Baboons and Bats

We went to the Shai Hills Game Reserve today. Our guide was Jacob. He and his compadres all wear green long sleeve heavy cotton shirts and cargo pants with jungle boots. They fit the mold but look incredibly hot.

There is a family of baboons which lives near the entry gate and reception desk so they can take advantage of all the free bananas and plantains the tourists bring. While feeding these baboons if one of them scratches you, no worry. Jacob will  immediately grab some leaves, crumple them up and rubb them on your leg. He told us it was a medicinal plant for sanitizing wounds, called Acheapong leaf. It can be cooked and drunk for relief of fever or used to stop bleeding It is a powerful medicine.

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Jacob then got in our car and we headed off through the bush with the Curtis family following in theirs. The animals, after we left the reception area, were largely Kob antelope with a couple of “Green Monkeys” thrown in here or there.

We climbed to the top of a hill which has a view of a major part of the reserve and a view of the savannah with lush grass and sporadic tall full trees. We climbed a large rock where the ancient Shai (pronounced shy) people used to grind their food with rocks. It would have been a great place for pictures but for the dust in the air from the Harmaton blowing from the Sahara which clouded everything.

We then went to the bat cave which has a more formal name but is generally referred to by its occupants. In the old days, (before the bats moved in) somewhere between one hundred and one thousand years ago, the Shai went to this mountain to protect themselves from their enemies. Jacob didn’t use the word hide but that sounded like what it was saying. There was a lot of space in the caves considering that these are formed from very large boulders being jumbled on one another from some prehistoric seismic event. According to Jacob there were large stacks of rocks they could drop down on their enemies. Given that both sides would have been armed with spears and bows and arrows being able to drop a 70 pound rock on someone would have been a decisive advantage.( Sister Wilde got a bee sting here that was not without pain.) 

As we climbed through we discovered why it is called the bat cave. There were hundreds; Deanne says thousands, of bats and their associated droppings which Jacob regularly referred to by its common name.

It smelled very bad. Climbing out the top left us with another wonderful scenic view.