JITrekking: Hluhluwe?? - Is this South Africa or Hawaii

This whole trip has been pretty much down on a shoestring budget - Airline Miles and Hotel Stay points. When we found we had enough American Airlines points to get tickets to come over to South Africa again, one of the things we decided like to do was go to a game reserve somewhere IF we could find a Marriott owned hotel at which we could use Irene's Marriott Points to pay for the hotel stay. We had kind of hoped to be able to stay in the Caprivi Strip of Namibia. Unfortunately, there were no Marriott owned hotels in the region. So, that was out. We found out the South Africa's Protea Hotel chain was now owned by Marriott so we checked for Protea Hotels on Game Reserves and B-I-N-G-O up popped the Hluhluwe Protea Hotel. Looking at the name of the hotel I could have mistaken it for somewhere in Hawaii, I thought to myself.

We decided that one portion of our trip would be a stay at the hotel. Getting the reservation was a little bit of a nightmare that I won't bother to relate to you. It dealt with Marriott just having purchased the Protea Hotel chain and there reservations systems not having been integrated yet ... calls to the hotel in South Africa .... Calls to Marriott Reservations .... Calls to the Hotel FROM Marriott Reservations .... yada, yada, yada. Finally though we got the reservation booked for a 5 night stay. PHEW!

It ends up that the word Hluhluwe was most definitely NOT Hawaiian - it is a Zulu word and it is kinda pronounces "Shalu-shaluwe." The Zulu language includes clicks and pops and other unique sounds in its words. "HL" - is a single "letter" of a kind of slur by forcing the "SH" sound UNDER the tongue as its said. You know how they say that Japanese people can't pronounce an "R" that ends up sounding like an "L" (so "fried rice" sounds like "flied lice") -- well all hopes of actually pronouncing the name correctly by our American tongue were fruitless. Ours tongues are trained from birth to pronounce the sounds we hear in our own language and clicks and pops and under the tongue slurs just ain't some of them.

We went to the park 3 days in a row. The first day we went with a guide in an 11 person "buckie" (as it's called here) to kind of get the lay of the land. The next 2 days we went out in our insured-to-the-gills Hertz rental Toyota RAV4.

The Hluhluwe-iMfolozi park is the oldest park in all of Africa. The land was set aside in 1895. (Kruger is the oldest NATIONAL park in South Africa. It was established in 1925.) The Hluhluwe-iMfolozi park has the highest concentration of Square-Lipped (or White Rhinoceros) in the world. San Diego Zoo got its white rhinos from there. Even Kruger national park got its white rhinos from there. In fact, virtually every zoo is "stocked" by white rhinos that come from this park complex.

We had the opportunity to see LOTS of rhinos. Some, much closer than it was comfortable to see them even. You can't imagine the size of these animals. On the adult rhinos there backs were HIGHER than the top of our Hertz owned Toyota RAV4. Somewhere between 5 to 6 feet (1.5-1.8 meters). They behinds are 4 feet wide (1.2 meters). Our RAV4 weighed ~ 3800 lbs (1725 kg) with us IN it. A fully grown male white rhino is 8500 lbs (3850 kg). You do NOT want to get one of them mad at you. AND, they are unfathomably fast. They run at about 25-30 mph (40-50 km/h).