Shack life

In late November, Tyler was passing through Johannesburg and stayed for a week to do some specimen work at the National Museum in Bloemfontein. Together with my graduate students Kimi and Blair, we drove down to Bloem together and elected to stay just out of town at the Emoya Private Game Reserve.

Since we were all working off limited grant budgets (and because of sheer curiosity), we rented ourselves one of the affordable shacks in Emoya's "simulated shanty town". Emoya has been on the receiving end of some terrible press about these shacks (see http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/06/travel/shanty-town/), but I'll hold my comments until the end. 

Full disclosure: many of the best pictures in this post were again taken by my graduate student Kimi Chapelle.

Three cups of coffee, Choiniere driving, and no breakfast make for a bit of roadside chumming just off the N1!

Here's our shack at Emoya.

Of course.

Unlike real shanty towns, this one's got wi-fi.

The collections at the National Museum are not for the weak - here's Blair pulling another dino' in a box off a dusty shelf.

This huge meat-eating dinosaur footprint in the collections at the museum is one of the hundreds found in the Clarens Formation (more on that in the next post). Kimi's hand for scale.

Back at our shack, we enjoyed the benefits of being on a private game reserve, such as giraffes at sunset and friendly knee-lickings from the resident warthogs.

Of course, there was big game at the museum, too! This fellow, Melanorosaurus, is an early sauropod dinosaur. 

Melanorosaurus has one of the better skulls from an early sauropod dinosaur, which means its perfect for resting your hipster sunglasses on...

...or studying intensely.

This pot-bellied pig might want to lay off the pies. We never even saw its feet. Tyler did notice, however, that it had been snacking on the discarded bones from someone's roasted ham! Cannibal!

Our wonderful friends Sanet (to the right of Tyler) and Jaco (to the left of Kimi) happen to live just down the road from Emoya, and we spent two great evenings drinking wine on their porch and celebrating their upcoming nuptials.

And they even gave us a preview of their first dance for their upcoming wedding.

As our last salute to Bloemfontein, we stopped for breakfast at one of the best restaurants in the Free State, called Iewers Nice. Not only is their menu cheeky, but Iewers Nice serves what may be the most delcious breakfast foodstuff on the face of the planet  - kaaings. 

I had to blatantly steal this picture off the internet because I was in such breakfast bliss that I forgot to photo document the beauty of kaaings. As you can see above, they're just rendered fatty bits of either pig (as above) or lamb belly (as is more traditional). Served with a poached egg, some cornmeal grits called pap, and tomato relish, they're enough reason to visit Bloemfontein on their own.

What can I say about staying in a simulated Shanty Town? Did I learn more about the desperate poverty that many South Africans live in every day? No. Did I enjoy staying in a modestly priced place with a definite theme and easy access to dowtnown, restaurants, bars, and giraffes and rhinos? Immensely. Do I think it's worth getting worked up about what is clearly just a wacky-budget-backpacker's-type hotel that provides a number of decent jobs for poor people in the Bloemfontein area? Certainly not. I will be staying there again.