A 5 am wake up phone call was not the most welcome way to start the day but the 3 hour safari that followed made it well worthwhile. Pilanesberg Game Reserve is home to the "Big 5" our tour guide Zach told us. The elephant, the lion, the leopard, the rhino and the wildebeest, the creme de la creme of African Wildlife. The Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea et al of the mountainous plains. Later we saw a Giraffe, clearly unhappy at not being in the Big 5, Stoke City as it were, excellent under a high ball. We also saw Gazelles and Springboks, Norwich City and Swansea perhaps, nice to look at but never going to win anything. Later I encountered a cockroach in the hotel bathroom, Shamrock Rovers I assume.
The first animal we actually saw just as the sun rose from behind the Pilanesberg Mountains was the Gnu. Now I didn't know the Gnu and the Wildebeest were one and the same thing. And with a name like Gnu it's no wonder the animal adopted a much cooler sounding moniker. Apparently the first such Wildebeest opted for the more street name of "Gun" but suffering from dyslexia, he misspelled his name on Noah's manifest. Numerous legal battles and court orders ensued before the new name could be taken. Pilanesberg National Park is 57,000 hectares, slightly smaller than County Louth, but with a better looking population. Numerous buses departed with tourists from Europe and Japan. We took photographs of the animals, the Japanese took photographs of us. They seemed surprised to see us in such big numbers, after our economic woes. Perhaps Japanese TV runs ads late at night with images of miserable and lonely looking freckly faced people with appeals for donations to save us from extinction. They now have photos to share with their friends, testament to their good work. The lesser spotted Irish. All in all the whole experience was a very memorable way to watch the day begin across Southern Africa and the locals certainly know how the make the absolute most of the wonderful natural resources and native animals of their country. I got me thinking about how in Ireland we could make better use of ours.
Some of you may remember my calls for a "National Scrote Day" and I apologise if I am repeating myself here but now I believe that we could make the observation and admiration of the scrote an all year round event. Imagine the tourist dollars as busloads of foreigners set off down Talbot Street and Abbey Street to observe our scrotes in their natural habitat. The beauty of it is that the scrote can be found at any time of the day or night in a variety of different states of inebriation or sedation. They will often congregate around the local Spar or Centra, the urban equivalent of a watering hole. Extended tours could take in O'Connell Bridge and the Boardwalk, another favourite haunt of the scrote. If the tourist was lucky they might even witness the scrote feeding or taking other refreshments or better again, defecating in public. All of this entertainment right here in the main thoroughfares of our Capital city. The same ground rules would apply of course in order to ensure the safety of the tourists. Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, do not approach a scrote and don't feed the scrotes Dutch Gold, physeptone or other similar opiates. Leo Varadkar needs to understand what our most abundant natural resources are and how to exploit them to the fullest. We don't have elephants, lions and gazelles. But we have an abundance of scrotes and they are not even close to becoming extinct.
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