caravan | Fired Up Cooking SA

I’ve been gone awhile (you may have noticed).

I have the usual excuses – busy, busy – but amongst other things that have been occupying me is a camping trip (oh happiness!).

I am still so busy that I don’t have much time to write a good food post, and my food photos are piling up, but in the meantime, and to assure you that I haven’t fallen off the planet, here are some photos of the wonderful place in the Natal Midlands where we camped: Bushwillow Park.

Our camp site

I wrote about this lovely caravan park for the October issue of the Caravan & Outdoor Life magazine – writing a caravan park review was fun, and an interesting excercise! Hope you enjoy the photos.

Joel & Kylah like camping too!

Some highlights of our stay there were the daily visits from the samango monkeys – they are very shy but the fig tree behind our camp-site was obviously on their daily routine, and not to be missed. Whenever they noticed us watching them they would shyly pull some branches across in front of themselves to hide, but completely forgot about their long tails, hanging down from the branches!

Samango monkey tree

I was a little freaked out by the unearthly screams that filled the forest at night – we eventually worked out that it must be nag-apies (literally ‘little night-apes’ even though are not monkeys or apes at all!). They are related to bush-babies, and their nocturnal screams are as unearthly. The owner of the caravan park told us how one of his staff, a chap called Sandile (Sun-dee-lee) when asked by visitors what made those terrible screams at night, would tell them that the nag-apies would go to sleep at night with their arms and legs wrapped tightly around a tree trunk. At about 9 pm, they would be so fast asleep, that they would let go of the tree and fall to the ground, and then scream terribly. You can imagine his delight when gullible tourists believe him! 😀

I did get to cook and photograph some really good camp-fire recipes, these will appear in the next few issues of the Caravan mag – just submitted my articles for the March issue (spinach and feta rolls and pecan-cinnamon buns, all cooked on the fire), so watch this space – the recipes will appear here eventally.