We wrapped up our 15-day trip to South Africa at the St. Lucia, iSimangaliso National Park. This was the first Unesco Heritage Site in the country and one of the most important wetlands in the world.

The cute, funky town of St. Lucia lies on the beach where the wetland flows into the Indian Ocean. The town sort of reminds of Talkeetna, Alaska! In addition to the brightly colored main drag of hipster coffee shops and quirky restaurants (“Key Biscayne Dining”), there is a small and very neat residential area where modest well kept front yards are filled with a mixture of monkeys and dogs.

Cruises go out continually from the outskirts of St. Lucia up “The Narrows” into the large, shallow lake that creates this enormous wetland.

This is an area of immense importance to whales, both green and leather-back turtles, and thousands of hippos, crocs and other wildlife.

On our cruise we saw more than a 100 hippos. During the entire six days in the two private reserves of Kirkman’s and Phinda, we saw 7. We saw a dozen giant crocs, whereas in the private reserves we saw only one small one.

Birding isn’t particularly good at this time of the year (late winter), but will become so very soon.

The town has had its ups and downs and one of its greatest successes was stopping Dune Mining in the 1990s from destroying part of the wetlands for titanium. Unfortunately in these conservative global times, that once presumed dead issue has resurfaced, and the battle has begun once again.

This was a great cap to a great trip! Stay tuned. I do it all over once again with a new group starting next week.