Solitaire Guest Farm aka the Local Zoo

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M – After a great day climbing the Dunes we headed north to Solitaire. Its pretty remote but once again we got lucky with our camp site. This time it however could have doubled as the local zoo! Not only did they have two nice pools and a beautiful garden but freely roaming the site I saw the following animals:
- an 10 month old Orix (think large antelope with black and - white markings and 2-3 foot long straight horns),
- a young Springbok,
- three MeerKats (I only saw the one, and thankfully Kate saw it too otherwise we could have been stuck at the Farm until she saw it as she thinks they’re soooo cute!),
- three dogs and numerous peacocks & ducks.
In addition in cages/large pens I saw two parrots, several guineas pigs and some rabbits. I am sure there were more animals or even some goldfish but I had seen enough.

The Springbok, called Bokee (I think they all are called Bokee) took a little bit of a liking to Kate. It began licking her hair when she was sitting on the lounger reading her book. What was really funny was the parrot was desperately calling it to come back into the house! Bokee taking a liking to Kate was particularly funny as a couple of days previously we were speaking to a man outside his house and from less than 10 feet away Kate didn’t initially spot that it wasn’t a dog he was absentmindedly stroking but his pet Springbok!

The Orix though was my personal favourite. We didn’t see him on arrival but the lady who checked us in ensured us that he would check by our site to say hello at some stage during our stay. Around 7am the next morning, just as the bacon was sizzling, sure enough from nowhere he turned up to literally stick his head in the pan and sniff our breakfast. Apparently Orix aren’t too fond of bacon as he didn’t hang around but wondered off to another site. Unfortunately he did this before I managed to recover my composure and get my camera out!

All this and we haven’t even been to a game park yet! Scroll down for more photos.

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