Cape Town’s Crocodile ”Dundee” is safely back with his human keeper after falling off a bakkie travelling at high speed and a six-day ordeal in the scorching scrubland of southern Namibia.
The seven-year-old African Nile crocodile was being transported to an agricultural show in Windhoek last Monday when he apparently broke open his cage and fell onto the B1 — the main road in Namibia between the South African border at Noordoewer and Windhoek.
His keeper, Bryan Vorster of the Cape Town Snake Park, only realised Dundee was missing when he stopped for petrol 300 kilometres after the border. Vorster retraced his journey but he found no sign of the six-foot reptile.
He offered a ND1 000 (R1 000) reward for Dundee’s recapture and pressed on to the capital for the show.
By Friday, Vorster had given Dundee up for dead in the
semi-desert where the average temperature is 25 degrees Celsius and often as high as 40 degrees. And if the heat didn’t kill him, he had to contend with 18-wheel trucks and armed sheep farmers.
On Saturday, however, Omaruru tour operator and former nature conservation officer Pieter Mostert spotted what he thought was a rubber bakkie loadbox lining lying on the highway outside Grunau.
He realised it was a croc as he drove past but took a closer inspection to convince his sceptical wife Tessa that it was not a leguan, fairly common in the area.
The spot where the Mosterts found Dundee is more than 1 300 kilometres from Namibia’s nearest native crocs in the Kunene and Kavango rivers.
Mostert got a similar reaction when he visited a nearby farm for assistance to remove the crocodile.
The farmer, his manager and two workers, along with Mostert, returned with a rope and a fishing net and, after some snappy work, captured the hot and bothered reptile and took him back to the farm and a long, cool drink and a bath.
Mostert tracked Vorster down with the help of Die Republikein newspaper in Windhoek and the delighted keeper gave him the ND1 000 reward on the spot before arranging to have Dundee transported to
his final destination in the Namibian capital.
Aside from a few abrasions, Dundee appeared to have survived his Namibian safari intact.
”This was the strangest thing that has ever happened to Tessa and myself,” Mostert told Sapa. – Sapa