Magical Africa

I'm now sitting in my hotel room in Cape Town, having flown down from Madikwe earlier today. As I mentioned in a previous post, Madikwe has a dirt strip runway for the planes to land and take off on. Fortunately the torrential rains over the past few days have not washed it away...a lot of the roads have become impassable except with one of the giant Toyota Land Cruisers that are so expertly driven by the rangers. New streams have sprung up where the water has run off from the higher ground, and at one point we crossed what had simply been a dip in the road a day earlier which was a raging torrent of water.

The last two days at Madikwe were wonderful. Although it was quite wet, we decided to make the most of the time and go out anyway. In the afternoon following my last entry, we went out again. It was spitting when we left, but by the time we got over to the air strip where we had seen the lions before, it had calmed down. The lions were lying down together again, but this time they were in a more playful mood. We were told that the lion and the two lionesses were relatively young - about 3 years old, and as such were still relatively playful. One of the lionesses seemed to be the favourite of the lion, and the other one got a bit jealous and started play fighting with the other lioness. I have some great photos of them up on their hind legs swatting at each other. They were fighting at the edge of the air field where there is a dip in the ground, and one of the lionesses was knocked over by the other one straight into a massive puddle of water. See the pictures I have uploaded on facebook for the action sequence!

There were some really nice moments too when the lion and one of the lionesses were grooming each other and play fighting together. I've uploaded a big sequence of those pictures too.

After we'd watched the lions for about half an hour we continued our game drive and saw some elephants who had been taking a mud bath. In the West, and in zoos elephants are always grey. Out in the wild, they rarely are as they bathe in mud all the time. The soil in Madikwe is for the most part very iron-rich, so the elephants are more of a rust colour than "normal" grey.

As the sun starts to set the ambient sounds in Madikwe change from the constant bird song to different sounds. Most striking of all are the various frogs that inhabit South Africa. When we went on a safari 3 years ago when I first started this travel diary, our guide in Kwandwe was called Mac. One evening after a successful game drive, we decided to go frog hunting. There is a certain frog called a Bubbling Kassina which makes a very distinctive sound like an exaggerated water drop "ploink". Mac had never seen one as they are notoriously hard to find (despite the loud calls). We tracked down a pond with some in it and after about 15 minutes of finding other frogs, eventually Mac found one. He was very pleased. There were plenty of the Bubbling Kassinas in Madikwe and I am uploading a video to Youtube to demonstrate the (rather loud) calls that the frogs were making.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1TQpOtthOc

After listening to the frogs for a while we carried on to a rhino sighting that had been radioed in. On the way we came across two male giraffe who were play fighting. Even the play fighting is pretty brutal. They have two stumps on their heads as well as hard bone deposits and they lower their necks and swing their heads into the other's neck. You can hear fairly loud cracks when they do this...and when they're fighting for real it apparently can sound like a gunshot. After lingering there for a while, we drove over to where the rhino had been sighted as the light was fading. Sure enough there were two majestic white rhino settling down for the night. White rhino doesn't actually refer to the colour, but seems to have been a gradual chinese whispers type thing from a description of the jaws of the rhino. There are several competing theories as to how they came to be called that, but the long and the short of it is the jaw structures of white and black rhinos differ. White rhino are far more common and eat grass. Black rhino are rarer and have smaller mouths with which they only eat leaves from trees and bushes. We had a nice time sitting there with the sun setting behind us. We were also treated to a rainbow in the sky with the remnants of the sun and the rain.

One of the nice things about the evening game drives is having a drink out in the park. Our ranger, JP, unpacks a camp table and a relatively fully stocked bar and makes G'n'Ts, pours beers or whatever you fancy as the last dregs of the sun are squeezed out of the sky. It's a very nice way to end the day.

We went out again on one last morning game drive this morning before we left. We saw some more lions who were sleeping after a kill off in the bush. We drove around a bit more and saw more of the usual giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and impala and then came back to the lodge for a final breakfast before we were driven to the airstip to catch our flight back to Johannesburg and our onwards flight to Cape Town.

We are staying in a hotel called the Twelve Apostles just outside Cape Town, but in order to get there from the airport you have to drive through downtown CT and then up the hill towards the cablecar that takes you to the top of Table Mountain. Once you hit the peak where the road to the cable car goes off, you start winding your way down the other side and have a wonderful view of the Atlantic. We arrived with plenty of time before the sun was due to set and checked in and then went to have a drink in the bar. The bar looks out over the sea and has an uniterrupted view of the sunsets. Unlike in Madikwe there are no clouds in the sky, and the sun was a glorious burning orange orb descending into the ocean. After the sun had set, the slight haze over the sea was illuminated, and the clear new moon was suspended not far above the horizon with (what I believe was) Venus next to it.

I'm going to try and gradually upload some more vids while I'm here...but in the mean time in addition to the link up the page, here's one of an elephant I took:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoDohWm94-8

EDIT: Here's the facebook album link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=100737&l=ca216&id=560070984

Here are some more videos too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKl5vJTQ1BY - the lioness that came within 50cm of me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66UEcs_QJdQ - lion and lioness grooming and playing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhYZpz-glHA - thunderstorm at lunchtime

Ken

Rain rain go away...

Well we've had a lot more rain - it rained solidly overnight, and although it had cleared at 5:30 am when we woke up, almost as soon as we were ready to set off at 6:00 it started pouring again. We decided to delay our start until 10, so we had breakfast and another lay down.

At 10 it was raining, but we set off regardless, and fortunately the rain eased off after about 20 minutes. We only stayed out for 2 hours, but we were lucky in that we saw a pack of 4 wild dogs and watched them circle round to try and take down an Impala. For some reason they didn't attack and then they carried on their way.

We followed them for about 45 minutes, driving off-road to watch them and eventually we had to give up chase as they went onto some private land. As we were driving around the land to try and head them off we happened upon an enormous male Kudu that was grazing in the bracken. It was startled and unfortunately ran off before I could get a photo of it.

We gave up on the dogs and drove over to the dirt airstrip where a small pride of lions is known to hang out. Sure enough they were laying out next to each other beside the runway. Remarkable in that only about 5 minutes earlier there had been a plane taking off. I got some nice photos of the lion and his two lionesses which you can see in the photo album at the end of this post.

While I'm waiting for the pictures to upload, I thought I'd mention some stuff about the locals and the reserve. At the moment Madikwe is (I believe) the fourth largest game reserve in South Africa. There is another reserve a short distance away and they are looking to link the two reserves up to create the second largest reserve after Kruger National Park. They do this by buying up land from the local communities. The communities are mainly farming-based...cattle etc. and therefore it is usually only the male head of household that earns the money, so the theory is that selling their land to the reserve will be attractive as then the wife and daughters can get work on the reserve - as housekeepers or lodge managers, the sons can work as mechanics or security etc. Thus everyone prospers and the animals are safer from poaching since there is more money to be made by participating in the conservation and tourism industry.

On the night of the boma barbecue, a number of the staff sung traditional songs while we were waiting for our main courses. I didn't have my camcorder with me, but it was someone's birthday yesterday and I did manage to record a couple of minutes which I will endeavour to upload from Cape Town or from home.

This afternoon after lunch we are going to try and find some more elephants, and may go to see the lions again. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for a leopard sighting, and some rhino wouldn't go amiss either.

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=100452&l=d9854&id=560070984

Ken

I bless the rains down in Africa

I've given up on uploading any more pictures today...the connection was downed earlier (along with the power for a few hours) as a result of a more than impressive thunderstorm. We have had light rain on and off over the last 24 hours, and we thought it would probably stay that way, but we were wrong! More on that later...

Yesterday afternoon's game drive was very enjoyable. Within about 15 minutes of leaving camp, we saw Zebra, Impala, Giraffe, Wildebeest and a large herd of Elephants. There were about half a dozen or so adult females and four baby elephants (by baby, they refer to anything under about 5 years of age). For those of you reading who are pub quiz regulars, you'll know that the elephant has the longest gestation period of (if I recall) 18 months. Giraffes apparently have the second longest at about 16 months. Feel free to google it and check - I haven't due to the bandwidth issues here.

After that, we drove about an hour away around one of the small mountains in the Madikwe park in search of the ever-elusive leopards and rhino. Unfortunately we didn't get to see any, but we stopped for drinks on the side of the mountain and had a wonderful view over the plains of the park and beyond its borders.

Dinner last night wasn't such an elaborate affair as the barbecue under the stars, but even the "normal" dinners are something special. There are beautiful hand-carved wooden tables that you sit at along the deck of the main lodge. There are no windows or exterior walls, just wooden floors and the thatched roof. At night, presumably in order to try and reduce the number of moths and other flying insects, the dining area is lit by paraffin lanterns. In the dim flickering glow we had a great pumpkin and apple soup followed by a melt-in-the-mouth steak with garlic mashed potatoes and some fresh mange-tout. Dessert was one of the best creme caramels I've ever had.

One thing you notice almost immediately on arriving here in South Africa is the vast array of birds that are around. Even in built-up Johannesburg there were birds singing. Something that in recent years is noticeably absent in London. After the mysterious demise of the sparrows and blue tits, you don't often hear birdsong. Out in the wild here there is never silence. There are always a handful of birds calling to each other - they fly and run around inside the lodge chasing each other and build their nests in the trees around. There are odd specimens galore. From the hornbill, with a yellow hook of a bill, to some other birds which are normal looking except for a tail feather that is about a foot long which dwarfs the rest of their body. Then there are the guineafowl. Very similar in look to the ones you get in England, and very funny when you are watching them scuttle along the road running away from the jeep.

This morning started off overcast, although at 5 a.m. when it's still dark it's quite hard to tell. But by the time we set off around 5:45 it was lighter and you could see the clouds. We drove for about an hour and it started to rain lightly, but we decided to stay out and we were all given rain ponchos to wear. The rain did get heavier and heavier and about 7:15 we decided to call it off and go back to the lodge. We got changed out of our wet clothes and ran back to the main lodge from our rooms with an umbrella for cover to have breakfast.

In the end we were the only people who had braved the rain to go for breakfast and so we sat on the deck and watched the thunderstorm unfold over the plains. I've videod a bit, so when I'm back I will try and upload some of it. I've been in some impressive storms in my time...not least some in the US and Canada which tend to put storms in England to shame. This storm, however, made all of them look silly. Because the park and the surrounding land is relatively flat, the sound just rolls over it, and with the lodge being on a little hill, I think we must get the full benefit of the thunder. The sky was a dark grey and the rain was latching down (full credit to the thatched roof for keeping us dry) and every 20 seconds or so there would be a flash of light followed by incredibly deep, loud rolling thunder. The storm did get closer and there were about 10 minutes when you could see the jagged streaks of lightning zip down from the storm clouds and strike the earth.

After breakfast I ended up curling up on one of the sofas in the main lodge and napping until about noon. We've just had a nice lunch and I thought I'd update the blog. The weather seems to have turned for the moment and it's getting hotter and sunnier. It may turn out to be a nice day after all for our afternoon game drive. I'm still holding out to see a Leopard - the only one of the "Big Five" that I have not seen in my two visits. A few rhino would be nice to see as well, but they are surprisingly notoriously shy creatures.

EDIT: I have actually uploaded some more pictures - we came in early this afternoon after another thunderstorm. Link here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=100306&l=a1372&id=560070984


Ken

Into Africa

It's been rather a long time since I updated my blog, but I figured that I might as well do so...I may have to refer you to a facebook album for the photos as I think the connection here is less than optimal...Facebook will do a nice small upload, whereas Blogspot tends to take forever.

We had an overnight flight from London down to Johannesburg. I have a bad habit of staying up and watching films on flights, and this time was no different. It did however afford me some great sights out the window of the plane.

At some point during the night (and I assume we must have been over Northern Africa), I looked out the window and saw twenty or so flickering fires down below. It was too dark to make anything out, but there was something slightly surreal about looking out of the aeroplane and seeing these campfires below on such a clear night.

Later in the flight I saw a lightning storm in the sky a distance away. If you've ever seen a lightning storm from the sky, you'll know how incredible they look. And then finally (after a little nap) we saw the sun rising as we were approaching our destination.

We transferred in Jo'burg and had to wait for a couple of hours to get our flight over to Madikwe - the game park where we are staying which is on the border with Botswana. It was a small 10-seater plane and we landed on a dirt airstrip in the game park, to be met by the safari jeep and transferred to the lodge.

The lodge where we're staying is beautifully built using traditional methods (think thatched roofs etc.) and we had a very nice lunch. One quick nap later after lunch and we went out on the afternoon game drive at about 4:30. We headed out towards the other side of the park and soon came upon a lot of vehicles all waiting to view the wild dogs that Madikwe is home to and famous for. From what I am led to believe, there are only estimated to be 2,000 wild dogs remaining in Africa. There is a rule that there cannot be more than three vehicles at a sighting, so we had to wait, but it was well worth it. There was a pack of 18 dogs that we followed most of the way back to the lodge. They were completely at ease with the vehicle and were not in the least bothered by us taking photos and driving alongside them.

Dinner last night was served in the Boma - a walled off enclosure where there were several barbecue areas. Suffice to say that they're feeding us more than adequately. The stars were out and Venus was shining particularly strongly. Being out in the wilderness means you can see all the stars without the light pollution you normally have in cities. Last night was clear enough to be able to make out the satellites making their steady progress across the canopy of stars, and eating out under them was a rare treat.

Today is our first full day, and it started early. 5 am wake up call to meet at 5:30 for tea/coffee/biscuits, and then set off on the morning game drive by 5:45. This morning we were lucky enough to see several lionesses, a male lion, and four lion cubs. They too were completely uninterested in our vehicle. One actually walked past the rear of the jeep where I was sitting and straight past us. Had I been stupid, I could have reached out and stroked it. I do have some nice videos of the lioness, but they're too big for this connection to handle, so they will have to wait for a few days until we're in Cape Town, or until I get back to London.

We saw a fairly large herd of elephants while we were out this morning, although the bull elephant must have been elsewhere as it was just smaller females and babies. Zebras, Wildebeest, Impala were all par for the course and were all over the place. We saw a few giraffes as well, and it struck me how much they seem to be a remnant of a past age. They're so unlike any other animal alive today.

Check my facebook profile for pictures as I know I won't be able to upload any here. Link below (and you don't need to be a member to view it):

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=100072&l=2d0a0&id=560070984

Ken