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
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
Labels: Africa, elephant, hyena, jackal, lion, lion. lions, madikwe, safari, south africa
posted by Ken at 9:05 am
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