21st
Two days ago I was holding my breath whilst an overgrown cub of a desert lion stood within 3m of our open vehicle. Today I sit with champagne and fresh Namibian oysters in hand as a cape fur seal leaps from the cold Atlantic Ocean onto the deck of the boat. I do a reality check…perhaps this champagne and the strong sun is having unexpected effects. Nope…there is indeed a seal on the boat, currently being scratched under the chin by Nick, our jolly, bearded and sizeable skipper.
This surreal contrast is typical of a journey through Namibia. Every other day the scenery changes so dramatically that it is hard to believe you are in the same country. This morning, for instance, I awoke to the chill of a dense sea fog draped over the very German coastal town of Swakopmund and now I sit beneath a warm African sun surrounded by the azure sea.
Nick pilots our little vessel expertly from Namibia’s only deep-water harbour past oil rigs in for a service, container ships and even an abandoned diamond-mining boat, registered to Panama. This one has been running up IOUs in many different ports and skipping town without paying the bill. Interpol finally caught up with it in Walvis Bay and it is now the centre of a court battle. We learn about how gravel and sand is vacuumed from the seabed and sifted for the precious stones.
As we skip across the glittering waves, we are joined by the “Namibian Airforce” – a fleet of pelicans that fly alongside the boat, hopeful for a fresh snack. At such close quarters, their fabulous anatomy can be appreciated fully and Nick gives us the benefit of his knowledge about these and the accompanying seagulls as we go. Everyone on board turns National Geographic photographer as we are treated to clear glimpses of both bottle-nose and heavy-sided dolphins breaching alongside the hull.
At Pelican Point, the seal colony proves a good fit for our trip theme…more mating animals. The males weigh in at upto 350kg and at almost half their weight, no wonder many of the females end up practically buried in the sand during “the act”. Youngsters lollop along the sand in search of their mothers.
Turning for the harbour, we see where the meaty oysters that we are drenching in lemon and Tabasco are grown. Seed oysters come from Chile to thrive in the chill Benguela current. They are huge and truly delicious. Windswept and freckled by the sun, we step back onto dry land and head back through the dunes of the Namib for coffee and cake in a German bakery. Quite surreal really.
Click here to see more images.
17th
I first visited Namibia in the late nineties as a “three-month wonder” (all naive disorganisation and irresponsibility), dropped off at a lovely safari camp by my parents with the instruction to make myself useful for at least 6 months. I have no doubt that I was more of a hindrance and, judging by the care-worn expression of my boss, I wasn’t the first gap-year princess that had added to their management woes. Anywho…I have vivid memories of that time and some if the best were hewn from the red rock mountains of what is now the southern Kunene region, then Damaraland.
Now, I’m actually starting to bore even myself with exhortations about how wonderful this place is, but it is like nowhere else I’ve been on earth. The colours at sunrise, the shapes of the mountains, the fact that anything that lives here survives on 100mm of rain a year and sea mist, the rock that is strewn on the land as though it was put there, the deep silence of the place. Among its many blessings are that it is not suitable for any human activity (except perhaps rock farming), which means that it has remained hitherto largely unscathed by our clumsy attentions. It lends itself to over-the-top, adjective-rich repetitions about just how magnificently splendid it all is. Ok, I’ll shut-up now.
Our safari takes us from Etosha through the Grootberg Pass and down towards the oasis of Palmwag. We spend a couple of nights at Etendeka Mountain Camp; tents dwarfed by the mountains, outdoor bucket showers where you can cool off, the warm breeze drying your skin as you admire the view.
An early morning walk through the canyons reveals extraordinary plants such as the euphorbia – poisonous to everything except rhino, kudu and ground squirrels. Golden-trunked butter trees crouch in the rocks and we discover that one which is barely 6’ tall is almost half a decade old. There are birds like the Damara rock-runner and Herero chat which are found nowhere else the world. I am amazed to find blue chloride, white quartz and amethyst crystals hiding inside the dull rocks, testament to ancient geological processes.
Later, returning to camp on an evening drive, we stumble upon an overgrown litter of lion cubs. Following the linear oases which cleave this arid place, the lion are like many other species in that they are adapted to the desert. They inherit memories of rich hunting grounds, water that does not dry up and sometimes their wonderings take them to the beaches where they prey on seals. As the sun lowers and sets the mountains on fire, we disturb a black mongoose in his feast of harvester termites. Also endemic to this area, he was only recognised as distinct from other mongooses (mongeese? mongi?) about twenty years ago.
Around the camp-fire, after chicken roasted in foil over the coals, I turn my chair to face the darkness, feel the silence creep into my mind, and search for shooting stars amongst a galaxy so bright that it seems to hang just above my head.
Check out our Facebook page for more photos of this area from my trip.
04th
Water has always had an instant renewing effect on me. I can glaze over and go gonzo for hours just watching a river go by. I get transfixed by drops cascading through a waterfall and if I’m feeling uptight, all I need to do is to have a shower to feel like I’ve sloughed off my old skin and come out all shiny and new.
The last two days on the Zambezi Queen have done something similar to my rather dusty safari-psyche. Sitting in the early evening light watching herds of elephant and buffalo glide by gently as this rather special riverboat chugs gently down the channels of the Chobe has to be something of a unique experience. This morning I woke to the lapping of the water only a few feet below the most comfortable bed in the world, and walked onto my private balcony to see a small herd of elephant swimming across the river with only the tops of their backs and heads exposed, trunks held aloft.
Admittedly I think I would get cabin fever if I had to stay on a boat for more than a couple of days – the food is too good and the options for exercise all too limited for my comfort. Fortunately there is plenty to do. I opted to forego a game-drive (maintaining the water theme of my stay) and instead tried my hand at Tiger-fishing this morning and failed to coax even a nibble out of the little beggars.
Yesterday evening I ventured out on a simple but immaculately designed little launch to take in the sights and sounds of the Chobe. It proved to be the perfect vantage point from which to sit and watch a herd of fifty elephant peacefully drinking, oblivious to our presence. A youngster, not yet in control of his limbs, experimented with his trunk with limited success. African skimmers wheeled around us and pied kingfishers dove for small-fry just metres from the boat. The crew surprised us by whipping up an impromptu mini-barbecue of chicken and beef kebabs on the prow of the boat. For the ride back to the “mother ship” I took up residence on the top level of the launch and watched the sunset paint the water pink and purple, and stars come out one by one in the warm African night air.
Find out more about the Zambezi Queen.
09th
Sliding over the calm, clear shallows of the Okavango Delta with the regular sound of the pole gently splashing and propelling you smoothly forward, the calls of fish eagle, kingfishers and bee-eaters, the warm sun lighting up the reeds and jackal-berry trees, and the deep blue sky overhead… It’s hard to choose words that don’t make this sound like syrupy marketing spin but there’s no avoiding the fact that that travelling through the Okavango in a mokoro is really quite idyllic.
Mokoros are long, sturdy canoes traditionally hewn from hardwood trees such as ebony and bleached a pale grey by the sun and water over time. The “River Bushmen”, amongst other tribes, still use the canoes for transport and fishing. However, with the influx of tourism into the Delta, some of these seasoned fishermen have turned their skills to guiding and what better way to undertake this unique experience than in the capable hands of a local?
The core of the Delta remains water-logged all year round, but the seasonal inundation fills out a vast swathe of channels and lagoons between March and June, swelling the Delta to more than three times its permanent size. The water that rises in Angola gradually creeps down hippo “highways”, creating seasonal islands and enriching reed-beds. Annual migrations bring an influx of elephant, buffalo and antelope into the area along with hundreds of birds as the Kalahari loses its green mantle to winter. For this reason, the period between July and the end of October is the best time of year to visit the Delta for the quantity and variety of wildlife.
Travelling by mokoro allows you access to areas otherwise impossible by motorboat or vehicle and the quiet is very much part of the appeal. It allows you to enjoy the sounds as much as the sights and gives you the opportunity to cruise quietly up to animals without disturbing them with noisy engines. It goes without saying that the view of an elephant is quite different from a few feet off the surface of the water and many animals are surprisingly relaxed in the presence of water-borne humans.
Many camps and lodges in the perennial Delta offer mokoro trips as part of the day’s activities while other camps which benefit from seasonal flood-waters will do so if the water is high enough, so you do need to choose your area carefully depending on the time of year. For those that wish to experience full immersion (not literally) in the Delta, there are safaris solely dedicated to exploring on foot or by mokoro in the old ways of the local people.
Look at ideas for safaris in the Okavango.
What are the main areas to visit in Botswana?
When’s the best time to visit Botswana?
I want to see birds in Botswana!
21st
I’ve lengthily extolled the virtues of taking to the bush on foot but today I discovered a new pleasure; cruising the banks of a river by canoe. Part way through a long safari and at the end of a tiring day of travelling, I was feeling a little fraught and probably slightly ambivalent about venturing out within an hour of arriving at a new place…my beautiful tented room at the Chongwe River Camp and its quite extraordinary view was calling.
The Chongwe River is a tributary of the mighty Zambezi at the point where the Zambezi National Park borders the Chongwe GMA (Game Management Area). Winding gently down from the ripples of the escarpment, the Chongwe is a pretty cool little spot. At this time of day it is particularly attractive as the light softens and the river takes on the colours of the trees and sky. It’s hard not to concede to such an all-encompassing peace and quiet.
Fortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to nod off (which may have led to a disappointing capsize and a humiliating return to camp). There was no shortage of things to see on our gentle late afternoon paddle. We floated past steep sandy banks in which white-fronted and carmine bee-eaters throng by the thousands to make their nests at different times of the year. A small breeding herd of elephant ventured down within fifty metres or so, with a tiny calf no more than a couple of months old. The assorted nostrils, eyes and ears of a pod of hippo watched our progress with interest but didn’t seem inclined to dispossess us of our transport, likewise the couple of crocs and a terrapin.
As the sun dipped below the escarpment, a giant eagle owl called from a large tree and we witnessed the aerial displays of a number of different species of kingfisher and a multitude of other water birds. A fish eagle even gave us a private fly-by. Troops of vervet monkeys and baboons watched us watching them.
I think that canoeing makes a great change from being bounced around in a vehicle with the noise of the engine and the dust which can get to even the most seasoned safari veteran after a while. The quiet, the quality of light on the water at that time of day and just the gentle sounds of nature make you naturally want to switch to a lower gear, cease the chatter and just absorb the world around with heightened senses. Click here for a little video…and pay attention to the sounds!
Incidentally, as I write this now, I am sitting in my room in Chongwe listening to a veritable cacophony of sound; lions roaring not far away, a hippo grazing about five metres from my room (I can see him by torchlight), an entire pack of hyena whooping over the river in Zimbabwe and all the other unidentified sounds of the African night….not sure there’s much sleep on the cards tonight!
21st
Ordinarily, it would be hard to argue that seeing two lionesses and four cubs devour a recently ex-zebra or a young male leopard stalking alongside the vehicle as I did last night, or twelve lion on a buffalo kill at eleven o’clock this morning would be the highlight of the last 24 hours. But, I am pleased to say that last night, just as we were driving into Mchenja Camp in the South Luangwa, our guide Levy topped the bill by finding not one, but two, Pel’s fishing owls.
Now, like the other guests in the land-cruiser, who had been delirious with excitement over the admittedly impressive lion and leopard sightings earlier in the evening, you may have found the above punch-line a complete anti-climax. They failed to see why I was hopping up and down uttering incomprehensible squeaks and pointing at the tree when I had been pretty cool around the cats. For the birders out there, I am sure you can understand.
The Pel’s is a magnificent owl, large and tawny with beautiful markings and a distinctive call. It’s also very uncommon and the kind of thing that people can go through decades of life in the bush without seeing. I’ve been hoping to see one for over ten years and even a few days ago at a different camp, was plagued by its call, never to catch a glimpse. And here were two sitting immediately above the vehicle within a few hundred metres of the camp. I went to bed happy last night…what a day!
26th
What determines whether we eat? Well, in the western world, we rely on a steady flow of cash to determine whether we are able to shop at M&S or Tesco. Often if it happens to be raining, it will be downright inconvenient and we’ll have to take the car to the shops but we won’t often need to personally consider how that same rain may affect the contents of the fridge. Likewise, the news reports of drought-stricken states are happily distant from our daily lives.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to become a guilt-inducing spiel on the plight of sub-Saharan Africa. It has struck me, though, how contradictory the seasons are in Africa. Did you know, for example, that the rainy season is typically when many rural families are at their hungriest? Think about it – the harvest from the previous year is dwindling and the seeds sown early at the onset of the rain are yet to mature. The larder’s empty. To add insult to injury, the pesky rain brings mosquitoes bearing malaria, and a myriad of other illnesses that affect both people and cattle (which are vital for ploughing and carting stuff around). AND to make matters worse, this is the time when the whole family really need to be at their physical peak as the daily chores ratchet up considerably. But, even with all that hardship and misery, everyone prays for the rain, dances to the rain gods, observe fasts and ceremonies in order to coax that rain to come. Because it is indeed a lifeline.
Now, on the other side of the coin, rain is the most incredible party livener in some of Africa’s wildest places. Take the Okavango Delta, the largest inland delta in the world. Every year between December and late March, the banks of the Kavango River are swollen by the drenching storms in Angola. No one tells nature’s intricate tales better than David Attenborough and in his recent series Earth’s Great Events, he catalogues the awakening of the Delta in all its magic. It’s impossible not to be reluctantly heart-warmed by images of elephant calves experiencing such a water-fest for the first time. The slick catfish emerging from months of hibernation encased in the earth are slightly less cute, but no less extraordinary.
After the rains in June – July, the deserts of Namaqualand (northwest corner of South Africa) wild plants lying dormant under the sands explode into a dazzling floral display that your grandmother’s curtains would be proud of. I still vividly remember witnessing a rich grassy pasture spring up overnight in the red rock mountain desert of Damaraland, Namibia and how extremely out of place it looked.
I guess what I am pontificating on is that when you visit a continent like Africa, nothing can be taken for granted. It’s really very cool to let your curiosity wander further than the “postcard” image of the continent because there really are some very surprising things to be found.
And by the way, don’t forget the milk.
10th
Like a lot of pilots, I have a real fascination with vultures and in particular the paradox they seem to embody. Large Quasimodo-esque creatures, ill-suited to movement of any kind on the ground, transform themselves into mesmerizingly adept pilots once airborne.
Idly watching vultures suspended in the skies above any of Africa’s National parks it’s easy to believe their lifestyle is as effortless as it looks. The truth is a bit more complicated.
Every movement has its cost, and with no ability to hunt, and no sense of smell (arguably an advantage if you live off dead animals) the choices of where to find the next meal are beyond their own control. So for a vulture, life is a little like constantly driving with the “empty tank” light on, and just hoping to find a petrol station round the next corner…
But it’s also easy to look the wrong way down the evolutionary periscope and forget that, rather than having to wrestle with a set of problems, vultures and their lifestyle in themselves represent a solution. Natural Selection’s answer to the question ”right then, how are we going to clear up all this dead stuff?”
The solution for vultures is directly linked with their distribution. For a place to be suitable for vultures there must be two things: firstly enough food, but perhaps more importantly, enough thermals or updrafts for them to be able to fly massive distances without flapping. At all. This mastery of free flight is critical, and the vulture’s dependency on it is probably the main reason we don’t have colonies of griffon vultures, instead of seagulls, living off the chips and curry in Leicester Square.
This same dependency on free flight also explains why you can expect to see no vultures in the sky before about 9:00 in the morning, and why on overcast days, tree-bound vultures, with no prospect of getting airborne, look even more miserable than usual.
There also seems to be a rather neat little equation relating to size – on one level, the bigger the bird, the more likely it is to get a share of what ever delight forms breakfast that day. But there is another catch which works the other way. The small vultures are much more agile, less expensive to operate than their 747-scaled cousins and so can afford to hang around the edges of a kill when the lions are still there. They’re nimble enough to grab the odd scrap and flap out of the way.
It’s always interesting looking at these clever little niches, but it’s also too easy to present nature as a set of neatly functioning processes, where each species performs it’s role and neatly dovetails into that of the next, like some elegant relay race.
So it’s good to get the odd reminder that occasionally the baton gets dropped. Like the day when I found the dead vulture that had asphyxiated with it’s head up a dead wildebeest’s bottom (I may have mentioned this before…). A master of free flight it may have been, but it was no match for a wildebeest’s bottom.
10th
Pigeons and doves are quite clever creatures. You only have to watch the pigeons in Trafalgar Square casually avoiding peoples’ feet, to know that they’re adept at assessing risk. So, watching a Cape Turtle Dove in the Selous one day being pursued by a small and determined looking eagle, I was intrigued to see what would happen.
Birds that are habitually preyed upon by other birds in the air, get to understand that one of the safest places you can be, if there’s a predator around, is on the ground. It’s simple logic, because the attacking bird can’t afford to injure itself by flying into something solid at very high speed.
So it was a sensible move, then, when the dove pulled a very steep turn and landed in the middle of a thick acacia bush right beside our car. The only problem was that the bird it was being chased by, the African Hawk Eagle (which is a tenacious little chap and not easily persuaded to change his mind) had clearly established missile lock before the dove landed.
Its response to the nifty bit of flying done by the dove, was pragmatic to say the least. It simply elected to join the dots between itself and the dove in the quickest possible manner. It arrived at the bush with the force of a penalty kick taken by Cristiano Ronaldo and, with a noise like someone slamming a car door, flew straight through the (really quite prickly) bush, and up to the (now running out of options) dove.
Needless to say, things didn’t get any better for the dove, and the only consolation would have been that, contrary to the Red Baron-style derring do that the eagle displayed on its way into the bush, its exit (lunch grasped awkwardly in the talons of one foot) involved a lot of roughled feathers, quite abit of huffing and puffing and a good dose of embarrassment. Eagles are far better adapted to spectacular feats of forward flight, than backwards walks through bushes.
This little incident lasted a minute, if that, but the unexpectedness of it and the sheer drama it involved, always comes to mind when I hear people say they find birds…rather boring.
13th
If you go to Africa in the green season, one of the things you can’t fail to notice is the outrageous breeding attire sported by many of the birds. Some of these outfits (and it’s nearly always the males) bear testament to the extraordinary lengths to which some creatures will go for sex.
Amongst the most outstanding examples are the Whydahs. For most of the year, these are small, humble looking little birds that you wouldn’t give a second glance to. But come the breeding season, all this changes as the male takes it upon himself to grow the mother of all tails; one that is quite preposterously out of proportion with his diminutive sparrow sized body.
There are several species of Whydah in East Africa, including the Straw Tailed and the Pin Tailed, but it’s the Paradise Whydah that is the most common and the best example. A typical sighting would be of a flock of small birds flying past, accompanied by what looks like a Ping-Pong ball attached to a pheasant’s tail bobbing around amongst them. The male’s tail is an elaborately foppish affair with a large bustle and two central feathers over 14 inches in length that trail along behind him.
The tail, which is highly visible and cumbersome must seriously increase the chances of becoming someone’s lunch, but it does show that it’s not just politicians who’ll do anything for attention. In Darwinian terms it’s no doubt a statement of fitness (if I can fly with this thing strapped to by backside, then I must really be pretty hot.) And the evidence would suggest that it’s a stretegy that works as the Whydah is both common and polygamous; in fact he rarely leaves home without numerous females in attendance.
But like many party animals, the Whydahs are reckless parents – the female isn’t interested in raising her chicks, but instead, like the English Cuckoo, lays her eggs in somebody else’s nest, to be raised by foster parents – in this case a melba finch.
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