Visitor

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

When I'm at Olifants River Game Reserve, I feel I'm at a place where I'm at home. That isn't really true, because I am, and always will be, a visitor. I've written about this before, but somehow the idea keeps coming back to me when I'm here.

A view of the bungalow I share with two partners overlooking the Olifants River

Olifants River Game Reserve is part of a group of game reserves open to the Kruger National Park. Its huge attraction is that the Olifants River, one of the few true perennial rivers of southern Africa, flows through it. The river is the center of life in the game reserve, because water is always the center of life.

There are always new things to see. They may be small things like fruit moths flocking to the dinner table to share the red wine or large things like elephants enjoying the river. This week the river in front of the bungalow is home to a mother hippo with the smallest baby I've ever seen. It was too far away for a picture but wonderful to see the near new-born trying to scramble onto its mothers head in the water. Her head was easily big enough! A hippo is born under water, tossed up to the air for its first breath by the mother, and thereafter its eyes and nose covers immediately close so that it can submerge again and suckle.

Buffalo coming to drink across the river from the bungalow

But this piece isn’t about seeing wonderful things in the African bushveld.  It’s more about how I feel in this natural area and about what these sorts of places mean to me. I’m not talking about conservation imperatives to which we all subscribe – preserving nature for diversity and future generations and so on.  I’m talking about what it means to me personally to experience this environment and to be part of it.

Of course, we are all visitors.  No matter if we come once for a couple of weeks or if we’re here for months every year.  We have other priorities.  Families, friends, jobs.  These things – for most of us – are concentrated in large towns or cities, so that is where we need to spend most of our time.  In the bush we now live with electricity, vehicles, appliances, cell phones, the internet.  This is hardly raw nature.

The elephants turn

So what draws me back here?  Of course, it includes the wonderful animal and bird life, but the complex interconnections of the systems are endlessly fascinating.  Huge blobs of elephant dung at dawn are sifted pancakes by dusk as dung beetles convert it to an incubator for their eggs and a nursery for their grubs.  (Watch for them rolling balls to a suitable burial place as you drive; a neighboring reserve has a welcome sign reading “Dung Beetles have Right of Way.”)  Caterpillars are hosted and fed by ants for the sweet juices they exude.  In the soft sand below our deck is a minefield of conical antlion holes waiting for unwary ants.  It’s not all feel good.  A baby impala is wonderfully cute but at the bottom of the fauna food chain.  Then, there is a low chance of catching malaria.  Bad luck, bad timing.  Pretty much how you get injured in a car accident in a city.  (There aren’t too many of those here.)

I suppose most people’s personal feel for history is related to their parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on.  For me, to be in a place like this is to experience the Africa of the past.  It makes these things meaningful to me in a way that no historical description can.  The African bush speaks to me about my mother’s grandfather who was a missionary from Belgium to what was then the rural Transvaal, and of my father’s great grandparents who took part in the Great Trek in ox wagons to the north of the country.  And it reminds me always of my mother who spent the happiest times of her life in wild Africa.

A relaxed leopard

I assume that most people feel this sort of connection with their physical, historical, and natural environment.  I can’t imagine that it matters if it’s the African bush, a forested lake in the backwoods of Minnesota, the Australian outback, or (insert your favorite natural place).  I think these areas hold us and remind us where we came from.  I never want to lose this link to what southern Africa was and still is.  Even though I remain a visitor.

An adventure...sort of

Michael - Thursday 

Those of you who follow this blog know that probably my favorite place in the world is the Olifants River Game Reserve - a private game reserve that is part of the iconic Kruger National Park. I go there whenever I can, and the one downside of now living in Knysna is that it takes at least two days to get there now instead of the single day's travel from Johannesburg. We spent four weeks there in June and saw a variety of wonderful things. Here's a whistle-stop tour.

Thirsty fellow at Nkonkoni dam

This lookout was built for primates. The other primates!

A klipspringer balanced on a rock
is as Bushveld as it gets.

Leader of the resident pride.
Old, yes, but full!

A group of Kubu relaxing in front of the bungalow.
No pressing cases to solve today.

How many giraffe?
Hint: Count the heads

A spectacular kudu bull

Red-billed hornbills also like the waterholes

After Olifants we came home via another favorite - the Karoo National Park. The Karoo is a semi-arid area, and the wildlife and ecology is quite different. Even better, I'd managed to book a house all by itself in the middle of nowhere - the Afsaal cottage, which had originally been a sheep herders cottage. It had been renovated delightfully and was completely self-contained. I felt very lucky that it was available.

But I missed a few not entirely trivial points.

Springbok in the Karoo

Mountain zebra

First of all, it is midwinter here and the temperatures drop below freezing in the Karoo at night. (Not very impressive by north American standards, but then you have heating in north America.) I wasn't too concerned. The cottage had a lovely big fireplace, gas for heating water, and solar electricity.

Looks lovely, doesn't it? We were very excited to be staying there. 

However, there was a problem. I'd booked the wrong cottage...

This is the Afsaal cottage. One room. No fireplace. An outside toilet a short distance behind the house. Okay, but at freezing temperatures in the middle of the night? An outside shower... There was some disappointment, but I pointed out that it would be an adventure.

On the way there we had a rare sighting of bat-eared foxes hunting. They are usually too nocturnal to be seen during the day, so our luck seemed to be running.

We had a most enjoyable sundown glass of wine from the observation deck overlooking a small waterhole a short distance away. The walls turned out to be eighteen inches thick, and so the temperature inside was comfortable. Things were looking up.

Later, a delicious braai around an outdoor fire. All was well.

Then I went to wash up. 

That was the point when the water stopped running. 

Permanently.

Far from the madding crowd

Michael - Thursday

This blog is courtesy of Aron Frankental, a very good friend and superb wildlife photographer. His other claim to fame is as a character in A Carrion Death where he became one of the murder victims. Well, a lot of characters suffered that fate in the book. It was nothing personal. He and Jenny decided to abandon the slings and arrows of Covid 19 in Johannesburg and spend lockdown at the bungalow we share in the Olifants River Game Reserve, which borders the famous Kruger National Park. They have been here for about two months now, lucky devils!

Waterbuck in the Olifants river in front of the bungalow

Stan and I decided that they had the right idea, and three weeks ago headed up here to join them. The only difficulty was getting permission to travel (finessed by the need to do "maintenance" at the bungalow), and the ban on the sale and transport of alcohol. Of course, we would never do anything illegal. Maybe we did bring rather more boxes of books for the shop here to sell than was absolutely necessary given the rather limited clientele. 

On patrol

Our timing was perfect. While Knysna and Cape Town have been experiencing cold and rainy weather, it's been mostly warm and pleasant here. Sometimes very warm. Wednesday reached 95 F.

It's amazing how quickly the whole Covid stress and rigmarole falls away. Here we need no masks, wash our hands as usual, and relax. The only difference is that we keep away from the other visitors more than usual. Fortunately, we now have a good internet connection at the bungalow courtesy of a radio link to the town of Phalaborwa to the north. So we have no withdrawal symptoms requiring frequent trips to the central office half an hour away

So much to learn!

Apart from the good company, food and wine, the main attraction here is the animals and birds, many of which come down to drink at the river that flows in front of the bungalow. Game drives through the surrounding wilderness areas yield all sorts of interesting sighting and experiences. I've taken some pictures with my cellphone, but Aron's professional ones are incomparably better. The one at the top is not from this trip, but it was taken here and won the Wild Planet Photo Magazine Leopard Day photo competition. 

Here's a selection of ones from this visit.

Long day

Elephant storming down the riverbank for a drink

African hunting dogs
Seems to be a small altercation about whose pool this is

White Fronted Bee eater sunning itself

A wake of vultures
Great title for a book!

Any questions?

Once again, Thanks to Aron for sharing these great pictures!

Africa 2018: Reptiles

Annamaria on Monday

Selfie taken from my accustomed seat during game drives

Much of the time, when fellow travelers in Africa talk about what they saw, they speak of animals--and then almost always the impressive ones, especially the big cats.  At Lake Manyara, on this last trip, I went on a game drive with a Chinese couple.  The woman lamented that she had not brought her own camera, because her husband was only interested in taking pictures of lions and leopards.  She was going home without her own photo souvenirs.  Poor thing.

I thought her husband would also one day regret the photos he did not take.  But who am I to tell another human being what to like, much less what to photograph?  I photograph everything: animals, birds, flowers, rocks, landscapes, birds, trees, birds, bodies of water, people, birds, insects.  Very often, I capture marvelously clear and precise shots of tree limbs that were very recently occupied by a beautiful bird.  Michael Sears dubbed those shots "was-birds."  Here is the best of this year's photos of was-birds:

Taken with a 30x zoom, with my splendid Panasonic Lumix camera, which
has a Leica lens.  Look at the clarity of those leaves.  Imagine how clear the
bird would have been.

I also  got some wonderful photos of reptiles:

None of which were snakes

A terapin, of the Order: Slightly-Out-of-Focus

Leopard Tortoise 

Michael, HELP! You told me, but I forget this critter's name

Are you a Nile crocodile?

At Lake Manyara there were scores of these on my mosquito netting each night.
I was happy to see them because I believe they eat insects.  Anything that eats
mosquitoes is my friend!

This cutie's body was maybe two inches long.
I tried to ID this tiny one, Michael, but the only thing I found that looks
remotely like it lives only in North America.

This guy, by comparison, was about three feet long tip to tail. 

Here you can see his size in relation to the clumps of grass and get a gander at
 his formidable tongue.  Look at the beauty of his markings.  What a guy!

Africa 2018: Some Favorite Shots

Annamaria on Monday

When this blog goes up, I will be enroute to New York after my marvellous month in Africa. I am taking home glorious memories and hundreds of pictures to make sure that the joy of this trip does not fade.

Here is a small selection of my favorites from my time with Michael and Pat at Olifants.

My gracious hosts: Enormous thanks to Michael and Pat!

On my last evening in Olifants, we went watch the sunset.  Africa NEVER disappoints me!