Month: October 2014

For more photos of in and around Cape Town, here’s the smugmug gallery.

We arrived in Cape Town after flying out of Livingstone, spending some quality time in the Jo’burg airport again, in the late evening. We got a simple apartment in Camps Bay from airbnb, the hostess was very thoughtful and got us some cheese and wine on the correct assumption that we hadn’t really had a chance for anything other than airplane food. Jack had started his plant frenzy on the drive from the airport even though it was dark, spotting some Rush Bird of Paradise(Strelitzia juncea) on a hillside. This would continue.

In the morning, when we finally got to actually see Cape Town, it was simply beautiful. The thing about Cape Town is that any direction you look is postcard worthy. You can look out and see a great coastline, then if you get bored, just turn around and look at the mountains behind you.

First thing, we grabbed a taxi to go pick up our rental car in down town Cape Town. So my very first taste of driving on the other side of the road was in the middle of a city, though I have to say as city drivers anywhere in the world go, Cape Town’s are pretty good.

We found the hardest thing was keeping centered in the lane properly, and not going too far to the left. More than a few times we freaked each other out thinking we were going to sideswipe the cars parked on the road side. After we made it back to the apartment, we decided that we should go see the penguins at Boulder’s Beach, about an hour away and we decided we’d take the coast road to get there. It turns out this took us through Chapman’s Peak, which was a super narrow, twisty road with tons of blind corners. Another poor choice to start out driving on the other side with. But what an amazing drive, we pulled over every few minutes to get out and look at the views (with lots of photos of course.)

We made it to the penguins and went out to a board walk overlooking the beach where they hang out. There were tons of them just sitting out on the beach, or sunning themselves on rocks. A few were back a little ways in the trees nesting. Some were also taking trips out into the water to look for food. It was really amazing to see them in such an environment. For some reason the best part was watching them come out of the water as they crawled onto to beach, stood up and started walking up the sand. Naturally, we spent quite a while there taking pictures and watching them go about their business.

It was a lot of fun, and we made our way back the same way we came, apparently not learning from the terrifying road.

 

I finally got all of the smugmug uploads for Zambia and Botswana done, so if you want to see more photos, check those out.

The day after Victoria Falls, we had primarily scheduled an elephant backed safari. The manager at our hotel suggested that we also do a village walk, since we had a little bit of time in the morning for it. We took a boat ride (everything is a boat ride) a ways down the river to the village where some of the hotel staff live. It looked like a pretty typical village similar to what we’d seen driving by. Our guide for this was a older woman from the village. She showed off her gardens where they grow vegetables for themselves and to sell to the hotel among other places. 

After the village walk, we headed back onto the road for the elephant back safari.  Our driver there took his already beleaguered van and charged it up the hill on the dirt road, until the mirror on the passenger side door fell off. After stopping to collect this, he continued charging up the hill until the shocks fell off or at least were completely broken. We had a rather scary rest of the ride, with the suspension completely bottoming out any time we hit a bump, which was often. Luckily he realized that he needed to slow down when the van started bouncing uncontrollably.

Eventually we did arrive at our destination, and the driver went off to get another van while we were doing our safari. The elephant back safari wasn’t terribly interesting. It was cool to be able to interact with the elephants closely, but they didn’t seem terribly thrilled about trudging around with us on the same walk they probably do several times a day. There was a very adorable newborn elephant running around with its mother though that we got to interact with a little bit.

The next day we had our day trip to Botswana to see the Chobe River park. It turns out, this was a much shorter, though somewhat convoluted drive. We went through Zambian immigration to leave, then stopped at the river, our driver stayed behind and put us on a small boat. A minute or two later on the other shore, we met another driver, who took us through Botswana’s immigration, taking all of about three minutes, and then onto the lodge where we were doing the Chobe River safari from.

The first part of this was a cruise around a formerly, between Botswana and Namibia, island in the Chobe river that lots of wildlife like to spend the day on, since it’s largely free of predators. We mostly saw animals that we’d seen plenty of at Londolozi, but it was a very different setting so it was still exciting. There were plenty of elephants, hippos and crocodiles. As you’d imagine it was  a good spot for birds as well.

 

We also saw elephants crossing the river onto the island,

and Hippos grazing on land, instead of hanging out in the water. This is somewhat unusual, since it was well into the 90s that day.

The next part of the day was a more traditional jeep style safari. We got a lot of great giraffe sightings on this, and hundreds of elephants.

Apparently, at Chobe, they are on the verge of actually having too many elephants, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.

 

We’re taking an easy day in Cape Town, so hopefully I can catch up on these posts a little bit.

We left Londolozi and were driven out to the Nelspruit airport where we caught our plane to Livingstone, Zambia. It had been chilly and raining in Nelspruit, so it was quite a shock to climb off the plane and walk across the tarmac in 100 degree intense sun. From there we drove out to our hotel, about an hour away along a pretty good stretch of highway, through a national park where we saw elephants, giraffes and baboons from the car. The last 8 km to the hotel were over a washboard dirt road which our driver was taking at about 90kph.

Arriving at the hotel, we were told that we’d been upgraded to the island lodge a little ways up the Zambezi river, so after checking in and looking around a bit, took a 10 minute boat ride to the island. It seemed like they were consolidating the three couples staying at the two hotels into one to simplify things, which was just fine by us, since we got a great bungalow looking out over a small tributary with enough privacy that there was a bath tub on the deck. A

Shortly after getting settled, we left for a sunset cruise a little ways down the river. Unfortunately, what we didn’t know was the the opposite side of the river was part of a big reserve in Zimbabwe (the river is the boundary between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and I think Botswana and Namibia a little ways down as well.) Expecting to see a sunset, and not much else, I’d failed to bring my big lens, and just brought my 17-55mm. Of course, that was the day when we saw three male lions hanging out on the shore.

This was really quite a treat for us, since the only male lion we’d seen so far was pretty much just napping in the middle of the road and was at night. The other passenger on the boat, a nice guy from Germany via Switzerland hadn’t seen any lions in his few weeks in Africa yet, so he was ecstatic.

And of course, there was the sunset. Every night was a vibrant red sunset, and what better place to see it than on a boat with drink in the middle of the river.

 

The next day was Victoria falls. On the way out there, going back through the reserve, we saw a Zebra Crossing:

First we went to the park overlooking the falls from the Zambia side. It was the dry season, so it wasn’t the huge wall of water that it can be, but they were still pretty spectacular. There were probably about 9 falls going at the time which is nothing to complain about.

 

We also took a short helicopter ride to see them from above. Finally, we took a boat ride out to Livingstone Island, which is right on the edge of the cliff, roughly in the center of frame in the above photo, just next to the really big waterfall creating all of the mist. On the boat ride out, you approach this cloud of mist on the river, which is of course where the waterfall is. Just as we started to question the wisdom of being in a boat headed straight for this, we pulled up to shore on the island. We were taken out to the edge of the cliff, to look over the gorge and the waterfall. Our guide stuck us on a rock about two feet away from the edge for a series of photos that he was quite practiced at taking. Then it was time for the Devil’s Pool, which we were both getting pretty nervous about at this point. To get there we swam across a narrow bit of river about 10 yards from the waterfall, and while it was never a problem every time the current pulled at me just a little bit I had a minor freak out. Then we just had to climb over a few rocks to get to a little pool on the very edge of the main waterfall. We had two guides at this point, one came with us into the pool, presumably to make sure that we didn’t find ourselves out of the pool and in the waterfall. The other walked on the edge of the waterfall and took pictures with Jack’s camera of us sitting on a little shelf of rock also on the edge of the waterfall and of the waterfall itself.

While in the pool, trying to not have a stupid look on my face for the pictures, and of course worrying about being there in the first place, a fish decided it wanted to nibble at my feet, so I kept having to move around a bit to scare it away.

Once we were safely back on land, we had a nice lunch, thankfully with beer, under a tent on the island with a bunch of other tourists and headed back.

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve now arrived in Zambia so I should try to finish up writing about Londolozi. Our internet access is still pretty bad, so I’ll just write and upload pictures as I can.

Londolozi is a private game reserve attached to the Kruger reserve, which is a huge fenced in area for wildlife that straddles the borders of several countries, but is primarily in South Africa. The main attraction there is of course, the wildlife, which is why the schedule revolved around the twice daily game drives.  While we were there, we had great encounters with just about everything there was to see.

There were lots of elephants, giraffes, a number of rhinos, plenty of hippos, a couple of lions, three leopards, and plenty more. Spectacularly colorful birds were also quite plentiful.

The second day we were there, we were treated with a herd of elephants hanging out in the river in front of the camp for a few hours. We sat on our deck watching them munch away with a glass of wine. It was just amazing.

The third night we were there, we came back to our room after the evening drive to find that they’d set up a private dinner on our deck, decorated our room with rose petals and setup a bubble bath. They really make every day special.

We’d also gotten to see lions at a kill that evening. A pride of female lions and some cubs had taken down a water buffalo earlier that day. They had plenty of time to fill up before we got there, several of them were napping on the buffalo to protect it from other animals. When they did decide they wanted a bite, they would jostle around for position with each other, particularly the cubs.

The next morning we drove up to a hyena den and luckily they were all still up and about. There were about 10 hyenas there, mostly young ones, and they were quite active playing with each other. At one point one was dragging around a set of impala horns taunting the others with it. They behaved a lot like dogs, but apparently they are more closely related to cats. The rest of the morning was relatively uneventful, we were searching for a black rhino, whose tracks had been spotted on the property earlier, but we never found it.

The evening’s game drive was also relatively uneventful, there were the usual sightings, but nothing too out of the ordinary. We stopped to look at a lot of birds, since we didn’t have any particular query in mind this time. When it came time for the usual sunset break for drinks, we turned a corner to find that they had setup a candlelight bar with drinks and snacks for our truck overlooking the river. The camp manager Will was there to greet us, and we had a lovely time. They never missed an opportunity to do something special and unexpected.

Unfortunately, that was our last night there, and our flight the next morning had been replaced by an earlier road transfer due to weather, so sadly we didn’t get a morning game drive.