South Africa Trip Nov/Dec 2013

I recently spent two weeks with my wife in and around the Kruger Park in South Africa. The main reason that we go there is photography although my wife likes it because we are so “disconnected” from my real job. Mobile phone coverage is available but when the choice is talking on the phone or photographing wild dogs …................. phone loses every time!

 

Female lion suckling cubs, Kapama Buffalo Camp, South Africa, Dec13

The Kruger is obviously well known, the Sabi Sabi is an area adjacent to the main Kruger Park. The beauty of this whole area is that the fences between the various conservancies on the area were brought down many years ago. This meant that the Kruger as greatly expanded, the animals had greater freedom to roam and the whole experience for tourists was greatly enhanced.

 

Travelling in the South African bush does not mean roughing it unless that's your style. There are camps (tented and buildings) that cater for every accommodation level. On this trip we stayed at Jock (the original concession in the Kruger), Nottens, Shumbalala and Kapama Buffalo Lodge. 

We typically stay no more than three nights at any lodge. We find that we start to feel a little stale at the lodge if we stay any longer.

 

It is hard to pick highlights from any trip to South Africa or

Namibia. On this trip we saw a young male leopard chased up a tree by a herd of buffalo. They then tried to knock the tree down or hit it hard enough to shake him from it.

Then we witnessed a juvenile male hyena greet a senior male from

the pack. The young male was sun baking on some rocks on the side of the road as we passed in our vehicle. We stopped and photographed him for a while, watching him enjoy the late morning sun. About 10 minutes went by when he started to become a little restless and it was then that the senior male emerged from the bush to be greeted by the more junior male.

 

Or the other time at sundowners (the evening cold drink out in the veldt watching the sun go down over the bush) when a small group of rhino emerged from the bush about 150m away.

These curious animals simply stood there trying to work out what we were doing. They wandered a few metres in our direction before stopping and staring at us for a while. After about ten minutes they wandered off, bored with just standing there watching us watch them.

 

Each of the lodges is different in terms of accommodation style, the game drives and sightings, the food experience and the overall feeling of the lodges. It is hard to get bored with a two week stay in and around the Kruger. We have spent as long as four weeks on game drives in different lodges and enjoyed each and every one.

For a voyeuristic “fix” of Africa and the wildlife, I often use the South African National Parks (SANParks) web-cam feed. It is available at ; http://www.sanparks.org/webcams/

Our trip was organised by a very efficient and organised lady at Go2Africa (http://www.go2africa.com/). She was highly attentive to our needs and what we wanted from this trip and I would recommend them for travels to South Africa.

 

Put a trip to South Africa on your bucket list, then move it to the top. That's where it belongs!

Epako Lodge, Erongo Namibia

Our first lodge of this trip was Epako Lodge in Erongo about 3 hours drive north of Windhoek, a nice easy drive out from the Capital.  It didn't take long before we saw some baboons, driven from the extremely dry bush to try their luck in the highway dividing strip. We hadn't driven much more than 15km from the centre of town when we encountered the first troupe busy digging up their morning meal.

 This was our first trip during the summer and the difference between a trip in July and a trip in February is amazing. Even though the annual rainfall in Namibia (if you exclude the Caprivi Strip in the north of the country) is around 36cm (14.5") a year because it all falls in a short period the effects over the wet season (Jan - Mar) are amazing.  The bush quite literally explodes during that short period and the whole countryside is completely different.

Our trip earlier this year was in February when the average precipitation is 8cm, fast forward to July / August and it drops to nil.  Some of the shots that we took will show this, in later posts to the blog, you'll see the difference.

Epako lodge is a pretty enjoyable lodge, it's run by a very cheerful French guy and his Dutch wife.  They have been there for around 15 years and in Africa for 30 or so.  Get to talking with them if you go, some of the stories he can tell about working in West Africa just go to show how much "fun" that part of the world can be.

The lodge has a good variety of game and provides enough variety to keep you occupied for a 2 night stay.  We managed to see a number of the more elusive creatures of the African veldt this trip and at Epako we saw the first of them, an Aardvark.  

The food is pretty good too but for our tastes, the presentation and whole dining experience is a little too European for us.  Something that was more noticeable to us on this trip, much more than any other, was the "cultural bias" of the lodges where we stayed.  If the host was French, German or of other European extraction, the clientele was overwhelmingly from the same country, this hadn't stuck out quite so much for us in previous trips.

Epako has a family of Rhino, the female is now too old to breed but she has a calf at foot, he's a couple of years old now and just about ready to be shown the door.  The first evening we were there, the male came and joined the group by the waterhole and started to become a little amorous.

 You can see in the photo at the left, she wasn't too happy about the advances from the big male and tried to see him off.  She had a scar along one side of her head that was the result of an earlier encounter with the male.  She also has a weird large horn that bends forward rather than the normal curved rear facing normal shaped horn.  Apparently, she lost her horn when she was very young when she charged a vehicle and it hasn't grown back in the normal shape.

The two of them had a protracted game of push and shove, the male weighs in at around 3500Kg, substantially larger than the female.  She didn't back down too much though as you can see from the shot to the left, there was plenty of dust kicked up by the two.

As I said, things are pretty dry in Namibia at the moment and Epako was feeding out hay to the larger grazers to keep them in decent shape.  They harvest the long grass by the road side and bale it up as farmers would cereal hay.  There are two advantages to this, a cheap source of roughage which will at least keep the grazers fed and it reduces the potential for road side fires.  There was plenty of evidence of this as we toured around, small spot fires that had been extinguished.

Like many lodges, Epako had some of the large cats in captivity, held large camps (African term for paddock) and we had the opportunity to feed these beautiful creatures and photograph them.  Epako keeps a couple of Cheetah that are fed by the tourists each evening.  These obviously have become used to this and can't be released. 

I really have mixed feelings about these types of arrangements and even photographing the animals in these situations even if they do provide some great shots.  The animals clearly cannot be released due to the increased familiarity with and dependence on humans for their food, however, if they have been trapped and then released into these enclosures it's because they have been preying on livestock and valuable game on commercial game farms.

It's not exactly conservation in the true sense but it's much better than the alternative, being seriously wounded in a snare by poachers or poorer farmers in an attempt to protect their livestock.

There is massive debate in Africa over how to protect the land, the wildlife, traditional cultures while the various countries progress.  There's the argument between conservationists and preservationists as well as the farm lobby and the green movement, as there is in other countries.  There is also the problem in Namibia of the death of the San Bushmen culture, with some believing that the culture will become almost extinct within the next generation or two.

Although we love the country and enjoy ourselves immensely there, there's much that as a tourist we don't get to see nor do we completely understand the problems.  It is however, a country with enormous potential and there are some very innovative, forward thinking and dedicated people working towards viable solutions to the conservation issues.  More on them later as we visited places on this trip dedicated to providing solutions. 

Cheers

DADFAP

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