Home again, home again, jiggity jig
It sounds good, but getting home is no jiggity jig.
Drive 45 minutes from the lodge to Hoekspruit Airport. Sit around almost 2 hours, then fly to Johannesburg. Wait 6 hours, then get on the plane and fly almost 16 hours to Atlanta. Clear immigration, pass through customs, re-check luggage, go through security for the third time, take the train to the far end of the airport, board the next flight, fly 5 more hours to SFO, collect luggage and make it home, 34 hours after we got in the van to leave. Our guide drove us, which made for a pleasant ride and a good chance to give him his tip. That worked well for all of us.
Rudi, our very talented and knowledgable guide.
The whole trip was great, every last little bit of it. I got to spend a day with a pro taking photos in places I could never go alone. We saw elephants, rhino, giraffe, water buffalo, impala, eagles, hammerkops and one damned lion.
Mufasa? More like Scar. This old, tired, sleepy, beaten up lion was the only one we saw all week–not for lack of trying.
Finding this miserable old lion was a major effort–our faithful tracker, Foster, and two other trackers, set out early to find something, anything, leonine. They trudged through the underbrush until they found Simba here, then radioed out so we could link up with them.
Normally, Foster sat in the tracker’s chair mounted on the front of our Toyota Land Cruiser. While he was off chasing lion tracks, somebody usurped it.
Our own home grown tracker.
With a smile like that, you’d think the game would come racing toward us.
We saw some more giraffes:
I like these animals. When they walk or run there is nothing more graceful.
The ostrich doesn’t really bury its head in the sand, it just looks that way sometimes.
Big Bird in the wild, no Mr. Snuffleupagus
Like social climbers who affect a British accent for life after one short trip to London, we have all decided we must pronounce the name of the striped animal “zebbrah”, not “zeebra”. Whichever you choose, they’re fun to look at and their babies are cute.
The little one is snuggling up to mom. You may say “awww”.
After an afternoon of lion hunting, we had sundowners by a lake, then wandered home in the dark, with Foster shining a very bright light into the trees and bushes to see what could be found in the dark. His impressive skills turned up a galago, or bush baby. This is a tiny, nocturnal, tree dwelling primate, hard to see even if you know what you are looking for.
The tiny and reclusive bush baby.
There was also a giant owl in a tree:
The last animal of the trip.
There was one more thing I wanted get a picture of–the sky. There is no light pollution out there in the middle of nowhere, so you can see more stars than you’ve seen since your last Boy Scout camping trip. Plus, it’s the southern hemisphere so the stars are different–no big dipper.
I think the Southern Cross is in there somewhere
Getting there is exhausting, coming home is at least as bad. Being there is heaven. We had a spectacular time, saw things we’ll never see again, loved being with family and friends. Life is good.
Roughing It
Great writers have always been willing to bear great hardship in the service of their readers.
Stanley mounted an expedition through uncharted Africa to find Livingstone.
George Plimpton suffered through Detroit Lions training camp so he could lead one play in regulation time.
Billy Crystal managed to get one at bat with the New York Yankees.
And I’m stuck here in a luxury resort, with cooks and butlers and housemaids and a driver and a tracker, but the slowest internet in the universe, just to bring you pictures of animals you could go to the zoo to see up close.
Ain’t life a bitch?
We were incredibly lucky to run into this leopard.
Okay, so I’m trying very hard to make it sound like this is work, but it’s really the life of Riley. We are staying in what was once a private house, with 5 bedrooms, just for the 8 of us. Every morning the cooks come in and make hot tea and coffee and small snacks so we can be ready to brave the elements at 6:30, sitting in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser while driver/guide and tracker take us gallivanting all over the veldt in the search for game big and small. After a couple of hours, we pull over and the crew erects a table and puts out more goodies. A bit later, we arrive back at the manor house, and eat lunch.
Did you know the collective noun for a group of zebras is a “dazzle”?
Take a nap, have a snack, and it’s back out on the trail for another 3 hours of big game hunting, winding up at sunset with another high class snack out in the open, with wine and aperitifs. Then home, where we are met with warm washcloths to wipe the dust from a hard days safari-ing off our fevered brows.
The rare white rhino, hunted almost to extinction by poachers who only want the horns–which are worth more than their weight in gold.
Dinner is outside (which is colder than one would like it, al fresco not being ideal in winter), cooked over an open fire. Still with tablecloths, crystal, silver and fine service, of course. All that fresh air and good food is exhausting, so it’s early to bed so we can do it all again tomorrow.
Another rhino photo just for Susan Rowley, who has a fixation on them.
I’ve taken a couple of thousand photos, and have many more than four I want to show you, but am prevented from doing so by the lack of bandwidth. I told you I was roughing it.
Victoria Falls
For some reason, it is important for everyone to remember that on November 16, 1855, David Livingstone “discovered” Victoria Falls.
Of course, the falls themselves had been there for millennia. The indigenous people had know about them, and even given them the name Mosi-oa-Tunya, The Smoke that Thunders. But nothing is real until a white man sees it, so Livingstone gets all the notoriety.
Despite the arrant chauvinism of all this, the falls themselves are truly spectacular. Over twice as wide and twice as high as Niagara, they are more than you can absorb in one look. You have to walk the length of them, getting soaked by the spray which in places is like rain falling UP, to fully grasp the size and scope of this natural wonder of the world.
We saw them from the ground, then saw them from the air. The worst thing about Victoria Falls is the constant buzzing of helicopters incessantly ferrying passengers on a 13 minute tour. The best thing about Victoria Falls is taking that noisy tour.
Cars pick you up at your hotel and drive you to the heliport, where everyone is weighed, much cash is exchanged (helicopters are expensive to buy and to operate), then six by six you get your turn at the brief flight. If you weigh more than 95 kilos (200 lbs), you can’t sit up next to the pilot, so Brad got the honors, not me.
The pilot makes two loops of the falls, one in each direction so everybody gets a good clear view. There is a tiny 8 inch square window you can open to stick your camera out and not have to shoot through the plexiglass. Here’s what it looks like:
The mist rising from the falls can be seen for up to 30 miles. It can rise as much as 2600 feet.
The surrounding land is so flat that from the helicopter you can see the curvature of the Earth.
The Zambezi river spreading out over a basalt base in Zambia, leading up to the falls.
As you come around to the front of the falls, their vastness becomes overwhelming.
The western edge of the falls is at the bottom of this photo, the water flows to the east after it lands.
Completing the turn:
A view to the northeast, showing the immensity of the falls.
The island in the falls is called Cataract Island, and geologists predict that it will one day be undercut by the water and fall into the gorge below. The basalt is extremely hard, though, and quite resistant to erosion, so it won’t be happening this month. Or century.
Now a view from the east looking back, with the wide Zambezi spread out behind.
All too soon the ride is over, and you are heading back to the landing spot. Then you look back, and see the result of the sun’s diffraction through the mist.
The western end of the column of mist is turned into a rainbow.
There is a movement in Zimbabwe to return the name of the Falls to Mosi-oa-Tunya, but it’s probably bad marketing. David Livingstone’s “discovery” will stay Victoria Falls to the English speaking world, and that will keep the tourist dollars flowing.
It doesn’t really matter who gets the credit for finding what had always been there, what matters is how beautiful it is and how lucky we were to see it.
The rich are different
The Victoria Falls Hotel was opened in 1908. The current building appears to date from the 30’s. High ceilings, brass fixtures, casement windows all bring to mind a time when wealthy people could travel here by boat and train from England and “The Continent” for a month’s vacation.
Seeing the Falls is wonderful, but that takes a couple of hours. I suspect that the men then took safaris, with guns placed in an ironclad glock mat not cameras, intending to come home with a trophy for the library wall in the old family estate.
The women would stay here, socialize, take tea, play bridge and have affairs with the men too smart to go hunting. People travelled with their maids and valets back then, so there was no work to be done other than writing home and reading.
Across from our room is a door with no number, just the name “Baines” on a brass plaque. The hotel leaves the door open, so we peeked in and found a spectacular suite, decorated much as it must have been 80 years ago except for the flat screen TV.
It turns out that the suite is named for Thomas Baines, an explorer and artist who joined Livingstone here in 1862 and spent 12 days sketching and painting the falls.
To The Western View
I thought I’d give you a gallery of photos of the suite, so you could see how the rich folks can still live.
Deep Overload
A sea eagle rises from the reeds.
Yes, it’s possible to have too much fun.
I’ve done so many things, seen so much, taken so many photos that I’m having too many new experiences to properly process them (and the attendant photos) by writing I get to my computer and have too many choices of what to write about, what photos to post, and just can’t make a decision. Everybody should have my problems.
A little kid in a local village. No reason, I just like kids.
Then the world conspires to confuse and addle me. We are currently in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. My Google News page somehow magically knows where I am, and gives me local weather. Oddly, very oddly, the dateline for today’s weather is “Matabeleland North, Rhodesia”. Rhodesia ceased to be a country in 1980, when it was replaced by Zimbabwe. Google came into existence 18 years later. Why, then, do I have the weather for Rhodesia?
Elephants in the water. I like elephants almost as much as I like kids.
Tomorrow we fly back to Johannesburg, then Monday we head to Kruger Park for a few more days of safari. So I’ll have another 1000 photos to winnow down. We’ve seen plenty of elephants, wart hogs, water bufflao and impala, now we’re hoping to see the big cats: lions, leopards and cheetahs. And giraffes, those most graceful and beautiful of creatures.
Water buffalo. Not graceful or beautiful.
Trying hard not to get jaded. We had a sunset cruise tonight on the Zambezi river, just motoring in the area above the falls. The weather was perfect, the canapés were delectable, Zimbabwe on the south and Zambia on the north, friends and family around and I was busily missing the big animals. Got to stay in the moment and appreciate living the very good life.
Out of Darkness
Joseph Conrad has nothing on me–I’ve been on a boat on the Chobe river in Namibia for four days. A boat with no internet, a phone that isn’t receiving text messages and a cell phone carrier that won’t recognize my ATT data package, so using the phone to check email is prohibitively expensive. Stanley searching for Livingstone (who was only about 50 miles from where we were) was no more cut off from civilization.
Of course, it was beautiful beyond words. Waking up to the sunrise and the sound of grunting hippos is pretty special.
Water lilies by the thousand grow in the marsh area.
We were on the Zambese Queen, which is more of a floating hotel than a river cruise boat. Since the navigable length of the Chobe is about 15 km, there isn’t much cruising to be done. Mostly, the boat sits moored and the tourists take speedboats to view the wildlife in the area.
We spent much of our time in immigration buildings. The boat is in Namibia. The plane lands in Botswana. You enter Botswana and get your passport stamped for entry, drive 3 miles to the immigration office and get it stamped again, for exit. Then you cross the river and get it stamped by Namibian immigration for entry. Because the ship is a Namibian company, you have to be in Namibia.
But the game park is in Botswana. So the day we went there we had to check out of Namibia and into Botswana, see the park, check out of Botswana and back into Namibia. Each time, there is a wait in line, a perfunctory look at the paperwork and passport, and some really vigorous stamping. WHACK! Hit the stamp into the ink pad. SMACK! Crash it into the passport. These bureaucrats make it look like they are working hard. It was worth it because we saw this beauty:
Just one of the many elephants we saw in Chobe Game Park.
Gail and I were in Kenya 5 years ago, and we greatly impressed by the birds. People come to Africa to see the “big 5” animals–elephant, rhino, giraffe, hippo and leopard. Then you find out that there are 450 different species of bird here, each more elegant and beautiful than the next. Here is just one type of the local beauties:
A very distinguished couple.
After four days of gawking at the animals, fine dining and power napping, we checked out of Namibia, into and out of Botswana and finally into Zimbabwe, to see Victoria Falls. We’re in an elegant 1940’s styled hotel, aptly named the Victoria Falls Hotel, and will go see the falling water in the morning. Now I’m going to sleep–all this passport stamping has me worn out.
Africa time
We’re on time, it’s Africa that’s late.
Not to worry, everything here happens eventually, just not at the pace rush-rush hurry up Americans expect.
We’re flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Kisane, Botswana to catch a cruise boat in Namibia. Up at 5:00, we will get there sooner or later. Most likely later.
Another day, another penguin
That’s right–penguin. Did you think Africa was all lions and tigers and bears? Actually there aren’t any tigers–that’s India. Bears? I don’t think so. Lots of lions, but this place goes very far south, and there are pengins here, too.
Our tour today took in many of the same places I visited yesterday, but with a distinctly different perspective. Yesterday I was looking for the personal, the individual I could photograph and make an interesting portrait. Today we were just looking at whale watching dana point sites and the oceans.
Here’s where I started yesterday, in Langa Township.
“Madiba”, Nelson Mandela. He is venerated as the founder of the modern Republic of South Africa. His image is everywhere.
My fixer hooked me up with a local guide in the township; there is no way an old white guy could just wander around and get into all the places I did without connections. As in any poor area, there are children by the dozens wandering and playing. I am unable to resist them.
The strange little finger sign is just because she’s 3.
I wrote about the shebeen last night–here were my drinking companions:
Just another old guy sitting around drinking beer in the morning.
The proprietor of the establishment–beer making and selling is a woman’s job in the townships. She may not have much education, but she runs a business producing and selling a desired product.
The Langa version of Joe the Bartender. I guess that makes me Mr. Dennehy
Asking strangers if you can take their photo is one of the hard parts of this operation. Sometimes, it gets easy. This guy stopped me on the street and wanted me to take his picture. Many people in the township have never seen a photo of themselves, so you always want to stop and show the on the viewfinder how the picture came out. This will make children howl with glee.
Mother would have said his face look like 40 miles of bad road.
I’ve noticed that I have a definite attraction to little kids–it seem like 3 year olds in particular. Here’s another that stole my heart.
Think I could sneak her home in my backpack?
There are some old hostels that were originally built to hold single men, 3 to a room, who moved into town to work. Of course, sooner or later their women came to join them, and a building meant to hold 16 men began to hold 16 families, in tiny quarters. People didn’t like being that cramped, with no privacy, so they moved out into tins shacks and the slums were born.
I got to go into one of the old places, and saw this couple living in a space that once held multiple families:
This is about one third of the room. The bath is down the hall. The running water is down the hall.
Here’s the lucky couple. I don’t think the man liked the idea of white visitors invading his space (although I was brought and introduced by a guide he clearly knew), but he accepted it for the small tip that was requested.
Not exactly American Gothic
Moving on from the township, we headed to the beach where I found this cabañas, which are no longer rented out by the day but used for storage by seaside merchants.
A beach that looks like a tourist poster
The off to a fishing pier, and one of the women who cleans, salts and sells fish.
My 11 am most of her work was done and she could sit down.
These aren’t huge, factory fishing boats, but tiny working boats putting out their lines in the morning. The government severely limits their catch, so only this little boats make economic sense.
The fishing business doesn’t get much more compact than this.
Finally (for this post at least), we ended up at the penguin rookery. There are only 3 on the mainland of the continent, the remainder are on outlying islands. You can’t walk among the birds, you have to stay on a boardwalk safely away (their safety, not yours). I liked the shadows all the camera wielding tourists made. You can probably guess which one is mine.
Tourists and birds.
There was more, but I have a 6 am flight to Botswana to board our tour boat for 4 days of river cruising. If it has internet access I’ll be back tomorrow. If not…………………..
I’m not accustomed to drinking beer at 10 a.m.
There are strange characters everywhere.
Yesterday I fulfilled a long time wish. I hired a “fixer”, a photo professional who knows where to find the good things to shoot, how to get into places you aren’t supposed to go and how to get back out alive. We ditched the official tour and went out by ourselves to find interesting people and faces to shoot.
It was great, but I’m beat. We started the day in a township, one of the many areas where the poor black people live. My fixer found a local guide who was able to take me deep into the township and see how things really are. At one point we were in a shebeen (which is actually an Irish word for some reason). This is essentially an illegal bar, serving homemade beer. The proprietor put down a gallon jug of fresh made, low alcohol beer which was to be shared by all 5 of us in there. I paid for it, of course, which came to about $2. Being the ever genial host, I took a big swig of the watery and not very good beer. This is not the recommended way to start your day.
We were out all day, walking and shooting and meeting people. I haven’t walked that much in one day since I was in the Boy Scouts, and arrived back at the hotel exhausted. Spent. Knackered. All-in. I managed to download the 287 photos I took and made a feeble attempt to edit them, but a nap broke out until dinnertime.
I needed a taxi to get us the 1/2 mile to dinner, where I enjoyed an African meal of ostrich, crocodile and springbok (a version of deer). Then a taxi back to the hotel and I tumbled into the sack at 9:30 and slept through.
We’re off on the tour bus today, and I’ll get more of the photos processed and stories written tonight. This having fun is hard work.
A thousand and one nights
Well actually, 1001 posts. That’s right, the last one was my thousandth. Amazing how much I have to say, but persistence pays off. Sometimes it feels like 10 posts a year for 100 years, but it’s really only been about 5 years. Thanks for being here.
Nap over, we went out to dinner at Baia, a Portuguese restaurant recommended by the hotel concierge. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to see Cape Town and the Cape of Good Hope. Although they colonized Angola to the west and Madagascar to the east, they left this area alone. Guess they weren’t interested in diamonds and gold.
Waiting for Mike to join us, I got one good photo:
A simple yet gorgeous design for a candle.
The candle is just floating in some colored water, but it looks clean and nice. The restaurant then turned on the heaters, and everything turned red, so no decent photos.
Which is a shame, because the food was excellent. I had the gazpacho, which was perhaps more pureed than I would have liked. Then the langostinos, which are like large shrimp but taste more like lobster–I really like them, and they aren’t particularly available in California. Other people had the seafood platters, with shrimp, langostino and lobster. We were all quite happy.
When on place hits on a good idea, others follow. The London Eye is an enormous Ferris wheel, and must be successful because Seattle built a huge one on the waterfront, and now there is one here.
They look better at night.
Back at the hotel, we stopped in at the bar. There is good news and bad news. Here’s the bad news: this is a DOUBLE Amarula over ice.
A double. Really and truly–I made the barman show me the shot glass and I measured the booze back into it.
Now the good news–it was RSA 40, which is about $4.
When I drained it, which didn’t take long, I went back and ordered a “double double”. It lasted somewhat longer.
The bar is named “Whisky” for its collection of fine spirits (although they won’t have any Bernstein’s Double malt Scotch for Mike). We first sat in the front of the bar, where there was an extremely loud band, but eventually found our way to the much quieter back room with the fireplace.
This bar has an extensive wine cellar, which you must walk through to find the restrooms. The racks are all locked, of course.
There is another room, as well.\\
Turning around from this vantage point, there was a window into the small bar area:
My rooting gallery
Tomorrow I have something special planned–I have retained a “fixer”, a person who will take me out to take photographs of the people and places around here. He is a photographic professional who does this for a living, knows how to get into places and how to get me out of trouble. I’ve been looking forward to this for a year. Read all about it tomorrow, in post #1002.
Totally Unauthorized 