If it weren't for my friend Bronwyn, I would probably never leave the house. It was she who declared in early 2006 that this year’s trip should be to the Okavango Delta. Ten days of lolling about in African swamps watching elephants frolicking and hippos twitching their ears sounded nice enough, but I figured that 4 days of exquisite discomfort in the hands of the air travel industry plus two days of jet lag and then 8 days of carefree photography was not worth the price, so in order to get a better balance I sulkily demanded an extra week somewhere.
The final arrangement was that we would stay for a few jet-lagged days in Johannesburg with friends of friends, then move on (after much research and discussion) to a place called Umlani Bushcamp up near the Kruger Park, and finally join up with the Sierra Club back in Johannesburg. So Bronwyn locked in our tickets and we set about getting inoculated against a catalog of horrible diseases that made me feel itchy, feverish, and loose of bowel in anticipation, and assembling clothing and gear that weighed nothing since the Sierra Club only allowed 25# of baggage including carry-ons. We were warned that, it being late fall in these parts, it would be cold at night when we would be driving around transfixing wildlife in our headlights so a quantity of wooly garments were reluctantly included. We later learned that what “cold” means in South Africa is something like 50°F and were thus able to leave a lot of sweaters in Johannesburg, saving wear and tear on our load limits.
My first purchase, with the 25# limit resting uneasily in the back of my mind, was about 10# of guidebooks, closely followed by a camera with 10X zoom, a pocket full of SD cards, and a small computer. Since our tour leader had told us that the contents of our pockets didn’t count toward our limit, I combed the earth for a garment with sufficiently large pockets to contain all this stuff, and finally found a vest that fit the bill, with a total of something like 43 pockets of all sizes, including a couple of really large ones big enough for the computer and books, so in the end, that vest, fully loaded, weighed a good deal more than all the rest of my baggage and caused my portly silhouette to blimp to Michelin Tire Man proportions.
Meanwhile, obligations independent of foreign travel activities kept us distracted as February, March, and April flashed by. I found a cat sitter and somebody to cut the grass . I packed and repacked 20 or 30 times. I counted my SD cards and spare batteries and checked my tickets and passport about twice a day, and finally, on the last day of April, the first really fine day of the year, I phoned a taxi and went to the airport, my pockets rattling with malaria pills, and the anxious conviction that I had forgotten something Really Important.
The flight was painless, and our South African host, armed with photos I had sent for identification purposes, found us with no trouble, and so our adventure began. Our first minor culture shock was when we pulled into the driveway through a stout metal gate with barbed wire on top that rattled ponderously closed behind us. We might have been more alarmed by these precautions if we hadn’t passed a thousand other houses on the way there that were all similarly equipped, and not a single armed band of wild-eyed felons. Happily our hostess was a fabulous cook, so we ate ourselves senseless and staggered up to bed with our quarter-ton duffel bags and sank into a dreamless jet-lagged sleep.
After a couple of days in Jo’burg prowling through craft markets and eating interesting things we picked up our rental car, stuffed it with as many of our chattels as we could fit in the trunk, having been advised in the strongest terms never to leave anything visible in the car ever, and set off by what we thought might be a scenic route to the Umlani Bushcamp. We had a few white-knuckle moments getting used to driving on the left, but in general had a happy time driving past the gold mines and rock-studded hillsides. We only got lost once when we came to an intersection, and, knowing we should be heading north, turned away from the sun. Wrong instinct in the southern hemisphere.
But as we got further away from Jo’burg and the towns became sketchier and further apart, we kept looking for Animals and as distant features tentatively identified as antelopes or buffalo or giraffes turned out to be cows and rocks and stumps, we gloomily wondered if we had wandered into a mass extinction.
And then, of course, we miscalculated time en route and when we finally approached our motel it was full dark. And then when we actually found the place, the gate (with barbed wire) was locked, and there was no bell, and we were just wondering if we would have to sleep in our tiny rented car wrapped in road maps when the manager emerged from the gloom and let us in.
The reason, she explained, that we had been locked out was that she was not expecting us since the previous manager, with whom we had made our bookings, had stormed off in a huff the previous week, leaving no hint as to any arrangements she might have made, and the current manager had been parachuted in from another place in Zambia and knew nothing.
Fortunately it was off-season, so there was space available or we might have wound up sleeping in the car after all. In fact we received a very large room with 6 beds, plenty of room to unpack everything and repack before leaving in the morning, a ritual with which we were becoming increasingly familiar, before heading south (with the sun at our backs) for our Bushcamp. Still no interesting animals, but changing terrain and bad roads kept us interested until we arrived at Hoedspruit where we pulled into a place where other cars were parked, avoiding a tree sporting a sign warning “Park at own risk BEWARE Falling Seeds” and explored the possibilities of a nearby shop called the Hoedspruit Boekwinkel which had a paperback in the window.
I staggered out soon thereafter with another armload of books to add to my growing collection. Bronwyn got some postcards. And so we rattled off toward our bushcamp, on the way to which we finally spotted a creature worth stopping the car for. A small bird striking poses on an electric wire, the gaudiest bird on earth – pink and blue and green and purple and a dozen other colors, which we were creeping up on clanking with photographic gear, when a Land Rover came upon us, stopped to see if we had broken down. Our fabulous discovery took off, and our would-be savior dismissed our feathered beauty as one of the commonest creatures in South Africa. Which proved to be true, so we ultimately consoled ourselves with many other photo opportunies.
OK so we finally got there and were duly greeted by great numbers of staff members, since we were the only customers, it being off-season as I have mentioned. There was Shadrach the guide. Foreman, another guide. Makendal who ran the place. Ginger and Peter who I gather was called that because nobody could remember his real name.
We were just in time for lunch which was provided in sufficient abundance for about 50 people. Having eaten ourselves senseless we were shown our room which was a surprisingly comfortable reed-walled place, and given intense lectures by most of the staff in turn, the upshot of which were “Don’t wander away from camp – there are lions.” “Don’t wander around in the dark – there are lions.” “Keep away from the riverbed – there are lions.” And then we were left to unpack and digest until the evening game drive where we were loaded into a completely open Toyota Land Cruiser with a tracker on the front bumper and Shadrach at the wheel, and off we went over hill and dale in search of Animals. Which we (=Shadrach) found in satisfying abundance. Giraffes and buffalo and lions and zebras. Tsessebe, kudu, hippos and a thousand impala. A porcupine right in camp, and elephants that could disappear into a leafless bush half their size. Wildebeest and almost a leopard. Turtles and lizards and chameleons and the odd snake. Hornbills and francolins and trees engulfed in vultures. Eagles and wading birds and, as promised, a steady supply of those beautiful flying jewels we saw on the way in.
These game drives happened morning and evening every day, the evening drives enlivened by sundowners where we hove to in some scenic place and guzzled rum & cokes and biltong while the the westering sun settled into a blaze orange horizon. But when we weren’t doing that we were rousting out creatures and driving up so close to them you could smell them. I have many many very close photos of things like lions taken in a downward direction from our open vehicle. It seemed that the tastier the animal the more difficult it was to get up close, but the bigger and more carnivorous things we could get near enough to scratch their ears, although we were warned in the strongest terms not to do this. The antelopes were quite another thing.
Well, 5 days and 700 photos later (God, I love digital photography) we packed up our dusty clothes and returned to Jo’burg via Kruger Park where we were not allowed to get out of the car at all except at one of the scattered campsites. In spite of this I managed to fill up another memory card with more wildlife photos, including many of an invisible elephant that suddenly appeared to us when it emerged from the bushes about 2 car-lengths away and placidly sauntered across the road, giving us only the briefest disinterested look. Then of course there were all those baboons, and the pool full of hippos near the gate and the family of wildebeest that paused in the middle of the road to give us a good hard look.
Then after an extra day in Jo’burg doing laundry and downloading all those memory chips onto my tiny computer and burning them onto a DVD in case the computer came to grief, and at last whittling down our baggage to the requisite 25# + 30# vest, we finally met up with our tour featuring a small heterogeneous group of people, prominent among which was Martin, who amazed us all on that first introductory evening when we had all known one another about 5 minutes with a loud and detailed account of his prostate problems which apparently had something to do with his fanatical fondness for bananas. To add to the fun, he had brought along his friend Patricia, whose contribution to the introductions was a solemn assurance that she hated the outdoors, didn’t like bugs, would a good deal rather be back home in Brooklyn where she belonged, and wanted to know if she could use her hair dryer in these safari lodges. The rest of us flicked glances at one another and studied the hems of our garments until the group leader seized the podium, made a perfunctory welcome speech and left us to drink our free glass of wine.
As it turned out, Our Happy Couple, far from being a damper on our party, turned out to be an endless source of amazement if not hilarity. Like when we all were packed up and ready to go, down in the lobby our first day, then duly piled into the vans that took us to the airport, and were standing around clutching our precious 25#, and suddenly Patricia discovered she had left hers back at the hotel. Or the time we paddled out to an island at the edge of a hippo swamp and clambered out on the muddy shore where the guide was studying some very large lion footprints which he declared had not been there more than maybe half an hour. Martin glanced at this with mild interest and then headed off into the bushes nearby to photograph something. Fortunately the guide fetched him back before he was eaten. But these light-hearted moments were a daily feature of our excursions, and so varied in their nature that we were never bored.
Neither were we bored by the cheetahs and mongeese and hippos (which sang us to sleep at at least one of our camps) and monkeys and giraffes and of course the elephants.
And our final place was a mile downstream from Victoria Falls which we went to, of course. You could see the spray rising from it miles off and hear the roar from an impressive distance. We were told that it had been a very wet year, so there was more water than usual, which contributed to the effect, but up close we were not really much impressed. Until we realized that what we were seeing was about 300’ of the full mile width of the falls and about 50’ of the 400’ depth. The rest was completely obscured by the spray.
Then we went to another place featuring leopards and crocodiles and I was attacked by monkeys with blue bottoms.
And then before we knew it we were anticlimactically back home.
The end
The final arrangement was that we would stay for a few jet-lagged days in Johannesburg with friends of friends, then move on (after much research and discussion) to a place called Umlani Bushcamp up near the Kruger Park, and finally join up with the Sierra Club back in Johannesburg. So Bronwyn locked in our tickets and we set about getting inoculated against a catalog of horrible diseases that made me feel itchy, feverish, and loose of bowel in anticipation, and assembling clothing and gear that weighed nothing since the Sierra Club only allowed 25# of baggage including carry-ons. We were warned that, it being late fall in these parts, it would be cold at night when we would be driving around transfixing wildlife in our headlights so a quantity of wooly garments were reluctantly included. We later learned that what “cold” means in South Africa is something like 50°F and were thus able to leave a lot of sweaters in Johannesburg, saving wear and tear on our load limits.
My first purchase, with the 25# limit resting uneasily in the back of my mind, was about 10# of guidebooks, closely followed by a camera with 10X zoom, a pocket full of SD cards, and a small computer. Since our tour leader had told us that the contents of our pockets didn’t count toward our limit, I combed the earth for a garment with sufficiently large pockets to contain all this stuff, and finally found a vest that fit the bill, with a total of something like 43 pockets of all sizes, including a couple of really large ones big enough for the computer and books, so in the end, that vest, fully loaded, weighed a good deal more than all the rest of my baggage and caused my portly silhouette to blimp to Michelin Tire Man proportions.
Meanwhile, obligations independent of foreign travel activities kept us distracted as February, March, and April flashed by. I found a cat sitter and somebody to cut the grass . I packed and repacked 20 or 30 times. I counted my SD cards and spare batteries and checked my tickets and passport about twice a day, and finally, on the last day of April, the first really fine day of the year, I phoned a taxi and went to the airport, my pockets rattling with malaria pills, and the anxious conviction that I had forgotten something Really Important.
The flight was painless, and our South African host, armed with photos I had sent for identification purposes, found us with no trouble, and so our adventure began. Our first minor culture shock was when we pulled into the driveway through a stout metal gate with barbed wire on top that rattled ponderously closed behind us. We might have been more alarmed by these precautions if we hadn’t passed a thousand other houses on the way there that were all similarly equipped, and not a single armed band of wild-eyed felons. Happily our hostess was a fabulous cook, so we ate ourselves senseless and staggered up to bed with our quarter-ton duffel bags and sank into a dreamless jet-lagged sleep.
After a couple of days in Jo’burg prowling through craft markets and eating interesting things we picked up our rental car, stuffed it with as many of our chattels as we could fit in the trunk, having been advised in the strongest terms never to leave anything visible in the car ever, and set off by what we thought might be a scenic route to the Umlani Bushcamp. We had a few white-knuckle moments getting used to driving on the left, but in general had a happy time driving past the gold mines and rock-studded hillsides. We only got lost once when we came to an intersection, and, knowing we should be heading north, turned away from the sun. Wrong instinct in the southern hemisphere.
But as we got further away from Jo’burg and the towns became sketchier and further apart, we kept looking for Animals and as distant features tentatively identified as antelopes or buffalo or giraffes turned out to be cows and rocks and stumps, we gloomily wondered if we had wandered into a mass extinction.
And then, of course, we miscalculated time en route and when we finally approached our motel it was full dark. And then when we actually found the place, the gate (with barbed wire) was locked, and there was no bell, and we were just wondering if we would have to sleep in our tiny rented car wrapped in road maps when the manager emerged from the gloom and let us in.
The reason, she explained, that we had been locked out was that she was not expecting us since the previous manager, with whom we had made our bookings, had stormed off in a huff the previous week, leaving no hint as to any arrangements she might have made, and the current manager had been parachuted in from another place in Zambia and knew nothing.
Fortunately it was off-season, so there was space available or we might have wound up sleeping in the car after all. In fact we received a very large room with 6 beds, plenty of room to unpack everything and repack before leaving in the morning, a ritual with which we were becoming increasingly familiar, before heading south (with the sun at our backs) for our Bushcamp. Still no interesting animals, but changing terrain and bad roads kept us interested until we arrived at Hoedspruit where we pulled into a place where other cars were parked, avoiding a tree sporting a sign warning “Park at own risk BEWARE Falling Seeds” and explored the possibilities of a nearby shop called the Hoedspruit Boekwinkel which had a paperback in the window.
I staggered out soon thereafter with another armload of books to add to my growing collection. Bronwyn got some postcards. And so we rattled off toward our bushcamp, on the way to which we finally spotted a creature worth stopping the car for. A small bird striking poses on an electric wire, the gaudiest bird on earth – pink and blue and green and purple and a dozen other colors, which we were creeping up on clanking with photographic gear, when a Land Rover came upon us, stopped to see if we had broken down. Our fabulous discovery took off, and our would-be savior dismissed our feathered beauty as one of the commonest creatures in South Africa. Which proved to be true, so we ultimately consoled ourselves with many other photo opportunies.
OK so we finally got there and were duly greeted by great numbers of staff members, since we were the only customers, it being off-season as I have mentioned. There was Shadrach the guide. Foreman, another guide. Makendal who ran the place. Ginger and Peter who I gather was called that because nobody could remember his real name.
We were just in time for lunch which was provided in sufficient abundance for about 50 people. Having eaten ourselves senseless we were shown our room which was a surprisingly comfortable reed-walled place, and given intense lectures by most of the staff in turn, the upshot of which were “Don’t wander away from camp – there are lions.” “Don’t wander around in the dark – there are lions.” “Keep away from the riverbed – there are lions.” And then we were left to unpack and digest until the evening game drive where we were loaded into a completely open Toyota Land Cruiser with a tracker on the front bumper and Shadrach at the wheel, and off we went over hill and dale in search of Animals. Which we (=Shadrach) found in satisfying abundance. Giraffes and buffalo and lions and zebras. Tsessebe, kudu, hippos and a thousand impala. A porcupine right in camp, and elephants that could disappear into a leafless bush half their size. Wildebeest and almost a leopard. Turtles and lizards and chameleons and the odd snake. Hornbills and francolins and trees engulfed in vultures. Eagles and wading birds and, as promised, a steady supply of those beautiful flying jewels we saw on the way in.
These game drives happened morning and evening every day, the evening drives enlivened by sundowners where we hove to in some scenic place and guzzled rum & cokes and biltong while the the westering sun settled into a blaze orange horizon. But when we weren’t doing that we were rousting out creatures and driving up so close to them you could smell them. I have many many very close photos of things like lions taken in a downward direction from our open vehicle. It seemed that the tastier the animal the more difficult it was to get up close, but the bigger and more carnivorous things we could get near enough to scratch their ears, although we were warned in the strongest terms not to do this. The antelopes were quite another thing.
Well, 5 days and 700 photos later (God, I love digital photography) we packed up our dusty clothes and returned to Jo’burg via Kruger Park where we were not allowed to get out of the car at all except at one of the scattered campsites. In spite of this I managed to fill up another memory card with more wildlife photos, including many of an invisible elephant that suddenly appeared to us when it emerged from the bushes about 2 car-lengths away and placidly sauntered across the road, giving us only the briefest disinterested look. Then of course there were all those baboons, and the pool full of hippos near the gate and the family of wildebeest that paused in the middle of the road to give us a good hard look.
Then after an extra day in Jo’burg doing laundry and downloading all those memory chips onto my tiny computer and burning them onto a DVD in case the computer came to grief, and at last whittling down our baggage to the requisite 25# + 30# vest, we finally met up with our tour featuring a small heterogeneous group of people, prominent among which was Martin, who amazed us all on that first introductory evening when we had all known one another about 5 minutes with a loud and detailed account of his prostate problems which apparently had something to do with his fanatical fondness for bananas. To add to the fun, he had brought along his friend Patricia, whose contribution to the introductions was a solemn assurance that she hated the outdoors, didn’t like bugs, would a good deal rather be back home in Brooklyn where she belonged, and wanted to know if she could use her hair dryer in these safari lodges. The rest of us flicked glances at one another and studied the hems of our garments until the group leader seized the podium, made a perfunctory welcome speech and left us to drink our free glass of wine.
As it turned out, Our Happy Couple, far from being a damper on our party, turned out to be an endless source of amazement if not hilarity. Like when we all were packed up and ready to go, down in the lobby our first day, then duly piled into the vans that took us to the airport, and were standing around clutching our precious 25#, and suddenly Patricia discovered she had left hers back at the hotel. Or the time we paddled out to an island at the edge of a hippo swamp and clambered out on the muddy shore where the guide was studying some very large lion footprints which he declared had not been there more than maybe half an hour. Martin glanced at this with mild interest and then headed off into the bushes nearby to photograph something. Fortunately the guide fetched him back before he was eaten. But these light-hearted moments were a daily feature of our excursions, and so varied in their nature that we were never bored.
Neither were we bored by the cheetahs and mongeese and hippos (which sang us to sleep at at least one of our camps) and monkeys and giraffes and of course the elephants.
And our final place was a mile downstream from Victoria Falls which we went to, of course. You could see the spray rising from it miles off and hear the roar from an impressive distance. We were told that it had been a very wet year, so there was more water than usual, which contributed to the effect, but up close we were not really much impressed. Until we realized that what we were seeing was about 300’ of the full mile width of the falls and about 50’ of the 400’ depth. The rest was completely obscured by the spray.
Then we went to another place featuring leopards and crocodiles and I was attacked by monkeys with blue bottoms.
And then before we knew it we were anticlimactically back home.
The end