Dear all,
In which Ilana visits northern Botswana, has a weekend in Namibia, and meets a pangolin. Now some of you will have read that and hissed in frustration that you weren’t with me. Others of you will have shrugged your shoulders and said: Wha…?
By the way, I just read that “to explore” in Latin means “to cry out”. The people who used to go before the others on a journey would cry out about where the wildlife was. [As per dictionary: explôrâre to search out, examine, + plôrâre to cry out, prob. orig. with reference to hunting cries.] Now they still cry out – or write out, if you’re me – about yes, where the wildlife was three weeks ago.
In which Ilana visits northern Botswana, has a weekend in Namibia, and meets a pangolin. Now some of you will have read that and hissed in frustration that you weren’t with me. Others of you will have shrugged your shoulders and said: Wha…?
By the way, I just read that “to explore” in Latin means “to cry out”. The people who used to go before the others on a journey would cry out about where the wildlife was. [As per dictionary: explôrâre to search out, examine, + plôrâre to cry out, prob. orig. with reference to hunting cries.] Now they still cry out – or write out, if you’re me – about yes, where the wildlife was three weeks ago.
And also by the way, the pics here are courtesy of Wilderness Safaris.
But to begin at the beginning. Colleague Caroline and I decided that neither of us had been to the Selinda Reserve in northern Botswana and I hadn’t been to our Linyanti Concession in that area either. Added to this we’ve just started to market a camp called Lianshulu Lodge just over the border in Namibia’s Caprivi Strip, so we put it to boss Chris to make a week of it. He obliged by saying yes and so on a merry Sunday morning, laden with cooler bags for me and camera bags for Caro, we boarded an Air Botswana plane to fly to Maun, to board a Caravan (plane, remember) to take off again for our first port of call: the Selinda Reserve.
Selinda means “place of many pools” and at the moment that’s exactly what it is. Thanks to amazing rains in summer (which weren’t so incredibly amazing to plod through in Joburg as I recall whinging several times) the grasslands and floodplains are punctuated with bodies of still water, scenically stunning, reflecting the cloudy sky and just clumps of reeds and hippo heads breaking the surface. In fact, the water-filled ground was the leitmotif, the theme throughout our journey as each place we went to had more water than there had been for many a year – about which more anon.
I won’t go into details of the general game – elephant, buffalo, impala etc etc but I do need to tell you about the flocks of red-billed queleas (tiny birds like small sparrows) that are currently swarming in enormous numbers – I use the word ‘swarm’ because there are so many of them and they’re so small that it looks like a swarm or a cloud, while the noise that this swarm makes as these birds fly is such a loud rumble it reminded me uncannily of the London underground which is a weird surreal feeling when you’re standing in the middle of the bush.
We spent the first night at Selinda Camp, which is very pretty, and then used the morning game drive as a transfer to Zibadianja Camp so that we could spend good daylight hours at the latter for photographing – it’s been upgraded to “premier” i.e. very zhoosh in Wilderness standards. A quiet morning suddenly became exciting when first we came across a herd of about 2 000 buffalo and then we off-roaded to where Dukes, a Zibadianja guide, had tracked the Selinda Pride – all 12 of them (2 males, 3 females, 5 juvenile males and 2 juvenile females) – who were all very alert, attempting to attack another, smaller herd of buffalo. The latter bunched up, horns facing outwards, and the situation ended in a stalemate – still, an amazing interaction to watch.
We spent the afternoon photographing the stunning Zibadianja Camp – well, that was Caroline’s job. Mine was to test the outdoor shower – which works very well I’m happy to report – and to sit on the deck made of railway sleeper-wood, which gives a colonial historical feel to the place, added to all the campaign-style furniture, brass-studded wooden boxes that hold whiskey or coffee depending but I digress… and watch the elephants come down to the Zibadianja Lagoon to drink.
The game drive that afternoon turned out to be the GDL – Game Drive of a Lifetime. We headed off to see the two Selinda Brothers – cheetah siblings that our guide Gordie and Dukes had spotted earlier. We found them lying nonchalantly and nobly as only these Egyptian royalty cats can on a termite mound, showing off their photogenic skills. They did the cat thing – dozed then looked up at us, yawned and plopped down again. But it was a very close sighting and we eventually left them (it did seem sacrilegious I agree) to see if we could find the lions for the two new guests on the vehicle – Doug and Sheryl from Seattle.
But the lions would have to wait. On the way, Gordon spotted a small brown mound shuffling through the grass a few metres away from the road. He gave a yelp, echoed by Caroline and me as we realised what it was, and whirled the vehicle around to stop next to what was undeniably and thrillingly a pangolin! The poor beast tried to waddle off but to no avail, he (unless it was a she) had some incredibly excited people around him all yelping and taking photos so he just curled his snout under him and pretended he was a large artichoke (this animal is covered with large scales that look like artichoke leaves, but they’re hard as nails and made of the same substance). But it was too late, we had realised we were looking at a once-in-a-lifetime sighting and hurled ourselves after him.
It’s also meant to be good luck to see one according to local lore, so all guides in the area raced over to spend time with it. As the sun went down, we had three vehicles, their occupants alternately taking pictures of the pangolin (after we’d explained what it was to some of the bemused Americans, they got almost as excited as we had) or sipping drinks and marvelling at this creature – “how complex are Your works,” I found myself thinking, looking at a creature that occasionally – very occasionally – would allow us a glance of a face with a long snout, almost no mouth, and bleary eyes. The pangolin – for those of you who shrugged at the beginning of this email – looks similar to the South American armadillo but is in another family, eats ants, is secretive, nocturnal and small and endangered – hence the almost impossibility of seeing one and hence the incredible warm fuzzies we had on doing so. His official name is Temminck's or Ground Pangolin and he is the only one of three species in Africa and the ONLY one to be found in Southern Africa. So there.
After an hour (by which time I was worrying about the traumatic affect we were having on the poor fellow), the sun had set and we all left him to waddle determinedly off and hopefully calm himself down after that dreadful experience with a helping of termites. There was no time to see the lions now so we turned around and chugged home, each of us feeling immensely satisfied with the sighting. But the night wasn’t over, for as it got truly dark, what should come padding down the road towards us but a leopard. Instead of turning off and disappearing into the darkness providing that usual thrilling 3-second sighting, she just continued walking towards us. Gordie stopped the vehicle and switched off. The friendly beast didn’t falter, but continued towards us and started to walk around the vehicle so close that she could have rubbed herself on the wheel. She stopped just below where I was sitting holding camera and breath, looked up at me, those green eyes lazily taking me in – and purred. I’m not really sure if it was a purr but that’s what it sounded like. If you take a cat’s purr and slow it down so you can hear each click in it, then lower it to a deep base sound: that was the noise. But it crossed my mesmerised mind that if she had decided to jump up and bite my face it wouldn’t take too much effort on her part and I couldn’t do a thing about it. Anyway, she didn’t, which is probably a good thing, and continued her minute examination of the vehicle, circling it, looking under it and around, before deciding we were no use to her and continuing down the road. We still followed her for a while; she circled us again, and then finally ditched us for the darkness of the bush.
GDL indeed.
The day was brought to a perfect end when we had dinner at TV dinner tables all set around the campfire, and served from food cooked on said fire. Even mine, albeit in layers of tinfoil.
Tuesday morning was a great if cloudy game drive, which while not living up to the previous evening, didn’t hurt either. Our cheetah brothers were walking from one hillock or termite mound to the next scent marking, and we followed them for a while before leaving them to do their thing. Gordie then found the lion pride again for Doug and Sheryl but this time they were sleeping, and watching sleeping lions after the first 5 minutes is like watching grass grow. I’m afraid to sound so spoilt but it’s true.
After brunch on the sleeper deck under a beautiful blue sky with elephant drinking in a couple of directions, we headed to our next destination: DumaTau.
But to begin at the beginning. Colleague Caroline and I decided that neither of us had been to the Selinda Reserve in northern Botswana and I hadn’t been to our Linyanti Concession in that area either. Added to this we’ve just started to market a camp called Lianshulu Lodge just over the border in Namibia’s Caprivi Strip, so we put it to boss Chris to make a week of it. He obliged by saying yes and so on a merry Sunday morning, laden with cooler bags for me and camera bags for Caro, we boarded an Air Botswana plane to fly to Maun, to board a Caravan (plane, remember) to take off again for our first port of call: the Selinda Reserve.
Selinda means “place of many pools” and at the moment that’s exactly what it is. Thanks to amazing rains in summer (which weren’t so incredibly amazing to plod through in Joburg as I recall whinging several times) the grasslands and floodplains are punctuated with bodies of still water, scenically stunning, reflecting the cloudy sky and just clumps of reeds and hippo heads breaking the surface. In fact, the water-filled ground was the leitmotif, the theme throughout our journey as each place we went to had more water than there had been for many a year – about which more anon.
I won’t go into details of the general game – elephant, buffalo, impala etc etc but I do need to tell you about the flocks of red-billed queleas (tiny birds like small sparrows) that are currently swarming in enormous numbers – I use the word ‘swarm’ because there are so many of them and they’re so small that it looks like a swarm or a cloud, while the noise that this swarm makes as these birds fly is such a loud rumble it reminded me uncannily of the London underground which is a weird surreal feeling when you’re standing in the middle of the bush.
We spent the first night at Selinda Camp, which is very pretty, and then used the morning game drive as a transfer to Zibadianja Camp so that we could spend good daylight hours at the latter for photographing – it’s been upgraded to “premier” i.e. very zhoosh in Wilderness standards. A quiet morning suddenly became exciting when first we came across a herd of about 2 000 buffalo and then we off-roaded to where Dukes, a Zibadianja guide, had tracked the Selinda Pride – all 12 of them (2 males, 3 females, 5 juvenile males and 2 juvenile females) – who were all very alert, attempting to attack another, smaller herd of buffalo. The latter bunched up, horns facing outwards, and the situation ended in a stalemate – still, an amazing interaction to watch.
We spent the afternoon photographing the stunning Zibadianja Camp – well, that was Caroline’s job. Mine was to test the outdoor shower – which works very well I’m happy to report – and to sit on the deck made of railway sleeper-wood, which gives a colonial historical feel to the place, added to all the campaign-style furniture, brass-studded wooden boxes that hold whiskey or coffee depending but I digress… and watch the elephants come down to the Zibadianja Lagoon to drink.
The game drive that afternoon turned out to be the GDL – Game Drive of a Lifetime. We headed off to see the two Selinda Brothers – cheetah siblings that our guide Gordie and Dukes had spotted earlier. We found them lying nonchalantly and nobly as only these Egyptian royalty cats can on a termite mound, showing off their photogenic skills. They did the cat thing – dozed then looked up at us, yawned and plopped down again. But it was a very close sighting and we eventually left them (it did seem sacrilegious I agree) to see if we could find the lions for the two new guests on the vehicle – Doug and Sheryl from Seattle.
But the lions would have to wait. On the way, Gordon spotted a small brown mound shuffling through the grass a few metres away from the road. He gave a yelp, echoed by Caroline and me as we realised what it was, and whirled the vehicle around to stop next to what was undeniably and thrillingly a pangolin! The poor beast tried to waddle off but to no avail, he (unless it was a she) had some incredibly excited people around him all yelping and taking photos so he just curled his snout under him and pretended he was a large artichoke (this animal is covered with large scales that look like artichoke leaves, but they’re hard as nails and made of the same substance). But it was too late, we had realised we were looking at a once-in-a-lifetime sighting and hurled ourselves after him.
It’s also meant to be good luck to see one according to local lore, so all guides in the area raced over to spend time with it. As the sun went down, we had three vehicles, their occupants alternately taking pictures of the pangolin (after we’d explained what it was to some of the bemused Americans, they got almost as excited as we had) or sipping drinks and marvelling at this creature – “how complex are Your works,” I found myself thinking, looking at a creature that occasionally – very occasionally – would allow us a glance of a face with a long snout, almost no mouth, and bleary eyes. The pangolin – for those of you who shrugged at the beginning of this email – looks similar to the South American armadillo but is in another family, eats ants, is secretive, nocturnal and small and endangered – hence the almost impossibility of seeing one and hence the incredible warm fuzzies we had on doing so. His official name is Temminck's or Ground Pangolin and he is the only one of three species in Africa and the ONLY one to be found in Southern Africa. So there.
After an hour (by which time I was worrying about the traumatic affect we were having on the poor fellow), the sun had set and we all left him to waddle determinedly off and hopefully calm himself down after that dreadful experience with a helping of termites. There was no time to see the lions now so we turned around and chugged home, each of us feeling immensely satisfied with the sighting. But the night wasn’t over, for as it got truly dark, what should come padding down the road towards us but a leopard. Instead of turning off and disappearing into the darkness providing that usual thrilling 3-second sighting, she just continued walking towards us. Gordie stopped the vehicle and switched off. The friendly beast didn’t falter, but continued towards us and started to walk around the vehicle so close that she could have rubbed herself on the wheel. She stopped just below where I was sitting holding camera and breath, looked up at me, those green eyes lazily taking me in – and purred. I’m not really sure if it was a purr but that’s what it sounded like. If you take a cat’s purr and slow it down so you can hear each click in it, then lower it to a deep base sound: that was the noise. But it crossed my mesmerised mind that if she had decided to jump up and bite my face it wouldn’t take too much effort on her part and I couldn’t do a thing about it. Anyway, she didn’t, which is probably a good thing, and continued her minute examination of the vehicle, circling it, looking under it and around, before deciding we were no use to her and continuing down the road. We still followed her for a while; she circled us again, and then finally ditched us for the darkness of the bush.
GDL indeed.
The day was brought to a perfect end when we had dinner at TV dinner tables all set around the campfire, and served from food cooked on said fire. Even mine, albeit in layers of tinfoil.
Tuesday morning was a great if cloudy game drive, which while not living up to the previous evening, didn’t hurt either. Our cheetah brothers were walking from one hillock or termite mound to the next scent marking, and we followed them for a while before leaving them to do their thing. Gordie then found the lion pride again for Doug and Sheryl but this time they were sleeping, and watching sleeping lions after the first 5 minutes is like watching grass grow. I’m afraid to sound so spoilt but it’s true.
After brunch on the sleeper deck under a beautiful blue sky with elephant drinking in a couple of directions, we headed to our next destination: DumaTau.
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