Dear alls from Africa

Delta Adventure II: Elephants all the way down

2011-11-18T10:17:00.001+02:00

In which Ilana has fun and introspection with elephants.

To continue the adventure, we reluctantly winged (wung?)our way from the blue-green swirls of Xigera to the still watery, flood-coveredmopane-land of Khwai, on the other side of the Delta. I say mopane-land becausewhile there is also riverine vegetation, other trees and even barren saltpatches, mopane rules here, from desiccated bushes to tall glitter-bright,green-leafed trees waving in the wind, casting dappled shadows in their wake.And where the flood has reached – that’s Botswana’s flood not Noah’s; it hasn’treached this far in over 30 years – the trees stand knee-deep, sunlightglinting off the silent water as it creeps further into dry land.

Of course lots of mopane means lots of ellies and indeedit was pachyderms all the way from one camp to another – as well as therequisite impala, giraffe, enormous herd of buffalo and zebra, one skulkinghyaena and a grey hornbill trying to kill a chameleon for breakfast.

Dana (our photographer, remember) needed a few shots ofus – the models – watching game. But as his last morning dawned and we bumbledaround trying to find said game, it wasn’t looking good. Clearly everyone wasvisiting their friends on the other side of the Khwai River (no bridge jokes,please). The fact that the eastern side of the concession only stopped being ahunting concession a year ago when Wilderness took it over doesn’t help much; alot of animals took fright as soon as our vehicle passed by, poor blighters.Hopefully as time goes on they will forget that cars mean bloody death and willlearn to relax to the sound of cameras whirring away instead. As we wereliterally on the way to the airstrip to drop him off, Dana’s legendary luckcaught and a young male lion came into view. He was all scruffy, looked likehe’d shaved his head in an attempt to be cool and it had bombed out prettybadly. He was lyin’ (sorry) in the long grass but obligingly sat up, looked atthe models madly stripping off layers and layers of clothing (so that we didn’tlook like ‘blobs’ as Dana called us; it was freezing that day). We obligingly oohed and aahed as the lion heaved his bulkup and walked ponderously past the camera with us in the background – and ...it's a wrap!

Scruffy lion; photo by Dana Allen

We stayed one night at Banoka Bush Camp, famed for being100% solar, and then one night at the delightful Khwai Discoverer Camp, hiddenin the thick undergrowth and trees overlooking a reed- and frog-filled lagoon. Besides being all hidden and nestled, what I loved mostwas the wonderful bright cold crisp smell, a sharp-ice smell that seemed torise from the grasses all around.

We left Khwai after a couple of days and went back westacross to the bottom left of the Delta, to Abu, land of elephants and a veryzhoosh camp. From the sublime (for me) to the luxurious – I thought Carol wasgoing to burst into tears when she saw the hair-dryer in the room, whereas Iwas missing that long drop... okay, not so much. The ‘tent’ (more like a house) looks out on a lovely lagoon, with ahippo neighbour who woke me up at 5am with a “squeal-grunt-grunt-yeeep” andthen proceeded to do what sounded like breast-stroke, splashing with verve andvigour outside the tent. After a while the splashing grew so loud I thoughthe’d jumped into our outdoor copper bathtub for a quick wash (did I mention itwas luxurious?).

Cathy the matriarch; my photo this time

Some background on Abu: it was begun by a chap whorescued a few elephant from various places – a circus, a Kruger cull etc – andthey became a ‘trained’ herd. I use the word ‘trained’ not ‘tame’ becauseanyone who thinks you can tame an elephant is smoking their socks. Wilderness has taken this place over and we’re trying tosee what we can do here to either release the ellies or at the very least usethis unique place as the centre for elephant research; since Botswana has moreelephant than almost anywhere else in Africa, this is a Good Thing.

So what happens here is that you join the ellies on someof their activities instead of them visiting you on yours. They sleep in a bomaat night and in the morning are greeted by their monitors – a group of men whoseem to have a wonderful relationship with their pachyderm charges. Themonitors take them out for the day, where they roam over the concession,feeding and just hanging out as a herd would. Guests join them, to beintroduced to them and to walk or ride them back to camp.

Yes, riding. Hmm. Mary-Anne and I were – and still are –against riding animals of such intelligence, but eventually were talked intoit, for the rather twisted reasoning that if we did, we could tell if we shouldhave or not! The result as I sat atop Cathy, the matriarch of the herd, was atangled web of emotions: horror that I was doing this, awe at seeing things froman elephant-eye view (the tops of termite mounds, trees, tops of walkingpeople’s heads, tops of everything really), and overall, wishing we could haveasked Cathy’s permission first. I sat up there, holding myself stiffly, tryingto weigh less as I could feel her massive hip bones moving under us as shewalked. Wondering if I’m hurting her or just an encumbrance – after all sheweighs in at close to 5 tons – or if, as Collet the head monitor maintains, itmakes her feel part of the herd; after all, this is what this herd ‘does.’ See?A jumble of emotions that probably need a bit of therapy.

Walking with them, ah now, that was amazing. To walkright next to the leg of an elephant and look up and then more up (upper?) towhere the sky should be and seeing instead a grey criss-cross of wrinkles withthick sparse hairs under Cathy’s jaw, her trunk coiling and roiling, seeming tohave a life of its own unrelated to the rest of the great swaying body – well,quite simply it’s a privilege.

But when you walk you have to be careful not to be runover by a bus – in the form of Paseka, the youngest of the group, who is atypical child. She walks with the herd, then stops to smell something or tolook at something, when suddenly she notices that she’s been left behind... Panic! Ears flapping madly and trunk wobbling, she comesthundering along (people jumping aside pretty smartly) until she gets to‘grandma’ Cathy where she immediately feels better; regaining herconfidence she jostles the large animal aside and sallies forth with renewedconfidence to grab at the nearest bush with her trunk.

Only here did I understand the concept of a matriarch inCathy, who really does radiate leadership in her calm, awe-inspiring (in theexact sense) presence. It is more than just her size and herincredibly long crossed-over tusks. There is something about her – or possiblyI’m guilty of anthropomorphising, it wouldn’t be the first time – either way,she’s hard to get over. (She’s obviously impossible to get over literally of course,har har.)

I saw an example of her leadership on Shabbat, when Ivisited the boma to watch the monitors and the elephant researchers in action.Once a week, before the herd moves out, the elephant researchers come tomeasure and weigh (yes, really) each ellie, look at dung and all the other funstuff that researchers get excited about. And the best, most thrilling part wasthe Morning Rumble.

As you know, one of the ways that elephants communicateis through low rumbles, some of which are inaudible to the human ear, but we dohear the ‘top’ of their range. It seems that every morning, Cathy starts themorning rumble (sounds like a name for a radio programme), and is answeredalmost immediately by her second in command, Shirheni, and then the others.Their temporal glands start to flow immediately as some sort of communicationtakes place. I found myself wanting to ask Cathy: "what did you say?"Was it just “Good morning, ladies”? Was it a snide remark about us silly humansand everyone else was cracking up? I felt that the humans, supposedly incharge, were standing around uncomprehending and briefly discomforted. We arethe outsiders here, forever foreigners; without means of translating we’relooking in on an intimate conversation we’ll never understand.

In which case, how kind of these particular members ofLoxidonta africana to put up with us and our clumsy attempts at connecting withthem. And on behalf of the whole human race I’d like to apologise to them forthe inconvenience, not to say trauma, of having to share the continent with us– and more, to thank them for the privilege of being able to do so.

Photos can be seen on my facebook page - here.

Botswana - A Delta Adventure I

2011-11-17T17:04:00.001+02:00

And you wondered if I was chained to my desk? Well, I wasa bit. But then...

In which Ilana goes from bucket showers to copper baths... and models brushing her teeth?

Courtesy of Dana Allen

A little background: We needed photos of an Explorationin the Okavango Delta – that’s what we call our mobile safaris – and so six ofus went with Dana Allen, photographer extraordinaire and really great guy, tobe models for said photos. You know those shots of smiling happy people onmekoro (plural for mokoro, which are dugout canoes), on boats, sippingcocktails at some beautiful camp? Well, we were the smiling happy people. Whilewe were in the Delta, we took in a couple more camps, of which more anon.

Sigh. It’s a tough life being a model you know. You haveto sit in a mokoro and be poled first one way then the next, sun sparking offthe water, as Dana clicks like a phalanx of paparazzi at you, shouting “Happy!We’re happy!” invariably making you crack up laughing – and thus achieving thedesired effect. Or being offered a beer several times by hostess Mash who hasthe biggest smile in the southern Hemisphere – every one of her teeth can beseen. Or brushing your teeth for the camera – yup, Carol and I had to be thetooth-brushing models and I can’t say it’s our forte really, but it’s a smallprice to pay for the privilege of being at Xigera, definitely one of myfavourite places on Earth.

So, about Xigera.

I’ve written before about Xigera being a bubble oftranquillity and silence. Xigera Mokoro Trails, however, is a bubble within abubble so to speak. Not for us traillists (despite spellcheck’s disagreement,we’ve decided that there is such a word) the hustle and bustle of a ‘large’camp of 20 guests with running water and electricity. Here there were justseven of us, five mokoro polers, our intrepid guide Brooks and the lovelysmiley kitchen staff of course. The camp is on the edge of an island in theOkavango Delta, just five dome tents on the ground with en-suite bathrooms (bywhich grand term I mean a long-drop loo and a bucket shower), with a main areathat is a simple canvas roof over some tables and chairs and a kitchen that ismerely two tables on either side of a large fire, on which everything iscooked. No electricity means no humming of technology in the background; uttersilence reigns except for human voices, the grunt of a nearby hippo, the crunchof feet along the sandy paths, and the crackling of the fire as it heats upsome water for someone’s shower. I’ve never been as aware of my sense ofhearing as I have here. (Hear here.) (Sorry.)

This stepping away from technology is immenselysatisfying in a minimalist sort of way and at the same time epiphanal (not areal word, sorry spellcheck) – every time I start to turn on a tap and realisethere isn’t one or brush my teeth with a bottle of water as my source of rinsingout, every time I switch on a swinging torch to light the tent, or am woken inthe morning by Brooks pouring hot water into a basin outside my tent – allthese and more tell me how much we are cushioned by our inventions andcleverness. But perhaps at the expense of wisdom, I wonder as I sit at thefire, staring into the mesmerising flames...

See what I mean?

The silent bubble deepens when we gingerly sit down inour mokoro, and our poler’s name is Oracle. Hmm, I think, poled by an oracle –that has a great ring to it.

The mokoro sits low in the water so we have to look up atalmost everything, and here, our hearing is sharpened even further. There’sjust the ‘swish-plop’ of the mokoro pole as Oracle pushes us smoothly throughthe water, or the faint rustle of the reeds as they are pushed aside when wetake the less beaten path. (That way you can avoid the hippos.) So much silence coats us like a heavy blanketand oddly enough, roars in our ears. We moderate our shrill voices to match andthe excited cry of a xigera (the local name for a Pied Kingfisher) has to pushthrough it, like a face peeking through the red curtain on a stage.

It’s a study in still, blue silence. I’ve written beforeabout the mirror-like surface with reflections that stretch downwards as muchas upwards; the mysterious red-green forests of reed and water lily stalks, andthe Dali-like blobs of green algae waving in the constant current that pushesfrom Angola all the way south.

‘Kol demama daka’ comes to mind. God is not in the fireor the wind or the earthquake. He is a still small voice, speaking volumes inthe hush.

Namibia 2010: Dunes, Damalarand and Dassies

2010-06-20T12:05:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana visits the land of sand dunes and dassies, towering mountains and elephants, gemsbok and springbok, lions lyin’ on the path to your tent and porcupines who nibble your trousers.

Almost five years to the day, I returned to Namibia. I did rant and rave a lot when I was last here so I won’t reinvent the pen as it were, and will confine myself to new rants. Mary-Anne (our other graphic designer, who has been at WS a mere seven months) and I flew to Windhoek, ran to a short meeting Windhoek – a very pretty little town – then ran to the other airport and flew south to the famed Sossusvlei dunes.

Here, the desert is almost complete; no semi-desert this, rather, it is prehistoric, with sand in layers everywhere, bare rock peeping out between tufts of grass and a few hardy (or foolhardy) bushes, and shadows stretching away ink-black as the sun sinks. “Lunar” is a clichéd description of the place but it is the correct term. From high in our little plane the landscape looks like a rumpled brown duvet, all hills and crevasses in varying shades, then we’re over the plateau and the colour changes to rust, valleys widen and the mountains rise higher to meet us. Where I've once wondered why there aren’t more names for shades of green, here I pondered over the lack of suitable descriptive terms for all the browns around us – red-brown, beige, dark brown, tan, blonde... nope, not enough.

The requisite sand airstrip, a warm Wilderness welcome and a bouncy drive in the golden light, past the odd gemsbok and springbok and even bat-eared fox (YES! One of my favourites, with their antenna ears and teddy bear faces) through the gravel plains of our private Kulala Wilderness Reserve (a barren yet stunning setting if there ever was one) to Kulala Desert Lodge, to arrive just as the sun was setting behind the black dune hills in front of the lodge. We settled into our ‘kulala’ (means ‘to sleep’ in Oshiwambo) and then I ascended the rickety ladder to the roof where you can sleep under the stars – or daven a late mincha in my case. The arching heavens turned blue-black, an inkiness that the stars punctured through one by one. The hot desert breeze turned cool. But suddenly, some 15 minutes after sunset, the sky in the west blazed pink – an encore if you like from the main performer out here; it is the sun after all that cuts and carves, colours and shapes much of this landscape, and with few trees, there is no escaping it.

As always, Namibia hits me in all the senses, overwhelming me with what is not there. Again, I felt like someone had given my eyeballs a good scrubbing as everything is so clear, springbok seem so much closer than they really are in this clear, heady air. The silence (broken only by the rasping noise of a barking gecko) of the night is complete, making the ears wonder if they’ve gone deaf – except there’s that roaring sound you get in your head which only occurs in such utter silence. Is it the blood rushing around my brain? The Earth’s subterranean fiery engines pounding? The sound of the universe expanding? As I sit here, it seems to me that the intervening years between my last sitting in the silence of Namibia and this one has been filled with clutter and noise, both in the head and out. And now, once more I can sit content and rest my ears.

A pleasant evening and the prerequisite calming of the panic-stricken staff about kosher (who then come up trumps with a delicious meal), and we sleep the sleep of the dead – or deaf in this case – and are up before the sun. Then, standing looking out at what we thought were hills yesterday, we saw them change. As the sun rose behind us, the black knolls in front of camp slowly and ever so shyly flushed rosy pink and then reddened; their colours were hidden last night because the sun had set behind them. Now filled with (coffee and) anticipation, we alighted our vehicle with Angula (first name Abisai but he prefers his surname), our guide and champion dune climber, but we didn’t know that then.

Off we whizzed through the private gate that Wilderness has into the Namib Naukluft Reserve (where the dunes live see), stopping only to watch the sun finally lift itself up from behind the desolate rocky mountains in the east. As it does, you turn around to gaze up in wonder at something you didn’t notice before: Dune 1 – an enormous hill of sand that had been black then grey, before gaining colour to finally flush that triumphant, bold, African orange-red.

I’ve seen the photos, hell, I’ve written the text, and nothing prepares you for the actual grandeur of the spectacle. All the more so because it is not pure sand, but almost impossibly, life: grass tufts grow determinedly up the steep slopes. Serendipitously, just before I came I read a thought by Rabbi Kelman of Toronto who describes being humbled as being faced with an awesome thing of nature and realising everything there is, and thus everything I am, comes from God. That is exactly the response here: to be in a place where one could not survive without all the trappings of civilisation and compare this to the size of dunes and their grandeur – enormous, stretching into the blue sky up to 300 metres, they seem to proclaim God’s glory – this presses one into a human shape. I feel my mortality and frailty press down on me. I feel much lower than the angels, in fact, while I may be larger than the grains of sand, yet I am so much smaller than the dune they have built.

It’s not just the size, but the sweep of time. For 40 million years, each grain moved infinitely slowly, starting as silt coming down the Orange River many miles to the south, then washed out to sea and pushed first north by the Benguela Current and then back onto land and right up the old river mouth and bed for kilometres, unhurriedly, to where they began to build up and up and up, moved by wind this way and that to become a huge, towering dune – and from the air, a sand sea made of red waves. Each grain played its part to shape one of the great spectacles on this planet – an enduring work of art by the prime Artist.

In between the dunes lie flat, hard once-pans, long ago filled with water (and in the rainy season some of them still are) they are now stranded as blinding white calcrete vleis – hence the name “Sossusvlei” – the place filled with water – or Dead Vlei, evocatively filled with the twisted shapes of trunks and branches, the remains of long-dead trees.

Sossusvlei though is a public park so you meet the public here. We therefore turned up our noses at Dune 45 'cos there were too many people climbing that one and drove on to Big Daddy, a monster of a ‘star dune’ – i.e., it has a number of arms in all directions as opposed to a linear dune, which has only one main dune ridge (see how much there is to learn just about sand?). The wind however had picked up so Angula suggested we only climb one of Big Daddy’s arms, which was only about half the height of the centre point of the dune. Halfway up, puffing and blowing, we were blessing his sagacity. You have to walk on the crest of the dune, the sand flowing steeply down on either side in an acute triangle, and if possible in someone else’s footprints as that’s easier. The wind was howling and sand particles were flying like mad across our shoes – interestingly and luckily not much higher – to flip over the crest and pour with verve down the other side; “dune on the fly” is how I thought of it. If the wind kept up, the dune would shift slowly over Dead Vlei which was on our right, but apparently it regularly blows back the other way, so that the dune pretty much stays put. Finally, heaving and panting, we reached the top of the arm – and ran straight down the steep side to the bottom, yelling a bit on the way, naturally. You can’t fall 'cos your legs sink into the sand almost to your knees at each step so that you are held up and supported by the sand that kept you back when climbing. Wobbly-legged I keeled over and lay flat on my back on the blessed hard floor of Dead Vlei and admired the 800-year-old gnarled trunks of dead trees that persist and insist on standing on this moonlike surface. Yet it’s not like the moon; even here we saw toktokkie, fog-basking and long-legged beetles scurrying about and a shovel-snouted lizard diving head first into the sand.

After all that exercise we journeyed on to the actual vlei that is called Sossusvlei, just next to Big Mama dune, and parked under an enormous camelthorn tree for coffee and bikkies. There’s something very restful about sitting in the shade sipping coffee and watching other people climb laboriously up that steep dune.... All around us were beetles and birds busily doing their thing, flitting in and out of the dusty green leaves – and the words “ma rabu maasecha” reverberated through my head at every turn where I could see life and its superb adaptations to an unforgiving environment.

Well, after all that colour and light, we took a drive back to the gravel plains and mountains and visited Sesriem Canyon (an unexpected crack in the Earth 30 metres deep that holds remnants of water in the dry season), then after lunch took a drive across the reserve to see the other Wilderness camps, finishing off with a lovely dinner and well-deserved sleep – unfortunately not under the bright swathe of stars that stretched out across the skies, mainly 'cos they come with a heavy dew.

We were meant to go hot air ballooning which I was so excited about I could hardly sleep. Unfortunately the wind had other ideas and so on our final morning we stayed on good ol’ Mother Earth and used flat feet and gravity to walk along the dry riverbed in front of camp, enjoying crunching over river sand and seeing signs of animals, and even a glimpse of a jackal in the distance.

But the best was having a chat to Angula who is the chairman of the Kulala Environmental Club. (No ordinary club this, it’s one of those “that’s why I love Wilderness” moments, so indulge me here, okay?) A few months ago, four staff members from Kulala Desert Lodge - not managers or anything, just your average person working at the lodge as a guide, waiter or cleaner - decided that they too wanted to make a difference. So they started the KEC with just a simple premise: to clean up and teach others to clean up. They deal with litter – not around the camp because there isn’t any there, but in the Sossusvlei area which of course is a public area and thus has human beings who can’t seem to resist dropping their stuff everywhere they go. So every week, someone goes along and picks up litter. The club has grown so there are now more volunteers and more hands. Not content with this, the Club has now expanded its activities to the nearby village of Maltahöhe, where they take the day off to spend time with the kids and run a village-wide cleanup programme.

See? Not complicated. Just a simple aim – but what a difference you can make.

A short trip to the airstrip and we hopped on the plane for what’s known as the scenic flight to Swakopmund. And indeed it is, with the red dunes seeming to flow like water beneath us, for mile after mile until we reached the Atlantic and took a sharp right. Flying north, we watched the famous fog rolling in importantly to work. As you may know, the fog of Namibia is one of the miraculous everyday events that ensures that some moisture gets to this arid land, and many animals and plants are well adapted to harvest the precious liquid that occurs on most mornings. What I didn’t realise was quite how solid and well, present, this fog is. No mere wispy cloud this, but a solid bank of white that hangs just above the sea, moving determinedly eastwards. It seems to have a large flamboyant personality of its own, which changes to a gentler, persuasive one when it reaches the shore. Here, it transforms into tendrils and fingers that curl this way and that. It tiptoes delicately across the blond dunes (to be oxidised red as they move inland in their turn), leaving droplets of moisture and the possibility of life as it passes by, finally disappearing over the horizon.

II. Damaraland once more
After landing in Swakopmund we continued flying a lot more till we reached Damaraland – and still one of my favourite places on Earth. (Yes, I know there are a lot of them. Since God took the time to make them all, I assume some appreciation would be in order, no?)

I won’t speak much about Damaraland as I will just refer you to my previous experience in 2006. But it’s still one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, bareness and desolation in an almost Mordor/ Lord of the Rings sort of way. The land lies brooding, the morning and afternoon's dark shadows in the valleys contrast with the flat-topped mountains and hills that rear up into the infinite blue sky. It is majestic and breathtaking – literally everywhere I look I take in a breath sharply at the stupendour (that’s stupendous splendour, see?). We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly at the camp with managers Ilze and Ivan and took a drive in the dry Huab riverbed to see the ellies. During this season they hang out here as one of the few water sources there are so you’re pretty sure to see them. The riverbed seems dry as bone but every now and then a little surface water sparkles out and there’s always something drinking there – kudu, steenbok and even Egyptian geese. And when a honey badger raced across our path, and we saw the endemic Rosy-faced Lovebirds and Rüppell’s Parrots, well, my water bottle runnethed over. We also saw one lone bat hanging upside down in a tree – was he sulking? Or perhaps a penchant for hermitage?

One of the verses from Tehillim went through my mind constantly here: "Poteach et yadecha," we say to God, You open Your hand and sustain all living things with what they need. This is so clear here once more: despite the dryness and seeming inability to live here, everything that does, does so successfully. Every plant and animal is perfectly adapted to survive – and thrive – lives here in Hashem’s ratzon, His favour.

Just one more story and then I’ll leave you alone. We went to visit the Petrified Forest. This is a very impressive hilltop covered with very scared bits of wood (sorry sorry) that are in fact 280-million-year-old conifers that were carried here during an Ice Age and lay buried for aeons, until erosion uncovered them and German palaeontologists discovered them. It was all very primeval of course, what with ancient rock-solid tree trunks lying around, not one but TWO snakes (a western barred spitting cobra had been attacking a sand snake when we interrupted it; it saw us and then with that fluid ripple of power so evocative of snakes disappeared into a crack in the nearby rocks, while the other one just hung dead still on a branch, its tail was bitten, poor thing), and to end off things nicely, our guide’s name was Bacchus (the Greek god of wine), so all in all there was a lovely mix of the primordial and prehistoric, Garden of Eden snakes, and Greek mythology. A lovely drive back to D-Camp yielded bat-eared foxes again and great raptors, before we took to the skies ourselves northwards once more - to Etosha.

But that’s another story....

Botswana Bits and Bobs II - Mombo

2010-01-08T07:37:00.000+02:00

So, with a roar and a noun-made-verb, we left the lush tranquillity of Jao and headed for Mombo – which means ‘place of plenty’. And so it was.

First of course we settled into our little shack (heh heh snigger), with not enough time to do more than check that the outside shower worked perfectly with its requisite elephant that walked right up close before turning aside, and to have the chef whose name I’ve forgotten inform me that he had it all sorted. And he had kosher puff pastry so he was making me something delicious the name of which I can’t remember either with it. That will teach me to wait so long before writing.

I do need to say that the guide we had at Mombo (whose name I do remember but I won’t say) was a little too enthusiastic about cats and not enough about other stuff. In case you hadn't noticed, I prefer to enjoy nature in all its microscopic stunning detail – and we all know full well that without the small stuff the cats wouldn’t be there either. Be that as it may, we raced across to an area known as “the 18th hole” thanks to its new, bright-green short grass, clearly delicious as the herds of impala, zebra, wildebeest attested to while warthog scampered between the herds like naughty children at an afternoon tea party. Then we stopped briefly at a pride of sleeping lion (watching lion sleeping is like watching paint dry except that the one lioness was one of Mombo’s famous maned lionesses – a genetic glitch that seems to pop up a very male-looking lioness every now and then). We then bounced off to see a tree which had had a leopard in before, but before we could go further, the radio crackled: “We found her!”

“Her” was Legadema, one of Mombo’s famous leopard characters, seen by many guests over the years, and now the star of a National Geographic movie called “Eye of the Leopard” (you should see it, it’s pretty cool). She had last been seen, heavily pregnant, before disappearing from view a few days previously. The guides had surmised that she was ready to give birth and wondered if they’d find her and her cubs. It seems someone had spotted the legendary cat and her cubs in a tree not far from Mombo back the other way, so back we bounced, on the way stopping to see a herd of 300 buffalo or so (you tend to get blasé about these things here) and then the curious sight of a lone young elephant. I’m talking really young here; the guides had been seeing him by himself for a week now. Considering that male elephants usually stay with their natal herds until their teens and this one couldn’t have been more than two or three years old, it is very unusual to see such a thing – and in fact we found it rather traumatic – nature out of balance, an orphan drinking alone at a small pool. We saw him a couple of times and he seemed able to take care of himself but his temporal glands were flowing – a sign of stress in ellies – so clearly he’s going to have a lot to talk to a therapist about – if he survives to tell the tale. (We never did find out what happened to him, ag shaaayme.)

Anyway, eventually we made it to the tree where Legadima was ensconced. Of course, the location had to be approached very carefully so as not to disturb mom and cubs – and so as not to give it away to any predators prowling around who would as soon take these furballs out as look at them. Each vehicle was given a few minutes that afternoon to drive into the sighting and we were the last. There was only one spot for the vehicle to park from which we could peer, binos glued to our eyes, into the hollow of the tree to get a glimpse: every now and then we would see them as they moved in and out of our range of vision between the large branches. There were two cubs, their rosettes showing vaguely through that beige downy fur of the very young kitten. They clambered all over Legadema, occasionally suckling from her, and the larger one clearly has a yen for exploring as he (we’re betting he’s a male) wobbled his way time and again to the edge of the ‘nest’ only to be pulled back by his worried mother.

It was quite a privilege to see such young cubs, but I was uncomfortable – as were the guides it turns out – as they ‘closed’ the sighting after we’d been there – meaning no one could go there again to see them until they were older.

Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later we learned that we were in fact the last to see these little ones. At some point Legadima lost both of them – how we’ll never know, as she was subsequently seen hunting close to camp, but not lactating and not returning to any spot where she might have been hiding the cubs. And that’s yet another reason not to get too bunny hugger with wild animals, subject as they are to the arbitrary vagaries of Fate – or ecology.

Anyway. A delicious supper that night followed, where Ulrike and I had the privilege of sitting with ‘Poster’ Mpho Malongwa. If ever there’s a movie star of conservation, it’s Poster. He’s six foot something and one of those clichéd gentle giants, an unassuming man who is also proud of what he does – and so now I need to tell you about him.

Basically Poster is the “rhino man” of Botswana – again, there’s a Nat Geo movie on him called 'Return of the Rhino' and again it’s highly recommended viewing. He started off in the 80s working with the four rhino left alive in Botswana, heavily protected in Kapama Game Reserve. Then when Wilderness got involved with moving these and another seven rhino from South Africa into the Okavango, they saw that Poster was a veritable “rhino whisperer” and so they brought him on board. He is now responsible for all the xxx rhino we have in Botswana (I can’t tell you the numbers cos then I’d have to kill you but it’s more than the original 11 and less than say... 60.) and every day he goes out to check on them. Not coincidently then, all the rhino here are known as “Poster’s rhino.” Despite their best efforts at charging him sometimes, he says, they’re his friends. With friends like that...

Unfortunately, that day his vehicle had broken down so completely he couldn’t get back without someone going out to find him so our plan to go out with him the following day went out the window and instead we went on a cat-finding game drive (we saw a few other things – a half-blind suicidal giraffe who nearly stepped on a crouching lioness and a lone wild dog, the only one in the area which again is very unusual as they usually hang out in packs, but she seems to be coping by adopting some obliging jackals as her family), had a lovely picnic lunch out on the floodplain, an elephant-less back of house tour and high tea where I got kosher samoosas just for me! (Funny I remembered that meal…) We then decided to relax by the pool and watch the waterbirds and a herd of elephants that waded between the waterlilies in the floodplain that stretched out all around us, the light of the setting sun bathing everything in romantic pearly-pink hues.

Good news that night from Poster – we could go out with him, Kago Tlhalerwa, our fabulous dreadlocked camp manager, and technical chap Roy Ridge, for the morning and see what we could see.

So the next morning we went a-hunting rhino. And how do you hunt rhino you ask? Well, firstly there’s none of this old-fashioned tracking – well a bit, but not when you need to keep track of dot dot erm numbers of animals spread out over kilometres of thick, unfenced bush. And when these animals are more precious than diamonds – unfortunately to would-be poachers too – you have to up the ante. So today you go rhino hunting with an antenna that catches a signal that is being emitted from a transmitter that has been placed in the rhino’s horn when the animal was moved here. It’s a convenient place to put it as the rhino horn is made of hair so it doesn’t hurt them to drill into it, place the transmitter in and cover it over. And if God forbid the poachers do get the rhino, they can be tracked to their doorstep – as apparently happened once: the man’s jaw dropped when Poster and the anti-poaching unit guys arrived at his door and politely asked if they could dig in his backyard, left corner….

So high-tech tracking it is. Piece of cake I thought – you just put up that antenna and find the big animal. Not so. First we drove about 10km south of Mombo, away from the madding crowds of lion, impala, warthog, giraffe etc etc, into the area where the rhino hang out. Every now and then Poster unfolded his long body, stood up and put up his antenna (being extra tall is a definite prerequisite for this job as the higher you get the antenna the easer it is to pick up the signal, see) and pointed it in different directions. Nothing but static to be heard.

Finally, we heard a faint click. “There it is – it’s Serondela,” said Poster, and started directing Kago who was driving: left, right, straight, while the click became a loud beep. Okay I thought, bull’s eye – he will pop up in front of us. I was wrong. Just because there’s a beep doesn’t mean there’s a rhino on tap. You still have to work for it. (Hmm, there’s an existential metaphor there, no?) Turning off the ‘beaten path’ (aka the bumpy sand road) we bounced our way merrily over thornbushes and around aardvark holes following a sound and on a prayer. The bush got thicker, more trees had to be negotiated and Kago had to do some brilliant manoeuvres to keep the vehicle alive and well. It crossed my mind that technology helps, but you really have to WANT the rhino.

Suddenly, a great grey domed bum appeared just behind a bush. The rhino – 25-year-old Serondela – was on the move and clearly on a mission. Nose to ground he was moving surprisingly fast for a prehistoric tank, negotiating bushes with balletic ease while we plodded ungainly along after him in the vehicle. Poster directed Kago around to a road he knew of where we could intercept him. We screeched to a halt as we heard him crashing through the bush on our left. Here he came, thundering towards us. It was truly a breathtaking sight this, three or four tons, not to mention one sharp implement, on four relatively small legs advancing on us. I fully expected the ground to shake but those wide footpads seemed to muffle the thuds, so that I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in a silent movie (in grey and green) watching as the round body loomed larger and larger filling the screen.

Poster told Kago to stop (counterintuitive I know, I know) which he did. The rhino man then spoke in a loud voice, telling us (loudly) that like all rhino Serondela doesn’t have good eyesight and so needed to hear us so he could avoid crashing into us – unless he wanted to of course. (Free choice in the animal world...) What with all that thumping and looming, it looked quite likely to be the latter, but a few feet away he turned aside and moved around us, head down and sniffing earnestly at the ground. You could almost believe he was muttering to himself, “Now where did I put that...?”

It was just a few startling seconds of hugeness and greyness and adrenalin – and the absolute sheer joy of seeing an animal that so many people have worked so hard to save from almost certain ugly death – that’s all it was before he had crashed through into the dense bush on the other side of the road and disappeared.

Sighs of satisfaction all round.

We could have continued to follow him but Poster was worried about the way he was acting and decided to give him his space until the afternoon when he would come back to see if all was well. We on the other hand had to return to camp and leave the chaps to follow up on the story (turns out to be an exciting one as Poster realised Serondela was on the track of a female in oestrus and ended up seeing him mating, quite a sight – you can read about it on our website if you want).

So after a brief stop for coffee with these amazing men and their flying rhino sorry sorry and then an excellent brunch, Ulrike and I had to say goodbye once more to our elephants (the ones hanging around outside our tents had become almost like family, talk about the elephant in the room), and reluctantly fly back to Joburg. A jolly nice way to end the Jewish year, I'd say.

Botswana bits and bobs I - Jao Camp

2009-12-29T13:16:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana belatedly describes her September little jaunt to Botswana. Er, yes, that’s September. Sorry about that.

Anyway, it was one of those “do you chaps (that would be colleague fabulous graphic designer Ulrike and me) feel like going to Botswana in the next month?” “Okay but there’s Rosh Hashanah and then there’s Yom Kippur and then there’s...” “Okay, how’s this week then?” “Jolly good.”

So off we went – for a brief two days to Jao, two days to Mombo and then one overnight in Maun because we couldn’t get on a flight back to Joeys that day and the next day was Erev RH which allowed for a certain frisson of uncertainty: would Ilana make it back for the High Holies or would she be davening in Maun? I took a machzor just in case....

Anyway I made it back in time for shul, and here are a few bits and bobs of the trip finally. I had trouble putting it down on paper, perhaps because I had done that before, but it really was loverly to be back in the Delta.

So I won’t describe Jao Camp except to say that the rooms are enormous and, well, gorgeous. The main area is on two floors so you eat brunch and take tea upstairs looking out over a floodplain that was still inundated with the famous Okavango Flood. Whenever I looked up from fressing/slurping coffee, there was an elephant or three wading across the floodplain, their legs making a loud shushing noise against the reeds. And there's a troop of banded mongoose who sometimes hang out around the path to the loo so you have to wait for them to finish their sunbathing before going. An occupational hazard at Jao.

Just a note on the Flood with a capital F. I tell you this so that you too can say “Mah rabu maasecha Hashem” - how great are your works, God. Basically in African summer, rains come down in the highlands of Angola. No, I’ve never been there but I know this is true. How? Because the waters then flow down streams and rivulets and tributaries until these become the Kavango River and finally, a thousand kilometres from where they began, they reach the flatlands of northern Botswana, where they spread out, like the fingers on a hand, filling up little dents in the land to become the Okavango, largest inland delta in the world. The thing is, it takes months for the water to get there – so that when the rainy season is over, in about April, the waters start to flood in. Ironically, the dry season in the Delta is waterlogged.

And Jao is one of the most water-filled areas of the Delta. Water, water everywhere, the calming blue glinting liquid mirrored in perfect azure sky, waving of reeds and grasses, the lap-lap sound against everything – all this made Jao my new favourite place.

Truth is, the Jao staff became my favourites too when, as I stepped off the vehicle on our first day, a big man with a wide white smile introduced himself as, “I'm Jost. And you must be Ilana with all the kosher issues.” Yes, I'm sorry, I apologised, but don’t worry I said, hauling out my battered blue cooler box, it’s all in here. Jost took the cooler bag between finger and thumb with all the distaste of a butler being handed a dirty nappy. “Yes, I’ll take it to the kitchen but I don’t think you’ll be needing this.” He then led me away from the large kitchen (a good walk away from the camp in the staff area where you can bump into elephants but more of that later) to the special ‘tea’ kitchen which they have right next to the dining area. I gasped. A special table had been set up covered in a table cloth. On it was a gleaming set of cutlery, sharp knives, cutting board, pots, pans, brand new white plates, a washing up bowl... “all yours and new,” he said. “Oh and we haven’t used this oven here so we’ll make your stuff in it and only start using it afterwards for the guests...”

Damn they’re good!

So for once, just for once, Ilana did NOT eat tuna and provita but instead had all sorts of delicious stuff – grilled bream and veggies, fresh bread, couscous, lentils... and for once, she didn’t eat on a purple plate. While keeping kosher has never stopped me going anywhere as you know, it was wonderful just once to be part of the whole experience that our camps offer – and not have to explain my purple plate. (By the way, the same thing happened at Mombo – so my little cooler bag came back to Joburg unopened and a bit niffy.)

So, water. The area is what we call ‘inundated’ with the stuff. Which meant that when we needed to get anywhere – like visit the other camps in the area, we generally went by boat. Or if we were in a vehicle, said vehicle did a lot of underwater action, the whole front bonnet submerged. And often, all around us were the vast herds of lechwe feeding and shlushing through the water, which glinted so brightly in the afternoon sun, all we could see were their black outlines and diamond droplets flying through the air as they moved.

Boating instead of driving is definitely the way to go. Instead of sand roads through bush, thin ribbons of channels snake through a veritable jungle of reeds, so that the boat slides through dim green corridors made by ten-foot green stalks on either side that often lean towards each other to become a roof. Sitting at the front of the boat I look at the still-unbroken surface that mirrors the green reeds and blue sky so perfectly I feel like I’m flying through infinite space on a thin convex line that divides air and water, reality and illusion. Such stillness creates mirror images – trees, reeds and a fish eagle seemingly far below are in fact a non-real world, a world turned upside down.

The seeming tranquillity has its own challenges: reed and waterlily roots snagging the propeller requiring halts to unsnag it, hippos having temper tantrums (these two incidents hopefully not within the same space and time)... But it’s a game drive with squacco herons, jacanas and great white egrets standing in for impala and lechwe, exploding out of the plants and taking off as we chug past them. That living explosion of colour, the tiny malachite kingfisher takes the place of those insane emerald-spotted doves that fly manically in front of the vehicle for miles (I always find myself saying "get off the road and you can relax, idiot!" to them); here the malachites do the same with the boat, zooming ahead of it, flitting and flicking this way and that so fast, you can almost hear them laugh out loud at the sheer joy of flying.

You can relax, that’s the rave for today.

“Mind the elephant”
So now, about that elephant. I wrote this up as a blog but in case you missed it, here it is again.

So I was touring the back-of-house at Jao with Chris. That’s Jao manager Chris, not boss Chris or Kiwi Chris. (“Back of house” as you know is what it says it is – it’s the kitchen, the laundry, the generator, the staff village etc – and guests can visit and see exactly how they end up eating cuisine in the middle of nowhere.) Anyway, Chris is talking away explaining stuff as we walk along a wide sand road past the guides’ tents, when he suddenly veers off the road, saying, “let’s get off the road now shall we?” “Oh, okay,” I say (you should always listen to your guide no matter how odd it sounds) and follow him obediently a little way off the road onto the slope of a termite mound. “Why?” I ask. “Cos of the elephant,” he says.

Oh. Okay then.

I turned and looked and just across the road was an extremely tall pachyderm. I say ‘tall’ as I was about ten metres away but still had to look up at his head. He was chilled, munching away on a bush before wandering off to feed off the roofs of the guides’ tents (clearly one of the lesser spotted gardener elephants, this) – but discretion is the better part of valour when you’re a puny human.

We watched him for a while and I revelled in the freedom of watching one of the best creatures on Earth with only a modicum of respect between us – okay, a lot. And it just goes to show – even a big grey animal is hard to spot sometimes.

Jost a minute
I need to tell you about Jost Kabozu. In addition to being my personal kosher saviour, the perfect host and the smiling guide who boated us through the waterways wherever we wanted to go, I learned a little more about him. It’s a quintessential African story.

Jost was telling me how his kids had been to Jao and had enjoyed it very much. “How many do you have?” I asked. 14, he tells me. 14! “No, well, actually only eight are mine and my wife’s. My older brother died and I didn’t want his four children to be orphans, so we adopted them. Then my other brother died so we adopted his two as well.” What about the mothers? Well, he explained, the mothers would go on to marry other men and then possibly die so that the children are left with a step-family that often doesn’t want them – it was better this way, he says. And the mothers agreed. He then went on to say proudly that thanks to Wilderness (and to Patrick Swayze who was a guest once at Jao and connected with him, they kept in touch until he died) he has managed to send all ‘his’ children to school and even university and now has a son who’s a doctor and a daughter who’s a chemist!

Other Jao bits
So we did the sundowner thing, hanging out on a boat floating on the pink-satin water while the sun turned into a yellow ball and disappeared. (We were with a couple who insisted on us floating close to a pod of hippo to try ‘make them yawn.’ Not the most relaxing of activities you may agree.) And we did the mokoro thing, sliding through reed-frog-clasped reeds and lilac waterlilies one clear morning, with yet another biblically named poler – Isaac this time. Isaac ended it off by making us a waterlily necklace which looked quite avant garde until it dried up and sent out a bit of a whiff... still, a nice idea. We saw fish eagles in every second tree – I kid you not – and we watched Wattled Cranes (a very endangered species) dancing in the grass, a delicate and balletic courtship, long spindly legs bending in and out and wattles wobbling in time to music only they could hear.

We saw African skimmers, which always make any Wilderness person get all misty-eyed as our logo comes to life (all together now: “aaawww”). With their heavy bright red beaks, the lower mandible larger than the upper, they always look like they’re in the ‘special’ class when it comes to survival of the fittest – and sad to say, it’s true. They are a bit too picky about nesting as we found out – they need dried sandbanks but the flood had been so high this year that the banks were still covered with water when they needed to nest, so two pairs tried to use the side of the road for sandbanks while we were there. Guides carefully drove around the ‘nests’ – I use the word loosely as they were mere impressions in the sand with two eggs in each – but their care was to no avail; something came and killed the parents as they sat patiently on their unborn progeny.

So our stay at Jao was much, much too short. Like about six weeks too short. But what can you do, we had to leave. Our departure was made a little less sad however by the fact that we helicoptered out to Mombo.

You know you have arrived when you use the word ‘helicopter’ as a verb instead of a noun. It’s all rather upper class nose in the air to say “Well, dahling, we helicoptered from Jao to Mombo, dontcha know?” Lordie lordie what a way to go. The ground drops down with the suddenness of a lift and spreads rapidly out to become blue-green squiggles of water and island. Yet you’re still low and slow enough to see the details – reeds waving in the wind or the sitatunga (YES!) grazing, hidden and unaware, in the middle of them.

I love my job.

More on Mombo next time. PS, you can see some more pics on my facebook album here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=313519&id=782775306

Pafuri Walking Trail – Another walk in the Park

2009-09-10T07:27:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana takes another walk in the park – i.e. the Kruger Park. Only this time it’s a proper one, in a real trails camp with honest-to-goodness chemical loos and actual bucket showers and for three nights and four days. And the combination of walking in one of the most beautiful places on Earth with a fabulous bunch of progressively increasingly insane people (myself not excepted) made it seem like a slice of paradise with a spot of mad humour thrown in.

How did this come about, you ask? I’m glad you ask, cos all kudos must go to Rabbi Gabi Bookatz or Rav Gav as he is known. He asked me months ago to book a trail for August and said he’d find another 6 people to come with. And so he did, the honoured members being – in no particular order – Barbara and Barry Schoub, Hugh Raichlin, Terence Ossin, Doryn Myers and Dan Chaitowitz.

Now, an introduction to the Trail. So you’ve all heard me rhapsodise wildly and, well, rhapsodically about Pafuri, in the extreme north of Kruger and one of the most beautiful places on earth in my humble opinion. No, make that the most beautiful. I have never found one more stunning and thank God I’ve been around a little. In addition to Pafuri Camp, Wilderness introduced a three-day Trail as well, where you stay at a real Trails Camp and you walk out every day, following the animal paths seemingly aimlessly through the bush. But being Pafuri, it’s not just bush. It’s everything from riverine forest (great ana trees towering over soft river sand) to acacia bush and mopane woodland, to rocky hills and gorgeous gorges (sorry sorry) to that magnificent and surreal yellow fever tree forest. And all the while, wherever you are, there is either the great Limpopo or the always flowing Luvuvhu somewhere close by, a brief shining glimpse of blue or silver to light your way between the various shades of green.

The before party:
So, in between preparing for Marice’s wedding (a joyously great affair may I say) and sheva brachot (another great meal if we say so ourselves) my mission should I choose to accept it was to get the whole kosher bit up and running and with everyone’s help this was accomplished, complete with lunches, snacks, and soothing advice to all participants.

Six of us decided to stay at Pafuri on the Sunday night. The Trail began on Monday afternoon at 2:00, so why not take the opportunity of staying at my beloved Pafuri Camp for one night? While the rest went on a game drive that evening I did fun stuff like kasher cutlery and ponder what on earth we’d used that particular dish for last time.

Everyone fell in love with the place, as I prophesied – walking those long boardwalks all the way to no. 18 (20 is the furthest and I always ask for the furthest) while looking at the truly unbelievable numbers of nyala that hang out grazing between each tent. As usual there was the optional extra elephant on a sandbank just in front of the tent. Between that and sitting on the main deck before dinner sipping a whiskey and listening to the guests tell of their latest sighting while the campfire crackles nearby and something hidden splashes in the Luvuvhu just below...sigh. It was good to be home.

Next morning we went off on our morning drive and I convinced Godfrey that he wanted to show us a Pel’s fishing-owl. Just to refresh your memories, a Pel’s is one of THOSE sightings of the bird world. Kind of like seeing a leopard, no make that a cheetah or a wild dog – but in feathers, see? Grinning that wide smile of his, he took us to the beginning of the fever tree forest where we got off the vehicle (a precursor to our next few days) and walked quietly through thick bush (well around thick bushes actually) to where a group of large jackalberry and nyala trees were standing. There at the top of one of them a large light brown shape took off quickly, enormous wingspan flapping just a few times before she disappeared into another canopy yonder. But Godfrey knew a thing or two and continued looking upwards (a physiotherapist’s dream this, all of us craning our necks to peer upwards into the teasing, waving leaves of the tree), and then bounded to the next tree and the next until he found it – a large ungainly chick who flapped heavily about on the very top of the canopy. What a sight – not just a Pel’s but one with a chick! Can’t get much better than that.

The rest of the drive was lovely but I didn’t care if we saw nothing as my brain had turned to mush over those few short glimpses.

Anyway, I had to share that with you – now, onward ho. We returned for brunch and beer before gathering around in the ‘second lounge’ and listened to our guide Walter explain where we were camping (there are a number of camp sites used by the Trail and we were staying at Premier Site, near the Luvuvhu River before it flows into a system of gorges – where Lanner Gorge is eventually) and how it would all work. Then we jumped into the vehicle all intrepid and explorer-like – and we were off!

Day 1:
The campsite is an amazing blend of luxury and roughing it. How many places do you know that have chemical loos yet linen tablecloths and napkins? Or a bucket shower but soap and towels all on hand? Six dome tents in a slight semicircle lie under the shade of enormous ana trees. In front of each tent is a canvas basin filled with water every day for you to wash in, a safari chair draped in a red blanket. Three tables – the preparation table, dining table and washing up table – create the other half of the circle; in the middle of course is the campfire. It’s river sand underfoot and almost always, at any given time, there are impala or nyala in the distance moving amongst the tree trunks. Two showers are set up behind the camp complete with bucket shower heads which are a novelty as well as teaching you just how much water you actually use. The loos also are a study in simplicity: simple canvas wrapped in a square around a chemical loo or a long drop (we were in luck, we had chemis) and a simple canvas basin on a stand. At night, if you dare to switch off your headlight you can look up at the stars – so clear and bright! – from this position.... (Mind you the wind picked up on the last day and we watched as one of the showers keeled over – good thing no one was in it at the time.)

Once we had all settled in we took a short walk down to the river where we saw innumerable tracks in the damp river sand and added to them. The Luvuvhu River has carved through the rock to form cliffs and gorges; near our camp the river’s geological path has created steep cliff faces on either side, framing well against the grey clouds. (It was a cloudy day, which has its own evocative atmosphere.) Then we took a scramble up a hill to look out over the wide floodplain that strewn with debris still from the 2000 floods, the ‘gateway’ baobabs (two enormous ones with a road made between them) and many ana trees.

We returned to camp and everyone got to work. (I don’t think our guides had ever seen this before – guests usually take it easy, but this was the kosher bunch – some made sarmies for tomorrow, tinfoil rustling and whirring madly away, others helped prepare supper and afterwards a bunch washed up.) Supper was hugely convivial with conversation that ranged from whacky and even toilet humour (probably nervousness at the prospect of stepping out into the dark African night to go to the loo in the middle of the night) to the nature of the universe. Whiskey and beer probably helped this all along.

That night as I lay in my tent, snug in my sleeping bag, I heard the tummy rumble of an elephant just the other side of the canvas. Then another tummy brummbled in reply. A crack of a twig and some branches being rustled and then... silence. This was one of my best moments – to lie in one’s tent, just a canvas hair’s breath away from these large grey animals and to know that they would go about their business and I could continue mine, both creatures in harmony under the stars, was a ‘mechaye’ – I felt safe and alive – tremendously alive. (Terence thought it was a lion growling so he didn’t feel quite as safe but there you go then.) As I looked out of my netting/window I hoped to see a dark shape move past, outlined against the dim grey light shed by the myriad stars of the Milky Way but there was nothing to be seen, and I soon contentedly fell asleep to the snoring in the next tent.

Day 2:
Day two dawned cloudy again but this was perfect for our walk, not too hot. It also started with the sound of high pitched giggling and a raucous comedy turn by Hugh and Doryn. Definitely beats an alarm clock. Eventually everyone stopped howling with laughter and the camp became quiet. The nyala watched as, some wearing large white shawls and black boxes, we faced north, minds turned to the Creator and Israel. The noise level went up again as breakfast broke out soon after – and yes, even that excellent Wilderness freshly plunged coffee is served... mmm.

The walk today went to the base of the Hutwini Mountains – not huge mountains by any means but large enough to form a wall of rock that sets the floodplain against its scenic colours. As we walked from camp we took a brief detour to find a giant eagle owl (now a Verreaux’s owl or something equally unspellable) which unsportingly stayed hidden in the tree canopy before flapping ponderously away.

The thing about walking in the bush is that in general most game is seen further off and moving away from you. That’s because we crash our way through the bush, not knowing how to move quietly like our intrepid guide Walter “Google” Jubber (so called because he knew everything and more than anything we asked) and his rifle backup, silent St Claire Finnaughty. However, every now and then we were lucky enough (and the wind was in our favour) to see a few antelope graze unaware of our presence.

We approached the multi-hued walls of the Hutwini – well, rocky outcrops somewhere between large mountains and small hills I guess – and walked along its base a little. The bush became a little thicker and the alert air of Walter and St Claire became even more er... alert. We were about to step onto the elephant highway. A narrow corridor has burrowed down through the rocky walls over the millennia, huge boulders on each side, but wide enough for let’s say four elephants to walk abreast. If they did that sort of thing, of course. And walk it they do (although more like single file) ... anyway the point is that it is an ancient pathway, worn smooth by generations of pachyderms moving between Zimbabwe and South Africa. It is a beautiful corridor to walk through; the pathway is covered by a veritable carpet of dung underfoot – not fresh, sillies, but dried grassy stuff that is soft and springy. Large rocks wrapped in the obsessive embrace of rock fig roots bulge out on either side while up ahead three klipspringers posed for a portrait on a large boulder. It was quiet and still here but perhaps the fact that we could come across elephants going the other way at any point added a frisson of awareness to the stillness. The cloudiness of the day helped add to the silence and general frissonness. But it seems the ellies were not using the highway today, so after a while we rested in the shade and ate some snacks before scrambling up to the top of the mountain where years ago Makuleke goatherds would sit up amongst the boulders and play marabaraba – the bowls of the game still carved into the rocks.

Up here in the silence with just a lizard buzzard calling, the place is heavy with a sense of history for me: on the wind are echoes of the shrieks and laughter of the young boys, the baaing of the goats, the shuffling and rumbling of elephants; the goatherds jumping up from their game to watch as the herd passes quickly and uneasily through the narrow gap to get to the steady waters of the Luvuvhu – promise of liquid pulling them southwards through the passage. And centuries before the Makuleke traders would walk this path in their turn, bringing Chinese porcelain and Arab beads to the civilisation that lived here and built the ancient walled royal city of Thulamela just a little to the south.

Scrambling down the mountain the scene changed again, this time to mopane woodland. Suddenly Walter stopped and crouched, motioning us to do the same (my knees creaking a bit thanks to yesterday’s scramble). About 100 metres ahead and peering through the mopane leaves was a herd of buffalo. Then the wind changed and they smelt us. All we could see through the thick bush was a cloud of dust and heard the thunder of hundreds of hooves. Then they were gone.

Over rock and along purple pebble-strewn paths we scrambled to look out back over the Luvuvhu and the Pafuri ranger’s house and ended this particular part with an undignified slide on the bum back down to the base of the Hutwini again. We stopped for lunch just underneath a couple of trees that had a troop of baboons in them. (Yes slightly dangerous as you never know what they might decide to ... drop but they seemed quite as disinterested in us as we in them – lunch seemed to be the focus for both primate species.) Cheese sarmies never tasted so good and we lay back on the dusty ground and snoozed and joked.

What a group – we really all gelled. It’s always interesting when you have a bunch of people who do not necessarily know one another and are forced into intimate company – it can be uncomfortable or it can be incredibly good fun with unexpected joy. We were lucky enough to have the second, making this a golden bubble of memories.

After a 20-minute snooze we continued back to camp. We were tired now and, like horses sensing the stable, we increased our pace regardless of very sore feet, through the ana trees and disregarding the impala, nyala and baboons who moved off warily as we approached. “Home” looked so inviting.

Here’s the thing with being uncivilised. You need to learn patience and appreciation. You get back hot and sweaty from your 10km walk and you want a shower. No problem, but Walter and St Clair must fill the large drum with water, and get a fire going to warm it up – a good half hour’s work. We were quite happy to have cold showers... but the buckets still must be filled up. Water is not an endless supply pouring magically out of a tap. It is brought in from elsewhere in drums and must be schlepped from one place to another to be used. Therefore it is used with care and thought – and would that we would all do this back at home!

Now, how to use a bucket shower (if you’re not going to use the Luvuvhu River that is – which most of the blokes did – which apparently was a lot of fun. But there was no girls’ hour unfortunately so I had to make do with a bucket): first you know you have a limited amount of water so this won’t be long, luxurious or relaxing. The bucket is hoisted up above you on a rope and has a showerhead underneath. Just turn the tap of the showerhead – and gravity does the rest! Excellent shower – if somewhat short and sandy – but look up as you wash your hair, and you can see the vultures flying overhead...

The schedule called for a walk that afternoon, but we were tired, so Walter said he’d try get us to Crooks’ Corner for sundowners. Was quite a way but we gulped down some coffee and hauled ourselves with sighs of relief onto the vehicle.

As we drove out of camp and onto the ‘main road’ though, Rav Gav saw some impala looking alertly in the other direction and lo and behold, there were two lionesses and two cubs – the cubs were lying up on a mound and mom and auntie were walking away towards the impala.

Hmm, says Walt, we may have walked straight by them today.

Hmm indeed. I had a vivid image of us walking along in our arrogant bipedal way, all laughing at something – be it Doryn taking close up pics of bark, or Dan in a happy hiking dream or Hugh looking for a tree to go behind... and they probably watched us with unblinking golden eyes in silence. (And probably thinking: there goes the neighbourhood...)

And I thought – you see, animals aren’t always waiting to jump out and attack us at any given moment despite what some of those Animal Planet movies would have you believe. So there.

Be that as it may, we were able to see the most amazing interaction – we went offroad (which we are only allowed to do up to 300m) to see if we could find the mother, and there she was calling to her cubs. They jumped up and ran to her, fawning against her and rubbing affectionately along her long lean range. The three trotted off at high speed ignoring the snorting, alarmed antelope and then to our amazement began to climb up the steep slopes of Hutwini. Apparently they were going to find a place to hide while mom went shopping.

Bemused by that sighting, we were now too late to go to Crooks so we just wandered down the road oohing and aaing at nyala and found a small herd of buffalo drinking at the Luvuvhu and decided to join them in a beer. We were in turn joined by the Bob Marley Birds – the crested guineafowl, which only occur here in all of Kruger so we were thrilled to have seen them a few times on this trip.

Back home we found our little trails camp lit merrily by lanterns casting a magic glow over the scene. Terence braaied the meat and others made sarmies for tomorrow and others washed up. Exhausted we dropped off quickly and heard nothing the whole night. Pity.

Day 3:
Magical day. We drove to a small pan called Reedbuck Pan to walk from there through the fever tree forest to Crooks' Corner. There were many high points of this trip, but I believe this was one of them. Crossing the now dry pan which is all lumpy with dried mud, and covered with a thin green layer of plant life, we watched two eland watching us before they heaved (hove?) their great bulk away and disappeared. We entered the forest, and walked between the green-yellow-barked trees. The bird calls echoed through the trees, which went all Salvador Dali on us, their green-yellow trunks shining in the bright sunlight and going very well with the blue of the sky – decor put in place especially for us. Our eyes shining we drank it all in, wending our way between the trunks in what felt like an ancient dance between humans who left the safety of the trees to walk upright on the grassy ground, changing their viewpoint from looking down to the ground to peering up to the skies.... Odd rant but applicable for the place.

We crossed a road and carried on towards the river. Where the adventures began to happen. Walter motioned us down and we crept towards the bank which was quite high, dipping down quite a steep slope to the actual water. There across the river an elephant stood feeding and further along another silhouetted perfectly in the still water as it reached its trunk down the steep bank to sip. In absolute silence we watched this vignette, the great beasts unaware of our presence. Again, I was reminded of the fact that – like the Uncertainty Principle – our impact is so great that even when humans just observe they change that which they observe. When in a vehicle in the park, just that noisy fact means the animals know we’re there. On foot it’s worse as they’re not used to legged humans and one generally sees just the up and down bums flying off into the safety of the bush, the odd spectacular leap of an impala, the wide-eyed almost panic look as they all face you to find out what sort of a threat you present. Here, we were peering into the elephant’s world without reference to ourselves – the observed did not change because of us. Walking unseen is the lightest of footprints, the lightest of touches on the world that we constantly destroy, manage and exploit, where just our eyes can rest on the event without changing it.

But you have to be very quiet. Something our group wasn’t so good at all the time but when St Clair put his stern face on we all listened. We sat and rested a bit further on looking out over Croc Pool – so called cos of the truly awesome number of crocs all draped on sand banks – about 30 or so.

We turned to walk back into the forest and I’m sure some smart remark or chortle of laughter was being delivered at the time, but I don’t remember because at that moment we almost bumped into an elephant. There in the gloom of the trees (at this point nyala and jackalberry trees with deep, heavy shade) a large black elephant-shape moved with a shake of its ears as we scuttled backwards behind the relative safety of an enormous jackal berry (where we stood in single file; an absurd thought popped into my head: it felt like I should be school uniform). Walter reassured the bull with his voice that it was okay, and then we saw a few more elephant-shapes walking to our right. We stood still hardly breathing as the elephants moved past us, barely 20 metres away then we beat a hasty retreat back to the river bank. Walter remained to see what they’d do and when they moved to the river we walked in a bit of an arc around them. Whew! Guess that wasn’t as untouched as the last interaction then....

Adrenalin still pumping, we walked intrepidly on through the “yellow fever tree graveyard” (avoiding another pachyderm on the way – another one of those moments where one moment you’re strolling along about to address the person behind you with some pertinent remark or otherwise, when suddenly Walter’s hand goes up, there’s a hiss down the line and a glare from St Clair to say “shuddup you fools” and you all crouch down in obedience to Walter’s hand movements. There you crouch (knees and quads creaking ominously from the unaccustomed amount of scrambling) waiting while Walt goes and talks to the hefalump tells him he’s a ‘good boy’ and then when he (the elephant not Walt) moves grudgingly off, you all can get up with a sigh of relief.

Where was I? Oh yes, so we walked on through the yellow fever tree graveyard, a section of the forest where the trees are sadly bent out of shape. Pushed over by said elephants to strip the bark of nutrients, their carcasses lie forlorn strewn over the ground and only a few lucky survivors give meagre shade in the hot afternoon.

A brief stop for snacks elicited another exciting encounter: as Dan went to go behind a tree, he found a python who had had a similar idea - or at least wanted to occupy the same space. We had a wonderful view of the snake before he decided that he'd had enough of the paparazzi and moved sinously and muscularly into the undergrowth. We all checked a little more carefully when using the 'facilities' after that.

Finally we reached the great Limpopo. I thought: How many people can nonchalantly say “so I was taking a midday stroll along the Limpopo you know...” Not many. And I was struck by the awesome privilege that I have been granted here. To be able to do things not everyone gets to do – and perhaps more importantly – to be a person who has always wanted to do it. To stroll along a dusty road with the Limpopo peeking shiningly through the trees on my left (there’s not much in as it’s the dry season, but still, there’s a glint of blue as a few brave rivulets make it to Crooks’ Corner) and high grass on my right (in which we heard a BIG rustle at one point and we all had to do the ‘stay stock still and wait for Walt to check it out’ thing again – we never did find out what it was cos whateveritwas didn’t charge us) was awe-inspiring in its everydayness.

At length we got to Crooks' – meeting point of three countries and of the Limpopo and the Luvuvhu, which sadly had no hippo in the Luvuvhu but lots of water. It was getting later and hotter and time to head back, so after a brief round of everyone snapping pics of each other at this historic spot, off we went back down the road admiring the Limpopo on our right, then through the graveyard – where we stopped to check out some amazing raptor action happening high in the sky above our heads – then back to Reedbuck Pan where once again we collapsed on the ground, ignoring the thorns and stones, as we dug into our cheese sarmies and some discussed the meaning of life and some snoozed.

Back home and time for a shower kindly put together by Walter. The guys went off to the Luvuvhu to bathe in it and then it was back out again, this time for the rocky ride to Lanner Gorge which is as gorgeous as always sorry sorry again. Man, were we tired that night. So after a quick supper and Walt describing various stars and constellations to us – well, they’re so bright and what with there being no moon and all, it seemed silly not to do so – and one more intrepid trip to the bathroom which seems very far away when you have to walk down a dark dusty path with just a headlight on for company we collapsed into bed. I have no idea if the lions roared or anything else that night as I was much too tired to hear anything.

Day 4:
Final morning dawned clear and bright with everyone being all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed goodness knows why cos we were leaving today. Then the wind came up and seemed to want to sweep us on our way – nearly pushing over tents in the process. We said goodbye to our little home to walk the two hours back to Pafuri Main Camp.

On the way out, it seemed that all the impala, nyala and some baboons in the area had come to see us off, as they gathered a few hundred metres from us and then proceeded to move slowly away, giving us a good view of them for a little while. The dust swirled around them (and us) making for a surreal sight almost as if on our way back to our reality, this reality was already becoming less real, the impala less clear and solid.

Fanciful perhaps but spending three days amongst the Creator’s best selection of beauty can do that to you, I thought.

Zimbabwe - Cry the Beloved Country

2008-12-12T11:25:00.005+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana goes to Zimbabwe to join the first Children in the Wilderness camps run there. Warning – mainly heavy bits. “Cry the beloved country” was a refrain that went through my head a lot here as I watched so many Zimbabweans who love their country try to help. Hence the title.

I returned a month ago determined to write this up on the first day back! (And how’s that working for you, Ilana?) Problem has been that I tried, I really did, but it always seemed to devolve into a very intense and let’s face it, fairly depressing read. Not my usual, but then, Zim hasn’t been usual for a good many years. I decided that I wanted you to know what is happening there – the good and the bad. Because I think the point is that Zim – like many tragedies in the world – brings out both what’s best and worst of the human spirit. From the Old Man as Mugabe is called and his henchmen to those who are a little better off thanks to a job with Wilderness but who do more than just their jobs; they go out of their way to help others.

So a quick recap on Children in the Wilderness. Feel free to skip.

As you all know, CITW is our programme where we host a group of disadvantaged, poverty stricken children, who are also often AIDS orphans or HIV-positive, at one of our camps. We close down one of our luxurious places that I certainly can’t afford and we bring in the kids for a week of fun and lots of excellent programmes – on AIDS, nutrition, and most importantly to teach them about their natural environment. Before this, when they see an elephant it’s usually as a threat to their vegetable patch and now we show them the ellies in the wild which begins the process of seeing wildlife as a resource and not a negative/white colonialist invention.

The thing is that when I see these lovely happy black faces having a ball, it always gets me by the throat. One can never smile at them running around playing games or singing a beautiful prayer before a meal without getting tears in one’s eyes at the same time. In Zimbabwe that feeling – of laughing while your heart breaks – was magnified a thousandfold. 20 children from a village called Mpindo arrived at Linkwasha Camp in Hwange National Park for five days. While thin, we couldn’t tell how bad things were at home for them (we also had a bit of a language barrier – well, those of us who don’t speak Ndebele – the others were fine), but when we read their profiles – there are no words to truly describe the emotion that comes from facing horror, real horror, head on. Written on a few pages torn from an exercise book by their teacher, each profile read like an indictment of the evil Old Man:

Buhle: 11 years
No parents living; lives with her aunt. Seems to be abused.
Eats once a day, usually fruit off wild trees if she can get them.

Sunboy: 14 years
Father died, lives with mother who is very sick.
Eats once a day. Eats fruit off wild trees.

Gugulethu: 13 years
No father. Mother at home, no work for her.
Eats once a day, sometimes less. Intelligent but doesn’t always come to school because she’s too hungry to walk.

And on and on and on. It’s real. I saw it with my own eyes.

And then we realised that the slowness in some of the kids, the unwillingness to engage was not about intelligence or lack thereof. It was about malnutrition. In fact, on the first day, we thought they’d attack the food, but on the contrary they held back and we worried like Jewish mothers, nu, why aren’t you eating? But by the second day, perhaps they’d realised – yes, this is for me, I can have some! And they would scoff their heaped, steaming plates of sadza (mealiemeal/maize/pap) and chicken or beef and salad – and come back for seconds! By the last day they were trying to stuff in thirds and fourths – they know better than we do what they’re going back to.

On the first day we wondered if little Buhle was mentally disabled. She couldn’t seem to keep up, her eyes a fog of incomprehension looking at us doubtfully as we tried to explain a game. Five days later, this little girl chattered gaily to her tent leader and apparently was singing “Ride, ride, ride the zebra!” (an energiser game they played every morning) in the shower!

This is the power of CITW. And of course especially in this group where malnutrition is such a big factor. We couldn’t ‘cure’ Buhle of course, but her potential crept through by the end. And it’s not just the food. It’s the discovery by these kids of a world filled with possibilities (admittedly here in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe these are almost nil for rural children). But the glimpse they had of these has hopefully changed them, given them hope in a land where there’s little of everything including hope. Now, Marvellous, Given and Khaliphani (who would grin at me whenever he saw me – apparently he’d never seen a white person before) confidently state they want to be game rangers as they loved learning about the animals. Another amazing thing was that when they had to write what they liked best at the end, many of them said that what they liked best at the camp was learning about HIV/AIDS. Knowledge – even a little – is power in this land of the powerless.

The most heartbreaking thing for us was the fact that we could only do so much for them. We couldn’t teach them the usual CITW things about nutrition (there is none) or the importance of education (no teachers). But we can feed some – so on the day they left, I took a drive with Obert Mafuka (assistant manager and guide extraordinaire of Linkwasha Camp) and Sue (who runs CITW in Zimbabwe and is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met – just won’t give up) to the communities who live just outside Hwange National Park’s Ngamo Gate. Sue wanted to see at which schools we could start a feeding programme for the kids. More like where not to start - it was an eye opener and heartbreaker of note. The villages are all very pretty, neat round huts of mud decorated with lovely designs – but there’s nothing happening in them, there are no crops growing because there are no seeds. Luckily the Christmas beetles are out, says Obert, these are a good source of food now that much of the wild fruit is finished….

And the schools – we saw four – are devastatingly broken down. We met the aptly named headmaster Moses at Zika Village School – who was so excited that we’d come. All his teachers have run away to South Africa (because here they get paid in Zim dollars, might as well receive old toilet paper) so there’s just him, his deputy and two women who are volunteers from the village; he tells them what to teach). All the children came pouring out of their classrooms (if one can grace the broken-down, missing bits of roof building with such a name) to sing and dance in welcome. Again, that tear-filled smile came into use.

We visited Mpindo School too, where ‘our’ children had just been dropped off after their week – they were proudly showing off all that they had received to the younger kids – T-shirts, trousers (from a French tour operator), stationery, ‘lap-desks’ (great invention: large round hard piece of plastic that you put on your lap – and voila – a desk!), drawings they had done and masks and beads that they’d made. When we walked into the classroom they burst into song and told the other children (wide-eyed at these unexpected visitors) that “you must smile for the camera!” You could see so clearly the ones who had been fed and loved – their confidence shone out of their faces.

Things got even worse. Mpindo’s headmaster asked us if we could take him, the teacher and Sunboy, one of the kids we’d had on the camp, to Sunboy’s village a few kilometres away. Why? Because Sunboy’s mother had passed away the day before. She’d been sick for two years and there was nothing anyone could do for her, the clinic is too far away, so she lay in the village, slipping away. So they jumped on the vehicle with us along with a few other kids who were going in the same direction. But when we got to the village, a red rag was flying outside. Some men were sitting on the side of the path/road next to a rough-hewn coffin. And Gugu, Sunboy’s cousin, burst into tears; they all knew something had gone wrong. Sunboy got down as in a dream and was covered in ashes by his grandmother and other old women. It is a tradition that if a twin has lost his brother, and then loses someone else, he must have ash put on him to stop his heart breaking. And Sunboy lost his twin brother a long time ago.

But combined always with the horror of the wasted opportunity and lives, is the inspiration of the beautiful people of this land of lost hope. The volunteers for CITW camp, both black and white, worked hard to give these kids the time of their lives, from energiser games at 6 in the morning to running all the brilliant programmes that Sue put together, to serving meals, going on game drives, you name it there was plenty to do – well, just think back to any Bnei camp. Zimbabweans of all colour showed me what it means to have hope in a land that has none.

And a refusal to give in. For example, we usually give the kids a little daypack at the beginning of camp with all sorts of goodies including a toothbrush and toothpaste. It seems that, on their way over the border from SA, the stuff was stopped by customs officials and inexplicably the toothbrushes didn’t make it in. No matter. Obert went to some blue bushes just nearby and cut of twigs for everyone and showed the kids how to use it – and how important it was to brush your teeth every day – even if just with a twig!

One afternoon we watched a sensational performance by a dance troupe called Ingonyama – local guys from Dete, a town outside Hwange, have formed this troupe with the theme “Conservation and Creativity” – where they use large amounts of the latter to teach the former. They tell a simple story through song and dance of a young man obeying his aging grandfather to go out and discover nature and to rekindle his relationship with it. Out in the bush he meets a variety of animals – and just by using a few sticks and their bodies they transformed into elephant or giraffe, imitated a baboon or lion – Broadway Lion King eat your heart out. And as always with such a performance, at the end, everyone jumped up to dance and sing, feet moving with speed and grace that my two left Jewish feet envied. (By the way, we wanted to show them the Lion King one evening, and had a DVD which apparently was made in China nudge nudge, anyway, when we opened the folder to find the Lion King to play – it wasn’t there. They did have the Loin King though… numbers 1, 2, and 3, but we decided not to take a chance on its possible subject matter and showed them A Bug’s Life instead.)

Moving off heavy stuff for a while, I must describe Linkwasha Camp to you – wouldn’t be my dear all without it would it? It’s an older camp (in fact it was built 10 years ago and the people who built it have all been employed at the camp ever since, such as Isaya who began as builder, then became a lamp lighter – lighting all the lanterns that hang outside each tent – then cleaned the kitchen, and today he’s a chef! In fact Robson the maintenance man was a tent leader for the kids – big, smiling man who was fabulous with them – another instance where CITW brings out the best in the people you don’t even see in a luxury camp. And everyone here has the most beautiful smiles that light you up inside….

But where was I? Oh yes, so the camp – Wilderness style tents made up of canvas walls with thatched roofs and old-style scarlet stoep-type floors – overlooking a pan surrounded by a dry and dusty plain (that’s cos it’s the end of the dry season see). But it’s not raised so that when you look out across the plain you really feel part of the landscape, looking eyeball to eyeball with any passing animal (well, they don’t come that close, but you’re on the same level as them, which makes them seem closer). When I sat reading by the ‘window’ (gauze) one night, I heard loud crunching sounds just outside. I was sure it was a buffalo at least – but it turned out to be a springhare, a little critter that makes a really loud noise eating grass, who knew. It stopped after a bit and in the silence I heard a soft crackle of a twig being snapped. I turned off the light and looked out to see a row of dark shapes moving silently across the full-moonlit plain: elephants who had come to drink at the pan and were moving off. The sight of pachyderm-shaped darkness moving in single file across the blue moon-shaded sand was a mixture of otherworldly yet comforting, homely feeling. Of being in my place. (Elephants can do that to you.)

At this time of year, Hwange – no make that southern Africa – transforms into YBK land. Huh? Yellow-billed kites my friends – large, yellow-beaked raptors who’ve arrived for the summer and they’re everywhere, flapping enormous wings, diving low at insects and other prey, being chased around by lilac-breasted rollers, hanging out at the pans to drink, all over the runway at Vic Falls… there are so many they’re like pigeons – only larger and much better looking.

One morning we went on a bushwalk. And in true bushwalk style, Obert would stop every 10 steps at something – a termite mound (he showed them how to eat them, smacking his lips in delight), some dung, and finally at a full elephant skeleton. It must have died a while back, the bones bleached white in the sun strewn across a wide area. Obert told the kids they had to rebuild the elephant, and so, shouting and laughing, they all hauled bones into a semblance of an ex-elephant (dem bones are HEAVY!) until the skeleton sprawled out in front of us in a semblance of its former self. There was a quiet sadness about the old bones, a feeling that we needed to respect them for the incredible creature they once carried. The kids moved off to make bracelets out of twine but I sat a while looking at the world through the circular frame that the hip bones made. (Weird, I know. Elephants can do that to you.)

I know it’s odd but I need to talk about the weather. Or rather the rain. I admit, for someone who prides herself on being all oh so natural, I do a lot of whinging about the rain in Johannesburg. I have been rebuked about this – “never complain about the rain in Africa” – and I hear it, I really do, but I haven’t listened.

But I need to tell you that after seeing the dry dusty bowl of the earth, watching the heat haze shimmer day after day across the yellow sands – at 9 in the morning! – watching the clouds build up day after day, then slide past leaving behind just that tantalising moist smell and a few paltry drops, feeling my bones fairly crack from dryness and lethargy stealthily take me – after that, I figure I learned that lesson – at least for a week or so.

The first three days at Linkwasha were cloudy and hot, a fierce wind blowing through in the afternoon which helped give us a little more energy but mainly hurled dust across the plain in front of camp in choking mist-like waves, leaving us all covered in the stuff. Eventually on Shabbat, it dawned clear and bright, but got hotter and hotter as the day wore on; we became obsessed with the weather, and by three o’clock we all watched the dark grey skies to the north “it’s coming this way,” “no, it’s sliding past,” etc, and then we saw the trees on the horizon disappear into what were clearly sheets of rain.

And wham! That storm hit us, sideways rain, mad wind and lightning and thunder. Bridget and I went and stood in the wet howling madness while the children sang and played games in the dining area and the camp staff tried desperately to keep some of the (very open) camp dry. It was over in half an hour but oh, the difference!

When we pray for rain we ask for rain that is a blessing not a curse and I saw that day what happens when the rain is a blessed one. As the earth became saturated, it exploded with life. Not plants – these would appear only in a few days – but tiny frogs, dung beetles and dragonflies all leapt, crawled and flew out of the womb of the Earth, followed by the acrobatic contortions of bulbuls, starlings and yellow-billed kites as they flew to catch the bounty. The air, clear of the dust and sparkling, was filled with the sounds of frogs burping and some seriously happy ducks.

(Of course all this profusion and explosion of life becomes less attractive when most of it starts clustering around your light when you’re trying to read at night. Well okay, not the ducks but otherwise….)

The pan tripled in size in that half hour, and when we plopped through the mud to the edge of the pan (following in the frogs’ um footsteps), we found that it consisted of shallow water no more than 20cm deep literally heaving with millions of tadpoles.

Dead earth comes to life. The world is bright with colour again and life is pregnant with possibility.

I thought then that this might be the other explanation for that statement in our prayer for rain: not only that too much rain can be bad, but that we should be given the eyes to see the rain as a blessing and not as a curse. Funny how I got the message with all my senses in the ravaged, beautiful land of Zimbabwe.

Two-in-one: DumaTau and a weekend in the Strip – the Caprivi Strip that is.

2008-07-17T08:21:00.004+02:00

Dear all,

Elephants, alive and dead, sitatungas and hippos and, if you read to the end, something that went bump in the boat... (Pic is courtesy of Wilderness Safaris - Caroline to be precise.)

DumaTau means ‘roar of the lion’ but I didn’t hear any. (Mind you Zibadianja means Lagoon of the Lechwe and I didn’t see any of those either, but no matter.) It is in the Linyanti concession, an enormous 125 000-ha area near Chobe for those of you who know northern Botswana, that has all of four camps, so it’s all very exclusive don’tcha know. But after the four tents of Zib it felt more like a big happy party, with a camp full of Americans who were having a whale of a time and very enthusiastic, warm, personable and efficient staff – all of whom are local Motswana (i.e. Botswananans see). Everyone was so friendly, including the Bradfield’s Hornbills and squirrels who were our companions during brunch.

Because the camp was full, Caroline and I were put in the honeymoon suite which seemed small after the enormous rooms of Zibadianja, but we managed…. The suite has a ‘sala’ added to it with a comfy mattress on which one can lie and contemplate the shining waters and afternoon sun. But the vervet monkeys it seems have taken ownership of the place and they leaped about on the mattress and cushions, clearly appreciating what Wilderness has done to the place.

The main excitement about this particular area (apart from the leopard and her cub who had taken up residence in a hamerkop’s nest but had left the morning we got there, go figure) is the filling of the Savute Channel. The Savute Channel used to flow from the Linyanti River further north and unaccountably stopped in the 1980s (probably due to tectonic movements deep below), leaving behind large dry grassy riverbeds instead. This year, what with the rain and other factors, it began again, and everyone has watched breathlessly as it has crept further and further down its former bed. But it’s not just a small stream; it has become a wide, flowing river that looks – to my first-time eyes – like it has always been there. I couldn’t appreciate it quite as much as those who have seen it empty; they let out yells of delight and wonder when they saw vast expanses of blue water glinting in the sunlight where there once was grass. The water birds seem to have taken to it with similar delight, but the hippo are more wary; they know the Savute will retreat once more.

So we had to experience and celebrate the waters creeping towards Savuti Camp. We drove to the point at which the ‘head’ of the waters can be found: a trickle that slowly but inexorably oozes its way through the dry grass. Each day the head-trickle disappears into the ground but the next day it has overcome this dry soil problem and creeps a little further forward. In honour of the occasion we all pulled off one sock and one shoe and precariously yet ceremoniously put one bare foot into the Channel – a historic moment captured on camera.

Game viewing-wise, we spent time driving between DumaTau and the other two camps in the area so that we could see them, which meant that any game we saw along the way was a bonus. We enjoyed what the Channel had to offer in terms of water birds, and also saw some interesting bateleur congregations (no, not like Glenhazel congregation, a whole bunch of these eagles in a tree together, fascinating sighting), great elephant crossings (as opposed to zebra crossings my favourite game reserve joke as some of you will know) – we watched a small herd of elephant come down to the Channel to cross. As they got closer, they bunched together and the trunks all lifted into the air to smell for danger. Then, still tightly bunched, they literally ran across the river as fast as they could, sloshing madly, trunks wobbling from side to side!

We had to drive through the mopane woodlands which tend to not have a whole horde of game, except for more excellent elephants. Including a dead one. Which had two big male lions feeding on it. So that was interesting. What was more interesting was seeing if Moss our guide could find his way to the sighting and back out when everything looks the same and each mopane tree looks like the other… but he was really good at bundu bashing and we did make it back to the sand road with sighs of relief.

After two nights, the time came for us to move on. So on Thursday morning we were taken to the airstrip where we hopped on a small plane to fly to the Kwando Airstrip where you have to do the following to get into Namibia: land at airstrip, walk 800 metres through the grass (on a soft sand road, with your guides helping you carry all those tins of kosher tuna) to the river, where you load your stuff on an aluminium boat and putter down past the Botswana army base (on our way back out we watched two elephants walk through it) where either an official gets into the boat with you or comes in his own boat to the Botswana Immigrations… um… office? This is a large canvas tent, no sides to it, some sand bags scattered for some kind of ‘official’ décor type thing, and a buffalo skull presumably for ambiance. A tattered Botswana flag flaps in the wind. Here you get stamped out of Botswana and into Namibia or vice versa depending if you know if you’re coming or going. An adventure in the middle of nowhere which creates an incredibly intrepid feeling of being a ‘real’ explorer – even though we’re not really, let’s face it.

On our way out of Botswana the soldier was smartly turned out in an army uniform, but on the way back in, it was Sunday gear - he stamped away at passports in shorts and a T-shirt… Of course no photos may be taken they get quite upset about that. After all the border formalities, we met our guide Justin and trainee guide Poniso and boarded the little boat again to begin the 25-minute cruise upriver to camp.

There’s something to be said for sailing between two countries as we puttered along the Kwando River (which is the border between the two), with Botswana on the left and Namibia on the right. I definitely got a thrill of being in no-man’s land (or no-woman’s water to be accurate) – floating as it were in mid-geography.

And what a river. The water reminds me intensely of the Delta with that mirror-stillness, crystal clarity all the way to the desert sands two metres deep, the upside-down trees and sky, all framed by the papyrus reeds. But when the engine stops, you realise it is indeed a river as the boat is taken quite quickly downstream towards the Indian Ocean. Well, eventually.

Lovely Lianshulu. It rolls off the tongue and is pretty accurate too. While the camp itself is quite old-style and not Wilderness-style accommodation – bricks and mortar etc – it is one of the most scenic camps I’ve seen, lying as it does along that stunning Kwando River, and shaded beneath riverine vegetation.

Although not known as a wildlife destination we actually had some amazing sightings. On that first journey to camp, we spotted an elephant feeding in the reeds. Justin killed the engine and floated the boat into an inlet, bumping onto the banks. The elephant, not 3 metres away, rose up out of the water. And I mean up: as he was clearly standing in deeper water, he climbed up out onto the banks and he grew and grew until we were literally staring up at him. While he stared down at us. Ears fanning out, this magnificent bull was obviously contemplating whether to charge these pesky intruders but changed his mind and had a drink instead. All was so silent around us that we could here the sucking noise as the water whooshed up his trunk, and then the echoing water-hitting-large-empty-bucket noise as he emptied it down his cavernous throat. He did this a few times then flapped his ears at us from that dizzy height and finally turn away, leaving us with beating hearts and pictures that definitely didn’t need the zoom!

On our sundowner cruise we saw a sitatunga! (Cue excitement for those of us who know it is a rarely seen antelope that loves to lurk in the reeds.) Even Justin last saw one five months ago. Then there was the fish eagle feeding on a bank who took off when we arrived, giving us that classic ‘raptor with fish in talon’ scene, a Nile monitor (leguaan) in a hamerkop nest, lots of hippo heads snorting at us and a group of Americans drinking their sundowners pretty much finished that trip off.

I’m not sure why but the staff at this camp specialise in very different names: There’s Cacius, Shylock, Brighton, Creandz and a Calicious. Yes, he says, it’s like ‘delicious’ but no, he doesn’t know what it means either. But names aside, very friendly bunch. They all were thoroughly entranced at the whole kashrut thing as usual. Shabbat at Lianshulu was scenic but not adventurous as there are no walks in the area, however nothing wrong with just sitting on the deck and watching the stars as they shine upside down in the river.

On the last morning I met Nandi the muffin-eating crocodile. While feeding the wildlife isn’t my favourite idea, she was brought up from a croclet in the water next to the camp and seems to have been fed muffins since then. She is a big mama now, who glides in stealthily when her name is called – and then you drop a muffin next to her head and that typical croc behaviour – lethal teeth in yawning gape, thrashing body and tail – takes place. All for a muffin. Seems a bit of an anticlimax really. The guests like it though.

Our last boat cruise back to the border post was as magical as the first, with great sightings of birds such as western banded snake eagle and an African skimmer! Once again a very rare sighting in this area, so we were all transfixed on the red-beaked creature, Caroline trying to catch a good shot – when something went BUMP on the bottom of the boat, almost tipping it! Sour (another interestingly named guide) hit the throttle and the boat leaped forward – we all turned around to see a disgruntled hippo glare at us….

Quite a way to end the trip but actually the final bit was that as we roared away from the hippo and the now forgotten skimmer, hearts thumping madly, my coat flew gracefully into the water – effectively ending this journey with a Kwando baptism.

Even though Poniso successfully fished it out, I think it’s a sign: I have to return to the Strip.

Botswana Again - the Water-filled North

2008-07-11T07:41:00.000+02:00

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.

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.

Mad about Malawi IV: Back to the Lake

2008-04-02T10:19:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana stays on an island in the Lake and has a stormy experience. Apologies for the tardiness of this, the last of the Malawi blurbs.

It’s possible that I’ve died and actually got into heaven (probably on a technicality). I’m sitting on a deck high on the rocks of a small island called Mumbo. At one square kilometre it’s exactly the right size for a private island – and here’s the thing: there are just two ‘guests’ on the entire piece of land (again a technicality as it’s Verena and me), and then there’s our chef and Ibrahim and Justice who take care of our every whim. (I’m writing this as I wait for that bucket shower to arrive....)

To backtrack a little: We had left Mvuu as you may remember, and trundled down very wet, potholed yadda yadda, you know the drill, roads. There’s a quirkiness about Malawi that had odd little episodes happening every now and then. One tableau I need to share with you is that we stopped for petrol in a little village, and I hopped out to begin saying morning brachot (blessings). The odd thing was that as I began to say the one about “shenatan lesechvi bina – who gives understanding to the rooster that it is day” – what do you know, a rooster crowed just behind me! I turned around, overjoyed at the (non-)coincidence – to find a wooden box perched on a bicycle. In the box sat the rooster along with several hens, so he may have been calling for help which sort of spoilt all that serendipity.

Where was I? Oh yes, the four-five hour trip to Cape Maclear, a village at the very south of the Lake. It was to be our last night before boarding a 3:00 flight back to Joeys the next day. We were supposed to spend a few hours driving to Cape Maclear, take a boat over to Mumbo, quickly see the island, snorkel, kayak, and boat back to the Cape, hop in car, drive four-five hours to Lilongwe, taking care to get back before dark, then potter around the next day until our flight.

Encouraged by our superb, knowledgeable, sensitive, humorous, smiling, good-looking etc etc driver-guide Michael, we decided to ask, nay beg, if we could stay at Cape Mac at least, even though the Island itself was closed to guests for maintenance. The office chaps were great about us changing plans, and said that we could actually stay on the island if we liked – but we’d have to bring our own food... Hmm, let me see, said the kosher kid lugging a big blue cooler bag around darkest Africa, I think I can manage that.

So it was settled. And it turned out that there were people on the island, as they had just finished a training course there, so Verena didn’t have to eat my tuna and provita and in fact had a delicious meal just for her. We were very grateful that some of the staff stayed on the island just for us, we did feel a bit bad but it’s hard to feel very bad in paradise. And anyway, the chaps were so nice about it, relaxed and all, with that quintessential “Wilderness Way” where, even if they didn’t want to be there, you’d have to run them down with a herd of elephants to get them to admit it.

So with all that background, we arrived at the “seaside” village of Cape Maclear, the weather deigning to stop pouring, Lake Malawi looking a bit choppy but not unnavigable, and got into a large weather-beaten boat to putter for an hour until we reached the island where we were received as usual with open arms – much-needed as you have to jump off the boat onto a barely submerged jetty.

Six tents are perched high amongst the pile of rounded boulders that sits a few metres off the ‘mainland’ of the island – an island off an island as it were. The mainland has the dining area set just above the tiny bay with a sandy beach from which kayaking and snorkelling take place and where you can chill on a beach lounger. You get to the tents over a bridge of wooden slats (which only shakes slightly) and up a winding path, monitor lizards whisking their tails out of your way. There are some funky eco-friendly things: the paths are lit at night by lights that are powered during the day by small solar panels, and there are eco-loos. While it sounds like just another name for a long drop it isn’t really; the feel-good aspect of being environmentally friendly should override the smell….

So here I am, sitting on my wooden deck. I can look straight down into the proverbial (sort of) crystal clear bright turquoise-blue waters of the small bay. A little to the right is the bay in which we just kayaked and snorkelled for two hours. Directly across from me is the other finger of the bay – a jutted edge of the island mainland covered in thickly wooded vegetation, in which is perched one of a pair of Fish Eagles which hang out here, crying their liquid call at regular intervals. Further out, the still waters of the Lake become more windswept and silver-grey, ending in the misty mountains of the western shores of Malawi – currently disappearing into clouds as the inevitable rain begins to move towards us. Thunder is doing its ominous thing, but is undercut by the soothing lapping of the blue-green mini-waves below me.

The double entendre of thinking I’m at the sea but really being on a lake lent a surreal layer to everything. I kept mentally shaking my head to remind myself of where I was.

I sat and looked around at my island MINE ALL MINE HA HA HA sorry, sorry. One tends to feel like a god/goddess/other deity on this gorgeous blip of land surrounded by an ocean of a lake. And God was definitely with us, as the sun came out just in time to go kayaking which was a lot of fun. Although as you move away from the shelter of the island, the wind picks up and there are enormous waves – and I nearly got shipwrecked on a rock! It’s difficult not to panic as I was sure I’d be swept away by the sea – forgetting that it isn’t a sea and barely 500 metres back to shore. (Mind you, there have been shipwrecks and drownings in this Lake - it's big enough and the waters can get wild enough.)

I’d been looking forward to snorkelling in the clear waters for which this part of Lake Malawi is so famous. But we’d been warned that as usual the rainy season cuts down the water’s clarity. Those of you who have dived in Bass Lake will understand the murkiness we now encountered, which was a pity but it means I’ll have to come back…. But on the other hand, when have you ever dipped your mask into the water to see 20 to 30 types of fish of all shapes, colours and sizes – then lifted your head to hear the Fish Eagle or see weavers squabbling in their overhanging nests? And the funniest sight I've seen in a while: two Pied Kingfishers crashed into each other in some sort of weird aerodynamic mistake – clearly their control tower had closed for the day.

Ignoring the lowering clouds, we pottered off for a walk around the island but funnily enough it’s a lot bigger when you walk through a still green forest that sprouts weirdly shaped mushrooms and alien-seeming round rocks in equal measures.

We were looking forward to a nice relaxing supper in the dining area before retiring early to bed in our tents on the rocks, overlooking that peaceful water. But nature had other ideas.

And lo the storm came forth and yea it was very mighty. And the [insert deity/evolutionary force here] sent a nine-hour storm of lightning and thunder and sideways rain and wind that blew from the east as if it would split the very sea in twain. And even I who love storms, e’en I felt like a cosmic speck of pink dust on a slightly larger speck of earth afloat on a sea (yes I knew it was a lake, but still…) that lit up brighter than day with blinding whiteness as the [insert deity etc here] smote the water and the very air with flashes of lightning. And every time the lightning flashed and seemed to miss us by but an inch, the thunder would crash like an atom bomb had dropped inside the tent. And each time I said verily: Yikes! Or even more verily: Ye gads! And I cowered under the covers. But the lightning was of such brightness that it bypassed my tightly closed eyelids and hit the back of my brain with a CLANG while the thunder caused my brain to shake inside my skull and the very rock on which we perched seemed to shudder so that I thought we would roll off slowly and ponderously into the sea. (Lake, dammit! It’s a lake!)

It is difficult not to get a bit biblical with a storm of this magnitude or length; indeed it is difficult not to lose one’s sense of perspective or one’s mind, or in my case both.

Anyway, it went on like that I kid you not for eight or nine hours. Verena and I lay in our separate tents both wide awake and worrying about a. the boat being cast from its moorings and disappearing into the black lake, b. the roads back out of Cape Maclear being impassable and c. that I needed the loo. That was the scariest, because the loo is in a separate little room along the path just across from the tent so I had to walk across the deck clutching torch and umbrella and then that lightning/thunder bit would of course happen as I did, so that I would yelp and jump three feet, then heart thumping madly I would slip and slither, arms flailing, to the relative safety of the loo. Did I mention there is no electricity here?

Shew. But the night did end at last as some song has it. Morning dawned allegedly, dull grey and wet and by now we wanted to leave paradise and come back when the sun came out again, so we were out of our tents by five o’clock and waiting expectantly to be hauled on board the boat – which had not sunk – and putter upsy-downsy through the choppy waters back to Cape Maclear. And the roads were barely passable but pass them we did – that’s also because Michael is the best driver-guide in the world.

And so we made our way up the Golomoti Pass through lowering, glowering clouds and past brown houses and beige maize fields, four-five hours back to Lilongwe. Malawi smelled of water, fetidly moist and cool through the hills, muddy puddles and raging torrents of rivers that had risen thanks to the storm in the valleys. All that remained was to say goodbye to fabulous Michael and our new friends at the Wilderness office, buy vitally important Malawian coffee to take home, and board that lovely bus at the terminal to drive 20 metres to the aircraft. As we took off through the duvet of clouds covering the mountains, I had the bizarre thought (no doubt lack-of-sleep-induced) that the clouds were echoing my feelings and kissing the lush, quirky, friendly-as-a-puppy land of Malawi goodbye.

Mad about Malawi III: Shabbat on the Shire

2008-03-21T17:15:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

Warning! Large epiphany ahead! I promise I don’t do it on purpose!

Where were we? Ah yes. I returned to Lilongwe where I was joined by colleague Verena (one of our graphic designers from Johannesburg) for
the rest of the trip – which included four days in Liwonde National Park, Malawi’s main wildlife area, and a last day sitting on an island on the Lake in a storm (of which more anon).

Off we bumped (for four-five hours) down the potholed roads south to Liwonde, with the requisite rain, donkeys and goats along the way. Finally we arrived at the banks of the Shire River, where we boarded a boat and chugged 45 minutes downriver until we reached Mvuu.

A note on the Shire River. I know it sounds like Frodo Baggins should be hanging about twiddling his ring, but it is in fact pronounced “Sheereh”. Broad and flat, it flows out of Lake Malawi down to the Zambezi, and is usually clear but of course muddy at this time of the year with flotsam and jetsam (always wanted to use that in a sentence) thanks to the rains. And hundreds of hippo too – but here, these hippo are the friendliest in Africa. In fact, when I ask our guide McCloud about the dangers of this many hanging about, he looked at me in bemusement: “but hippo aren’t dangerous!” Seems the friendliness of the people has rubbed off on the beasts. (McCloud, so you understand, is yet another wonderful Malawian, who, like many of his race, has a free and easy attitude to the use of the letters L and R in a sentence; hence we would see a “led-necked flancorin on the light hand side of the load.” Work that out.)

Wilderness has two camps almost next to each other: the more ‘zhoosh’ Mvuu Lodge and the simpler yet still delicious Mvuu Camp (Mvuu means ‘hippo’ – of course). We stayed at the former, which has its tents fronting a brown, slow-moving stream that flows into the Shire. While this doesn’t sound exciting, it turns out that this – it’s larger than a stream, more of a riverlet – is quite a highway, with hippo and crocs floating up and down it and of course all manner of birds. But the feeling is secretive, away from the main highway that is the Shire.

Once again at Mvuu, the people around us were just incredible. From Richard the camp manager (he began as a ‘houseboy’ – his own words – and gradually worked his way up to being a guide and manager. Look, you have to read about him – it’s on our website, go on, be inspired by Africa! Or directly here.), to James the Seventh Day Adventist barman (who has the nicest, whitest, shyest smile you’ve ever seen; on Friday night he joined me for Kiddush and we compared notes on various explanations for verses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy according to the Oral Law which his teacher taught him; an excellent dvar Torah for Shabbat!). I was provided with my own private chef – Hussein (we bonded over the differences between Halaal and Kosher) and they made half the kitchen kosher for my use, clearing out cupboards and putting every spice or ingredient with The Sign in one place for me!

The Mvuu experience is mainly a study in sound and colour, a profusion and bursting-out of life that took my breath away every day. Leaves rustle from a riot of bushes and trees – the leaves of the towering palm trees crackle as if an elephant is hiding in them – and a mass confusion of bird sound (and thunder of course – as I write the clouds have come down again). Thanks to the rain, it is so green that an Irishman would burst into tears at the sight.

Our tent (classic Wilderness, large and luxurious, outdoor shower, funny towel shapes on the beds) looked out over that gently flowing stream, complete with Brown-throated Weavers enthusiastically making their nests in the reeds, Bohm’s Bee-eaters just sitting there waiting for twitchers to get excited and tick them – and several rude, brash Hadeda Ibises perching on the top of the palm trunks and shouting insults across the river at us. But the African Fish Eagle that sat regally watching me watching him more than made up for his bourgeois neighbours.

Friday afternoon, as Shabbat approached, had the by-now prerequisite evocative, dark, glowering clouds. I was ready to be all sad that I was going to miss my Friday evening sunset and have to make do with towering – or lowering – cloud formations (depends on if it’s about to pour or just building up to it) – all a bit too moody sometimes, you know? Not bad moody or depressing, just moody. Like too much Beethoven Sturm und Drang music.

The bird cacophony died down to that special pre-Shabbat peace, when you’ve done all you can do and there is nothing more than to light the candles and enter a different place. An Emerald-spotted Wood Dove was calling plaintively about his/her dead relatives, a hippo snorted
somewhere in the Shire, the palms continued rustling manfully and a few desultory drops of rain fell. The night insects and frogs were tuning up for the big performance later while the Collared Palm Thrush perched almost on my shoulder tried out a new song.

Head spinning from all this mood stuff, I tottered off to the main lounge area to light candles. And the miracle occurred. As I lit, from somewhere behind me the sun broke through, strong yellow rays lighting up the dark-grey clouds. Colour returned to the leaves and trees across
the now-sparkling river with a vengeance and even that blasted hadeda’s wings shone metallic green-purple. And Shabbat duly came in with a drum roll of thunder and in a blaze of glory!

Perhaps encouraged by the last burst of sunlight, the birds decided to give it one last go and burst into louder song, if that were possible. Even the tiny flying jewels that are the Malachite Kingfishers chirped reedily down by the river – and the African Fish Eagle gave a clear, high cry that seemed to echo across the whole world – indeed, as if he was the chazzan (prayer leader) beginning the universal service: “Lechu neranena – let us go and rejoice!” At that moment it occurred to me that – to mangle the immortal words of the Bard – “all the world’s a shul and
all its birds and beasts say many prayers...”. What I mean is that every bird, every living thing, seemed to be joining me in praising the Creator and bringing in the Shabbat.

As the sun disappeared – for good this time - they were joined by the reed frogs and the clear peeping of the bats that swooped down around my head. (Best not to make sudden moves in case one of them was in the slow Reflexes class…) But the point is that, on my little deck with the brown river meandering below, I felt as if I was standing in the middle of the greatest choir on Earth, who were singing the loudest, purest paean in the world to He who made it. A sublime moment indeed; I couldn’t have asked for a better one.

(Of course, like all good shuls, there are always the two women in the front row shouting to each other: “So I said to him, STUNNING doll!” in raucous tones – the blaring voices of the hadedas hit the right note there.)

Shew, well after that, seems a bit of a comedown but as I mentioned, I discussed the parsha with James the Seventh Day Adventist, and sat down to a delicious Hussein-inspired Shabbat dinner (the local fish, chambo, is delicious!) with Verena and Richard. The candles flickered in the wind, and we tried out Kuche Kuche (pronounced coochie coochie), the local Malawian beer, which was very nice and went well with challa.

It poured Friday night so that both Verena and I slept badly, disturbed by worries that we wouldn’t be able to go walking in the morning. But Malawians don’t let a little damp stop them, and after much-needed coffee at 5:30 (it was the Netz minyan for me) we started off. Oy vos it
muddy! I thought to myself, “Embrace the mud, Ilana” as we slipped, slid and splatted our way through the bush. (“Embrace the mud – but not too close, ooh, a little too close!”)

Mud aside, it was a stupendous walk. Liwonde does not have any large cats (no one is sure why this is so), but the herbivores are everywhere and less skittish about walkers than any I’ve seen. So everywhere we stomped were impala, warthog, yellow baboons, kudu, bushbuck – and of
course the birds!

The rest of Shabbat was peaceful and easy. I tried out the hammock on our deck and am happy to report that it works fine. Several birds insisted on visiting me which I thought was very kind of them as I could not go to them. After Shabbat, we were joined for supper by Jillian Wolstein and volunteers – she is financing the building of a school in a village across the river. They are doing an amazing job and we went to visit the school on Sunday afternoon, after a SPECTACULAR game drive in the morning (too muddy even for the intrepid Richard to walk), and a boat cruise along the smooth-as-glass Shire. You shouldn’t trail your fingers in the water for obvious reasons, but that aside, it is just as scenic as can be.

Of course, I whinged like mad about leaving Mvuu. But Monday morning dawned – allegedly, since it was cloud-covered and splattering – and we had to take the boat back out of Liwonde. On the way, we were treated to our one elephant – a damp, dark grey individual who moved rapidly into the bushes, disappearing completely as only a hefelump can. We also saw two African Skimmers skimming across the smooth Shire (hence their name, see) their beaks dipping into the water. We got a special thrill out of this, not only because you don't see these birds often, but because this is Wilderness’ logo come alive. (The two orange and brown sort of
double-ewes are in fact birds’ wings, see?) I know, it’s sad how patriotic we are, but it was lovely way of saying farewell to the Shire.

Mad about Malawi II: Tu Bishvat on the Lake

2008-03-09T10:21:00.000+02:00

A stranger Tu Bishvat I haven't had. (Tu Bishvat is a Jewish holiday: the New Year of the trees, look, it's complicated, ask me if you need to.) Usually I haul over various unsuspecting friends to my house, where I make them eat various fruits and nuts and drink wine. But there I was in the middle of Malawi, surrounded by a group of children and adults, all singing softly in Tonga. Sitting on cool, white sand on the banks of the enormous Lake, the full moon seemed to laugh as it rose out of the still black water. It blazed down, mirrored like a black and white Salvador Dali painting. The fire crackled and 24 kids and their mentors watched transfixed as "Rabbi" (seriously – real name: Matthews, a guide at Mvuu but volunteers at Children in the Wilderness, calls himself this because he says, he's not an official teacher but wants to show the children the way – and that is his idea of a rabbi. Not having met one personally himself, mind you – he has to explain to them that that is what a rabbi is, but he doesn't tell them it's a Jewish thing cos they don't know from Jewish…), with a jersey worn upside down on his legs – the sleeves become trouser legs – and a blanket wrapped around him elder-like, gosh this is a long sentence sits at a fire and tells the children the following:

"Don't be afraid of learning. You have come here to have fun but also to learn and learning is the best thing in life. Don't be afraid of it."

A very good lesson I think.

In between each sentence he breaks into song – and the kids pick up the refrain. All their songs are very simple, with one or two words repeated over and over. For example, one song that even I could sing went: "Folwahd, folwahd…" – and then I realised that meant 'forward'… followed by a Tonga word meaning backward which I didn't get so well. (Another one is "sehko, sehko, sehko" – circle, as in: get into a circle, see.) The song they sing around the flickering firelight that turns the sand golden is "Hazaa zaa zaa" and is sung between all the acts of the campfire show that the mentors and leaders put on for the children on their first day. There's a magic show and a skit on poaching and a doctor joke – each one very simple, the magician using not-so-fast sleight of hand but these kids have never seen anything like it and are enthralled. At the end, we all stand in a circle, small, warm hands in each of mine and sing a slow good night song that brings the tempo right down and envelopes them in a warm bubble – just right to send them to sleep.

The next morning… ahh… the sublime Lake lies silver-smooth and silent. The view straight out my room is of the water, the clouds reflected in its perfectly still surface at this time of the morning. And the birds are... well actually they're drowned out by screams and yells as the children, up since 5:00, play an extremely noisy game of catch with their mentors who clearly have an incredible amount of energy at this time of the morning. (Mind you, they are very well organised – they all have turns to be on early morning duty while the rest sleep in.) Bit of a clash of audio and visual here!

Hence my davening was slightly different today – not the elevated type, but rather one that is filled with what it means to live life with a sense of meaning – to give of yourself somehow in this world, because let's face it, in Africa, there's plenty of places to give. This is emphasised by the mentors who are running around madly with the children. They are generally between 18 and 20 and have the life that they're trying to move the kids away from: they haven't finished school and live in the villages continuing to do what their parents do – fishing or subsistence farming. A beautiful girl named Desire (seriously, not a pun) shrugs her shoulders and avoids the question when I ask her what she 'does'. What she 'does', what they all 'do' is look after children once a year for six weeks – and then for the rest of the year, they do 'follow-up' – in other words, keep in touch with the kids, make sure they're okay, encourage them to study and continue their schooling and to perhaps look at another future for themselves – an opportunity that they, the mentors, have never had themselves.

There were a couple of volunteers around too, including a Scottish boy who talked about a "wee house" and he didn't mean the bathroom, a Zimbabwean boy called Pule, pronounced Pulleh (his English name is Andrew but no one calls him that) whose parents are missionaries somewhere in darkest Zimbabwe, and a nurse from the Peace Corps with Hebrew letters tattooed on her toes…

Then there's the African rhythm that one must gently descend into: where one instruction takes ten minutes to give over, because a whole story, no, an entire production, is made of it, complete with enormous facial expressions, leaping, shouting and then dramatically dropping the voice to a whisper, with the final denouement or moment of humour – and the whole table erupts into laughter. I do too, delighted by the wonderful heart-filling giggles of a child. (Apparently the instruction was: please turn off your lights when you leave the room.)

There are many more memories of the few days I spent with these people: the words they begin to instil in the children (RTC – stands for Respecti, Teamworki and Challengi; the 'i' is at the end of the word in Tonga, not the beginning), or the Nutrition Game (do you know how to act like a vitamin? Or be a carbohydrate? I do!) and other games, all educational. The children who if not malnourished are not exactly well-fed, stand politely in line to get their food and then all wait before diving in, while one of them says grace. (The first little girl to do so, appropriately named Grace – seriously – went on for about 10 minutes – Sephardic grace I suppose.)

Then there was the 'swimming test' where everyone gets a chance to see if they can swim before they go on a 'boat safari.' The boys swim better than the girls - that's because they are the ones being taught to fish and therefore need to know. One little girl, as she tried to swim across the width of the pool, clearly thought the test was how long she could keep her face underwater - luckily Pule pulled her out after a bit....

Many other quirky happenings, but most in the context of "you had to be there" so I'll leave it for now. With the shlush-shlush of the Lake and chanting "sehko sehko" of the children still ringing in my ears I reluctantly dragged myself away, returning to Lilongwe to grandmother Tammie at Heuglin's Lodge for a night.

Mad about Malawi I

2008-03-09T10:10:00.001+02:00

Dear all,
In which Ilana visits Malawi in the rainy season and spends time with Children in the Wilderness, and some other lovely people, hippos and birds.

"’Tis the season to be rainy…" This version of the song went through my head during my ten days in Malawi. See, ’twas the rainy season indeed – and the thing about the rainy season in almost central Africa is that it tends to well, rain. A lot. To make things a little um wetter, this rainy season was rainier than most apparently (something that the whole of southern Africa has been experiencing actually) so that my overall impression of the country was one of water – from Lake to River to heavy skies and muddy puddles; the sounds were musical drips and plops. Not that that put a dampener on my trip at all har har.

I landed on a (grey, rain-speckled) Sunday afternoon in Lilongwe, capital of Malawi and immediately began to enjoy the quirkiness that is Malawi. Lilongwe International looks like many other African airports – one, simple large building – and the plane came to a stop about a two-minute walk from said building. But when we alighted, we were told we had to wait for the bus. Somewhat bemused, we watched as the bus left the airport building – just over there – and drove around to us. Then some of us didn’t fit in so we had to wait for it to come back…

Lilongwe is another typical African city, with spurts of ‘city’ interspersed with suburbs and maize fields. When I was ‘in town’ I stayed at Heuglin’s Lodge (named after the White-browed Robin Chat, confusing I know, but that’s its new name – it’s still a beautiful bird with a gorgeous deep orange chest, striking white eyebrow and delicious song), a large rambling house in the suburbs that feels like I’ve wandered into a grandmother’s home and have ended up in one of her many bedrooms. Between its old-style cupboards, highly polished wooden floors, wrought-iron bed posts and Tammie, who plays the grandmother part very well – I could just relax and potter in the garden checking out the birds….

I was a bit impatient, as I just wanted to get going, you know, get to the Children in the Wilderness programme – until I realised that this is the real Africa – where things take a bit longer than you’d expect, and we’d go when we went!

Finally on Monday afternoon (after I had pottered around Lilongwe, seen memorials and markets) I found myself travelling along the potholed roads with Gladys, (programme coordinator of CITW for Malawi) with a bucket of chickens covered with ice cubes in the back seat. Apparently this isn’t a custom of the country, it’s because they didn’t all fit into the freezer box she had, and she had to get 50 chickens to Chintheche Inn where she was running the next CITW camp. Good thing she was picking up chickens cos then I got a ride too but at least I didn’t have to sit in the bucket.

Driving through Malawi is like being in the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz – remember how everyone had to wear green-tinted spectacles? Here you don’t need the spectacles because the country is bright green everywhere, except for the lake which is a blue-green. Of course when I comment on this to Malawians, they all crack up laughing at my naïveté – during the dry season (April to November) this country is brown and dry!

Can’t imagine it myself.

Everyone rides on bikes here and the bikes carry everything, from bags of charcoal, chickens (these ones seemed to be alive, as opposed to ours which were frozen and in polystyrene from Shoprite, I’m happy to say. I don’t think the chickens were that happy but they don’t need to worry about it now do they?), piles of clothes and I even saw a man with two goats on his bike rack. They looked a bit seasick, but goats generally don’t look happy with the world. Mind you, there are lots of goats in Malawi, some with distinct suicidal tendencies as Gladys drove at 100km or so an hour, avoiding potholes and goats with equal calm. My yells at several near-misses just made her crack up laughing. Quite a jolt for the lily-livered mzungu (white person) as she chats to me, swerving around a bike that just popped out of nowhere while she’s passing a massive lopsided truck and a suicidal dog wanders into the road on the right. All this while humming to strains of "Jesus is my friend…" playing on the CD.

Meanwhile, the countryside is a patchwork of maize fields dotted with low mud, thatch-roofed houses – there is no electricity out in the rural areas, only in the towns (which, considering the whinging of South Africans, makes one think). As it got darker, the only lights anywhere were small fires on which supper was being made and paraffin lanterns hanging in the windows of the houses, oddly enough reminding me of Chanuka. Oh and there was a bit of lightning and a small moon struggling through the clouds.

Thanks to the clouds I never saw a sunset in Malawi, something I missed. But on the other hand, they were redolent with atmosphere at all times of the day or night. They hung low and heavy over the landscape, so that I am convinced that either the clouds are lower here than in any other country, or the land itself is higher, closer to the sky than anywhere else, green touching grey. Today they piled up high, white and grey in Renaissance shapes and colours, brooding grey bracketed by bright sun-reflecting pink.

We eventually got to the Lake (it takes "four-five" hours to get everywhere here), and its dark mass ringed the horizon on our right, the peaks of mountains kissed by clouds on the left.
You’ll notice that we spell the Lake with a capital L – that’s because something this big deserves a little respect. The Lake is about 600km long and about 80km at its widest point, and 100m deep on average with 700m being the deepest – with some interesting characters that live in it like a 10-foot catfish named Henry but I digress.

So you’ll remember the Children in the Wilderness programme that I took part in at Pafuri a few years ago? Well, this time I was asked (I didn’t beg, okay a bit) to go to one in Malawi, to film some of the kids, take pictures and write about it – well of course! And then while I was here I could visit some other spots so it all worked out well. Gladys and Simon (a marvellous man who is an excellent Rosh Machaneh – camp director – as well as being comfortable in a dress) work full-time for CITW here and they run six or seven camps a year – two in our Mvuu Camp in Liwonde National Park and four or five here at Chintheche Inn.

Chintheche, about halfway up the western coast of the Lake, is perfect for a beach holiday, despite the fact that it’s not the sea. But a body of water that big causes confusion in the mind, because one thinks that it must be the sea, but then one wonders what is missing from the air – oh, it’s the smell of salt! But there’s soft white sand, lapping cool blue water that is crisscrossed by small dugout boats with fishermen, beautiful snorkelling, birding and swimming – what more can a girl ask for?

However, because I was here to watch the CITW camp and not to indulge my senses, I didn’t get to kayak or snorkel at this point. But I did get to sit on the long sandy beach, with the sound of the waves – small ones, that go shlush-shlush all day long in the ears, a calm background noise. After the rain (yes, plenty), the sky above would clear to a pale blue, but the horizon and hence the edges of my eyes were filled with cumulonimbus – burgeoning Renaissance clouds that towered kilometres high, blinding white in the rare sunshine.

If the sun is too bright you can sit in the shade of the enormous mango trees that grow in the beach sand, the fruit falling with a gentle thump every now and then. And occasionally, if you’re very lucky, you’ll see large squirrels moving up and down the branches enjoying pre-lapsed fruit (garden of Eden reference, get it); these are called Mutable Sun Squirrels and are different to the usual tree squirrels, so a privilege to see. The Collared Palm-Thrushes with their amazing repertoire of sweet song are also everywhere and one of those that you get really excited about (never having seen them elsewhere) until you realise the little chap lives practically on your shoulder and then you shrug nonchalantly when you see him – a good lesson not to take CPTs or anything else for that matter for granted!

Here endeth that lesson. Next time – Tu Bishvat on the Lake.

Zambia Musings

2007-08-09T18:09:00.000+02:00

Dear all,
In which Ilana loses some wine but gains some puku, does a helicopter flip over the Busanga and contemplates the concept of ‘real’.

My latest journey was bracketed by odd food-related occurrences. From the confiscation of my kiddush wine at ORT (Oliver Tambo International aka Jan Smuts aka Joburg International) under the new liquid explosives rules – I offered the man a taste of it but he was clearly unimpressed with that suggestion. (I never thought to offer to taste it myself and if I didn’t explode or start ticking ominously in a few minutes, could he let me take the rest?) But to no avail; I told him to enjoy it as I went through passport control. It ended in a similar fashion when the new ORT beagle – yes a dog – full of enthusiasm as only beagles can be, sniffed at everyone’s bags at the carousel for illegal fruit, vegetables or drugs – and of course he clearly LOVED the leftover tuna and cottage cheese in my bag and shoved his eager snout right in, to the amusement of all except me, since I now had to hand over the ‘contraband’… ah my friends, these are difficult times to be a kosher-carrier…

But between these two moments? Now that was quite simply a privilege – I spent a week in a country that calls itself ‘the real Africa’ – four days in the South Luangwa National Park and three more in Kafue National Park. Both these names have hovered on the edge of my imagination for years, with visions of midpoint of a continent, lush woodland, timid elephants and a people that meld characteristics of the south and north.

It’s the place that Livingstone wandered through, that a solid Jewish community inhabited when it was unromantically and colonially called Northern Rhodesia, and was a byword for dictatorship for decades before democracy hit. Last year I managed to spend less than 24 hours there and it only whetted my appetite for more. Now that I’ve spent 8 days there – well, it seems to have just whetted my appetite for more…

We – that’s Caroline my colleague, who has now been skilled up on the risks of carrying kosher food, and I – took off from ORT on Thursday morning sans wine but with a brand new bird book, landed in Lusaka Airport, where our two pilots Mark and Peter introduced us to our Sefofane plane which would be taking us everywhere, called Ndlovu – elephant! Flying in an elephant over Zambia one realises that the Zambians like to burn their countryside, apparently it’s a custom so that the young shoots will come through to feed cattle and wildlife, but the result is often a blackened landscape which is very hazy and washed out from the air that takes some getting used to.

We landed in the South Luangwa National Park just half an hour away from our new camp on the banks of the South Luangwa River called Kalamu. This camp is named after a nearby tributary Chankalamu, but should really be called ‘place of a million hippos’ because wherever you look there are the rounded ears and domed heads of the river horses, and always in the background are the sounds of splashing and snorting, and of course the deep Jabba the Hut-like grunts and squeals which continue day and night.

Aside from these amphibious constants, the river is silent, broad and smooth; barely a ripple disturbs it unless it is the Pied Kingfisher breaking the surface as it dives to spear a fish. We only have a camp here in the ‘dry season’ – in other words, the rains finish somewhere in April and the place dries up enough so that we can plant a camp here that doesn’t sink knee-deep into wet sand and sticky cotton soil. And here’s the thing: as the season progresses, the river and the land around it dries up until only lagoons or oxbow lakes are left to drink from – and lots of animals come to drink here. But of course we were too early for that – that’s about August-September so they say, so we just enjoyed whatever we could see at the time.

When they call Zambia ‘the real Africa’ I always thought that was a bit much, you know, I mean, isn’t it all real? And what does 'real' mean anyway? Not to get existential here or anything. But now I think I know: there is a sense of simplicity, of down-to-earthness, of being amongst the few who are here, whether inhabitant or visitor. The sensation of hiddenness, of mystery, of Africa warily presenting some of her rarities, is something that tingles every now and then between the shoulder-blades.

This primeval feeling is echoed by the camp – literally, with none of the boardwalks of some of our other places; you tend to have to crunch through river sand to your tent (admittedly which can be quite tiring on the ankles). There are only 4 tents and each one has a clear view across the still-full river to the tall profusion of riverine trees on the other side and the Muchinga Escarpment just above their canopy. The Muchinga forms the western border of the Park, and seems shy, sitting low down on the horizon and disappearing in the strong afternoon light as the sun slides towards it, reappearing only just in time to be set behind by that now-pink ball. The light at this time is a delicate hazy pink, thanks to the fires, reflected in a bridesmaid-satin-pink off the river, broken by the black silhouettes of the hippo-heads. The colours only deepen towards dusk when suddenly the river flashes deep, thrilling orange, echoed in the waking excitement of the formerly somnambulant hippo as they snort and grunt until it sounds like I’ve been stuck in the tympanic section of an orchestra who’ve all had a little too much to drink.
The feeling of being an intrepid explorer was probably enhanced by the fact that on the first night there were too many ‘guests’ so anyone who was staff was relegated to the back-of-house section for supper, which was a lot of fun, with managers Dave and Cathy who welcomed us warmly, Charles and Linda (and cute 3-year-old daughter Tatum) who were there to help the camp get going and finish the building, the Elephant pilots, and ourselves making for a lebedik (lively) supper. Then we were driven to an old camp half an hour away – no electricity or hot water, just very pink houses built around a large defunct pool and we took cold showers but it was all part of the fun, we slept well ignoring the skittering critters in the roof above and the next morning we had to tumble out at 5 and go back to Kalamu 'cos they needed the game drive vehicle to take the guests out… anyway, by Friday afternoon we’d settled into our tent and I could daven kabbalat Shabbat on the banks of the Luangwa River with that pink ball sinking behind the mountains – baruch Hashem another dream fulfilled!

Four days at Kalamu allowed it to become home for me (as opposed to my other homes, Pafuri, Chikwenya, Damaraland… etc), so forgive me if I wax a little more lyrical here. Kalamu lies on a narrow spit of land between the river and a large open area (filled with water in the rainy season but now dry); the herbs and grasses that grow there during this season are nibbled on by puku (pronounced POOOKu, with joyful exclamation mark at end), bushbuck, impala and yellow baboons. This is not a character reference, but a description of colour; they’re exactly the same as the chacma baboons except their fur has a yellow tinge. Why? No idea. But they look cute and golden and don’t get in the food - yet. So on one end of the camp you can sit on the pool deck and watch the baboons, impala, and puku work their way down this long open space, or turn your head for the proverbial hippo-filled view. And get to see Collared Palm-thrush and Little Bee-eaters playing in the nearby bush.

Puku abound in Zambia and other central African countries, but our Krugerised eyes are not used to them and for a while I kept thinking they were impala on steroids. They’re larger, more muscular, with thicker, red fur, so that I did a double-take whenever I saw them. But then there’s also their snooty look. Impala have a glazed, blank look on their faces when they turn and look at you with those dark liquid eyes, a sort of "Wha….?" before running off. Puku on the other hand have a slightly superior look about them so that when they raise their heads from grazing to look at you, it’s more of a "And who crashed our party?" look that makes me want to shuffle my feet and move off muttering sorry, sorry all embarrassed like. But that disdain is all a sham as, having tried to outstare you for a bit, most take off (presumably to move the party to a classier neighbourhood).

Back to the camp: Next to the pool, there’s the obligatory loo with a view – over the Loo-angwa River (sorry, sorry). Now the thing about this view is that it more often than not has a hippo’s eyeball in it, so that one’s ablutionary visit tends to be a little… self-conscious as one is eyed suspiciously by said eyeball or three more, the irritated twitching of the ear makes one hurry up and apologise for being rude…

But let me tell you about the most evocative point of the camp, written at dawn on Monday. The sun is just rising behind the river, which once again is smooth as silk, the hippo sighing as they gently rise and sink in the water. I’m on a deck built into a dying fig tree which has fallen over into the river, so that I am standing practically in the middle of the river, surrounded by twisted branches and hippo-shapes. There’s a Fish Eagle calling and it seemed just the right time and place to daven hallel, it being Rosh Chodesh and all. The river is in morning mode which is slightly different to its afternoon style: the lines are sharp and clear, the bright sunlight turns grey sandbanks into subdued gold, reminiscent of a freshly baked loaf of bread. The Muchinga Mountains in the background are brown-blue; thanks to the light their nooks and crannies are clear even at this distance. The water is a secretive blue, the hippo mounds dark pink verging on brown. Sound seems clearer too and a hippo grunt echoes from one bank to the other.

I can tell this from my vantage point of the middle of the river, from inside a fallen tree. When one first arrives at Kalamu and finishes oohing and aahing at the river, the hippo, the coffee, the birds, the coffee, one is confronted with jarring sight: an enormous fig tree, meant to be the focal point of the camp under which we were meant to dine, fell over in the floods that the Park had last year. It is a raw, primal sight at first, the once-proud trunk lies half submerged in the water, with its branches pointing skywards. The sprawling root system, meant to anchor the tree, could not hold against the churning waters.

Traitors of trunk and branch, they lie at 90 degrees on the mud, reaching 6 or 7 feet into the air, clayey soil still clinging to the twisted roots. The sight slammed into me like a punch in the gut, evidence of a violent death if you will. But the people who were building the camp decided that its death should not be an eyesore, so they built a wooden bridge through the roots and then ‘up’ into the branches where they put a neat little deck, a couple of chairs. So that I can sit here being surrounded by wood: deck and tree, the beginning of giving and its end, alpha and omega. The branches above the waterline still have green leaves clinging to them – as if the tree still holds on to life. But its purpose has changed: a baby croc has taken up residence on a once-vertical branch, now a great place for a reptilian sunbake. A kingfisher perches on a branch on the lookout for fish. And the river flows on, beneath and through the tree which in the great cycle of life has a new role to play, all the while decomposing so that its nutrients become mixed with the water and feed other beings. The place of its death is a site of contemplation of the beauty and fragility of life.

And you thought I’d skip the epiphanies this time.

So what did we do at Kalamu you ask? Well I spent Shabbat in camp, except for a walk with Dave along the riverbank downstream, yellow baboons objecting as we went. On Sunday we joined guests Rex and Simone from South Africa on a trip to some hot springs situated in the Game Management Area outside the Park – these are areas where hunting can take place and there are villages there, but it is still wild and we saw some great game on the way there and back: Thornicroft’s giraffe which exist only here – just like our giraffe but a more complex pattern, snow white socks almost to their knees and a snootier expression if that’s possible. We also saw puku, impala and some very skittish elephant – oh and a leucistic waterbuck foal! That’s ‘white’ to you, but it wasn’t albino cos it still had dark eyes, not pink ones, see? This one stood out as beautiful in its whiteness and otherness, and we could only hope that its lack of discreet colouring wouldn’t be a serious impediment to its survival.

To go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I feel it is time to mention the tsetse flies. What can I tell you, these are God’s creatures to be sure, but personally I find them somewhat difficult to appreciate. I was reminded of the mishna in Pirkei Avot: "Don't be scornful of any person, and don't be disdainful of anything; For there is no person who does not have his hour and there is no thing that does not have its place." And this teaches us that even a fly has a reason to exist. I’m not sure what they would have said if they’d met tsetse flies, large buzzing pernicious insects with a painful bite, mainly found in the miombo woodlands - the minute you stop the vehicle to look through your binos at some fantastic bird, they attack with verve. These do not carry sleeping sickness any more it seems (mind you, I for one wouldn’t complain if I got a little more sleep), but the bites can still drive you insane nonetheless. Actually, I do understand their presence – they still make cattle and domestic animals sick, so that areas where tsetse are found, the wildlife ironically are protected. So once again, the mishna is correct!

To continue, on the way we went through ‘villages’ which are small clusters of huts, usually with a bunch of children who come running out when they see us, yelling "Sweeeets! Sweeets!" Gosh I wonder who taught them that. The women were dressed in an assortment of brightly coloured clothing and some were digging holes in the riverbed to wash their clothes it seemed. Didn’t seem to be for water as each village had an old fashioned well complete with bucket and winch – I experienced a weird displacement feeling when I saw that, as I expected some European Grimm’s fairytale witch to approach us, cackling…

After 50km of bumpy riding through the most unbelievably beautiful mopane woodland – tall straight mopane trees with great spreading crowns utterly unlike those twisted bushes of much of the Kruger – we came to a lovely spot with a merrily bubbling brook, just right for a picnic, so we had some of that truly incredible Zambian coffee (no really I wasn’t addicted) and some of us had homemade rusks and one of us had a granola bar, and we watched a Nile monitor as it skittered away (maybe it doesn’t like rusks?), and encouraged by guide Keennan we felt the water; it was lovely and warm!

Just 500 metres later, we arrived at the source: a spot that was lonely and deserted – the dirt track just ended in an open space (which had at least one treacherous sharp piece of twisted mopane wood as we discovered when the ominous sound of Pssshhhhhh as our tyre was pierced gave an altogether more… intrepid feel to the place; we knew there was a spare but visions of walking through the mopane back to camp did wash over us). There was no sound other than the call of a bird or the swish-swish of the wind through the mopane. The view from the hill behind us stretched miles into the blue distance, the blue hazy Muchinga showing us the way home. The little unassuming river was only different when you noticed the steam curling up from it into the branches of the trees and looking closer (after feeling the scalding water and uttering a wild yelp!) the rocks were covered in salt and other crusted minerals, looking for all the world like alien shapes made big by a microscope.

After we puttered about poking things and sitting on rocks and finding fossilised rocks too – this place is great for amateur geologists – and discussing how unlike Yellowstone this is – no crowds or big sprays of water sky-high either, but again, like much of Zambia, hidden, different, unexplored – poor Keennan and ZAWA (Zambian Wildlife Authority) scout Moses changed the tyre and back we went, via some quicksand (a weird encrusted bog, which if you stand on it and are quite light it just wobbles, but the giraffe bone lying nearby proves that the giraffe was definitely on the heavy side) and via a lovely lake for lunch ooh eizeh alliteration framed by ana trees and fig trees hanging upside down in the water. Again, no one around but ourselves, that word ‘hidden’ on the edge of one’s mind. There’s a sense of immense freedom to do and be, to metaphorically stretch out your arms until you touch the edge of the world.

Monday saw us saying goodbye regretfully to Dave, Cathy and the team – oh forgot to tell you that the majority of their staff were recruited from the building site – meaning that they took guys who came to help build the camp (casual workers who turn up for jobs when the bush telegraph says there’s one going – that’s how all our camps have been built, men arrive out of the bush quite literally to get a job and earn 8 times more in 5 months than they can earn in a year!). So Mumbwe the chef, who is turning out truly stunning meals according to the non-kosher guests, was a builder just last month. Makes you think….

Where was I? Oh yes, so we alighted our brave little Elephant and flew off to Kafue National Park, where we landed at Lunga airstrip, and Robert our guide picked us up there and whizzed us down south to Lufupa Camp. Now Lufupa turns out to be a good 6-hour drive from Lunga or more, but because we landed at 3:00 this would make for a lot of it being at night, so Robert decided to speed up a bit… quite an experience going at 60 km an hour, cheeks rippling in the breeze, air whistling through the ears, tears streaming down the face and boy is it cold! Despite this, it was an incredible game drive: 12 sable, crowned cranes, Defassa waterbuck (another endemic: instead of the toilet seat ring on the bum, this one clearly sat on a closed lid without reading the "wet paint" sign), ending off with a relaxed leopard sauntering down the road at night. We followed her as she moved off into the bush onto a dark plain where a small herd of puku lay some 800 metres away in the long grass.

As she disappeared out of sight we could dimly see the puku, ears twitching. We switched off the light and we waited in silence for 10 minutes to see if she’d attack. All around us was darkness, the only light coming from the stars and a sliver of new moon (rosh chodesh remember), lending a silver-grey tint to the sky. The horizon cut an inky black line, below which not a thing could be distinguished. The only sounds were the crickets chirping their treble counterpoint to the bass grunts of the hippos in the unseen river. Somewhere in the darkness a leopard stalked puku. And I felt Africa seep a little deeper into my bones.

We finally arrived at Lufupa, but it was late so we only really appreciated where it is the following morning when we awoke to find a large, deep, swiftly-flowing river just outside our tent. Lufupa is on the confluence of the Kafue and Lufupa rivers, both large by African standards, they don’t look like they have problems with the proverbial African droughts. The camp is more basic than most of the Wilderness camps I’ve been to (I nearly cried when I realised there was no ground Zambian coffee, oh dear, I must be addicted…), but great finishes, using twisted pieces of wood to hang toilet rolls on for example and spectacular view of the river that encourages contemplation. It also encourages boating, enjoying more hippo than even the most fervent of hippophiles can handle, and definitely the right place for the birds, as we shrieked and got seriously excited at Bohm’s Bee-eaters, Malachite Kingfisher, Black-backed Night-herons and just missed an African Finfoot, aaaah – guide Robert was fantabulous at spotting all these and more. Run by Dutchman Buzz and his wife Natalie, we spent two nights here and thoroughly enjoyed, but Wednesday saw us driving back north to the most well-known area – for Wilderness at least – the Busanga Plains.

The Plains look like miles of innocently waving grass, but are in fact to a large extent swamp. Inundated with water in the rainy season it slowly dries up after the dry season begins in about May, but even in July there were many areas still under a few centimetres of water – which is crucial if you want to drive through; you rapidly find just how sticky and clingy that soil is, so the only way through is with a mokoro which is pushed manually through the channels with luggage and people as it’s just a little to shallow even for them! Two other methods are to remove shoes and socks and wade – or you can take a helicopter for a kilometre or so… Now that’s an interesting little hop – we got into the heli (scary getting in because my imagination was rife with visions of my head being taken off by the swirling blades), which rose up in the air like a lift (held on by Willy Wonka’s sky-hooks perhaps?), zooted about 2km and dropped like a stone back to earth – a very sexy lift! Incredibly hyped when we got out of that one I must say and, as much as I don’t mind wading in mud, this was a lot more fun!

Oh but I was describing the plains: The waving grassland reminded me of the sea – a smoothness that is deceptive as it hides a host of life heard but not seen: from Crowned Cranes whinging at each other to the shrill alarm whistle of the puku, Coucals hoot and Fish Eagles call. And throughout the waving grass up pop the tree islands: large humps of what were originally termite mounds now overgrown with palms, large fig and sausage trees. And the camp we stayed at - Busanga Bush Camp (or BBC as it is fondly known) – is on one of the smaller islands, covered with fig trees, under which lie four tents. This camp got mega-points and much yelps of excitement from me, especially after I took a shower under a sycomore fig tree. Yes, the tents – of canvas and gauze – have a roof as usual in the bedroom side of things, but then the roof ends before the walls do so that the toilet, basin and shower are all completely open to the sky or in this case the trees. This is stunning when you look up into green, twirling leaves and colourful flowers, but a slight ‘downfall’ pardon the pun is the fact that the fig trees are in fruit at present so that birds and monkeys are all in the trees fressing away like Jews at a shul brocha. At this point gravity takes on vital importance when one might be hit on the head by a rotten fruit, or bird or monkey wee while showering – kind of defeats the purpose you understand. But it does add that frisson of excitement to even a mundane wash as one never quite knows if a rotten fruit will join the shampooing process, or as the rustling of leaves above indicates the possible fall of something gooey….

An afternoon drive turned up a large herd of roan antelope – an incredibly rare species in Kruger but here there is a herd of 28 which is amazing to see as aside from their rare status, they are the second largest antelope in Africa. Then on a termite mound lay a lioness and her two cubs who tried to outstare us with those huge round eyes – we watched them watching us watching them until we were all confused and left. The sun, thanks to the haze that hangs over the plains (a mixture of rising water vapour off the still-wet plains and the Zambian national
pastime) set in spectacular splendour, a large, round, shimmering pink ball that moved obligingly and scenically through the branches of a tree before slipping away.

The only thing better than sipping Zambian coffee while watching the sun rise through the mist over the plains of green and gold, lechwe grazing and Crowned Cranes dancing in the bright early morning haze, is being told by Shani the manager that "we’re just off to see the lion on the next termite mound, wanna come?" and bouncing off to do just that. Then just watching as she sauntered along (the lion not Shani), lit by the early morning sun, in front of that herd of roan who clearly didn’t know whether to run or stand and behaved suitably stupidly, yet backlit beautifully for the photo shoot!

Leaving at this point would have been an anticlimax but we had a ‘heli flip’ back to Lunga airstrip and oh my word! The helicopter rises straight up, doing the sky-hook thing, then does an abrupt turn and suddenly we’re at right angles to the Earth, staring over my left shoulder at the tiny buffalo herd amongst the trees. Then we zoom along close enough to the ground to see a pair of Wattled Cranes and their youngster spread their wings in alarm before we’ve left them far behind, or peer right into the nest of a pair of Fish Eagles on the top of a knobthorn tree directly below, only to rise sharply to look over vast swathes of woodland that disappears over the curve of the Earth in all directions.

And after that ANYTHING would be an anticlimax but truth be told, tummy was glad to get down to Earth, especially when we were met by Raymond from Lunga who had set up coffee (Yes!) and biscuits in the bush on the side of the airstrip, a last satisfying indulgence before flying south once more to Livingstone, dipping our wings over the great Victoria Falls in fond farewell to the ‘real’ Africa.

Return to Rocktail - or Turtles by the Sea

2007-03-08T07:53:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana returns to see the results of the egg laying activities she’d witnessed in November. This turns out to be a whole emotional birth/primeval Earth/woo woo-type experience….

After my last visit to Rocktail in November, I was determined to return to see the results of all the labour of those nesting mothers. I whinged and whined a bit, and when that didn’t work I took leave, and so, with friend Marice, I wended my way once again down south-east to KwaZulu-Natal (much in the news lately as a crime-infested place; luckily the only crimes we saw were the coal trucks going up and down the roads between Ogies and Bethal, clearly committing environmental crimes by helping people to burn fossil fuels but I digress). Aside from the potholed roads, KZN is beautiful in a truly rural African sort of way. Round thatched huts or rondavels banded by small patches of mealies, and clumps of lala palms dot the gentle green hills. Cute goats and regal cows with the occasional donkey munch on the side of the roads, which always helps to keep the driver awake as they have a marvellously sudden way of deciding to wander across the road at whim. Towns like Pongola and Jozini teem with people who do the same thing – all in all, a very invigorating drive.

Rocktail was as lovely as ever – if a little on the hot and humid side. Okay, a lot. Almost like being stuck in a cave deep underground sometimes, all damp and drippy, but nothing that several showers a day can’t help and anyway that’s the tropics for you. I’m not going to go into detail about the camp because you got that last time (homework: (re)read my last email), but the smiles and atmosphere made it feel like I had come home – even the kitchen staff were pleased to see us again! Chalet no.2 had less birdlife around it than my last chalet did but made up for this by having a slew of thick-tailed bushbabies who still had parties at night, but also delighted us during Shabbat dinner (which we had on our deck; the staff set up a table and lanterns under the stars – highly recommended for Friday night), bounding silently and effortlessly through the branches. Silently that is, until some family issue erupted and the screams were loud and bloodcurdling.

Speaking of birds (weren’t we?), two fantastic sightings: on the way to the camp we came across a pair of – wait for it – Rosy-throated Longclaws! (Okay the rest of you stop sniggering now.) And then, on the Friday morning, we decided to walk from Black Rock to the Lodge – some 6km, aren’t you impressed – and saw Palmnut Vultures – twice, once with a juvenile! Made the birders at the office green when I got back, that did.

(Some of this was written in the bird hide: a little dell with a tiny pool of water and a hide around it, a place so quiet you can hear a leaf hitting the ground or a gecko creeping across the canvas – scritch scratch – to catch an unwary spider. Of course this is except for the birds who are making such a racket (would Willie PLEASE come out and fight already?) but underneath this joyful clamour is a deep quiet, with the distant, confident roar of the ocean playing bass tone.)

This time I also managed to hang out in a hammock on the Hammock Trail, swinging and swaying through dappled light and shade, and I also went diving! I was rather nervous since it’s been seven years since I last put on the old BCD and sucked air out of a tank, but the diving operation at Rocktail is seriously professional, and Michelle the divemaster (mistress?) was amazing, taking me through the motions so calmly, I didn’t even do my usual cork imitation, but ascended to the surface like a normal human being. Although the school of large sturgeons flitting their way through the sunlight-shafted water above us made the three-minute stop incredibly well timed. We dived Gogo’s – a beautiful reef 18 metres down, where we saw a green turtle feeding, and stunning numbers of fish – Moorish idols, clownfish, clams, moray eels, parrotfish etc etc. No sharks but you can’t have everything I guess.

But the main reason for going was the turtle babies. Of course, that meant that the first night we were jumping up and down, let’s go already, in anticipation of the turtle drive – luckily low tide obliged us by being at 10:30, and there was a half moon shedding mysterious, blue light and doing the glinting thing off the sea, the waves alternating black and white as they rose and fell on the sands with soft sighs. The clouds came and went, the moon lighting them up to form heavy, woolly shapes against the stars – one looked exactly like a puppy lying upside down on its back – no really, Marice saw it too!

Not long into the drive, we saw our first tracks. Unlike the tanklike tracks of the big mamas, these are picanins, little pockmarks across the sands of time… sorry sorry. Anyway, the nesting tracks begin high on the beach above the high water mark; a little hole in the sand marks the point of exit from the earth. Then the tiny footprints spread out like a Chinese fan, but all leading down to the water. I expected to see broken egg shells, but it doesn’t work like that; the lighties break free from their shells whilst under the sand then, when everyone’s ready, they shimmy their way to the top in a tightly-knit ball, bursting out in a glorious, perilous bid for freedom as they scramble down to the sea en mass – that way some of them will escape ghost crabs and other predators – safety in numbers you see.

We stopped when we saw the tracks, for turtle researchers and gurus, Gugu and Chris, to record them, and then we saw it: a tiny, yet perfectly formed loggerhead about 10cm long. Clearly he (or she) was the slow one in the class because everyone else had left already, but this little lad (or lass) was still trying to get home, when our vehicle’s lights confused her (or him). You see, their eyes are very light sensitive so that they will head in the right direction – the slightly lighter phosphorescence of the sea as opposed to the dunes – isn’t it amazing how it’s all perfectly worked out? Unfortunately then we get in the way with our big lumbering feet and flash cameras and headlights and this poor guy took to wandering toward the vehicle. After taking a few minutes to admire his perfect little flippers and the way they moved so determinedly – first left front, then right front, then the back ones, all in strict rotation – we switched everything off to let him find his way. In the half light of the half moon, we strained our eyes to see a dark tear-shaped blob waddle towards home. His tear shape mirrored the tears in my eyes, because let’s face it, when you know that his chances are two in a thousand, there’s an overwhelming feeling of helplessness and desire to protect him all the way to the sea. (Yes, I was guilty of flapping my hands at a ‘nasty’ crab that was sidling up towards him to make him move away, muttering dark threats if he even LOOKED at ‘our’ turtle funny. Shame, poor bloke.)

On we went, silent and pensive – would he make it? Had he already been eaten by a kingfish? But such melancholy was driven away by the sight of an enormous leatherback (YES!) just finishing patting down and disguising her nest on the beach by disturbing the sand for a few metres around. The contrast between the 1.6-metre animal with enormous flippers thwacking the sand down with incredible power and that little lightie was so great it was almost ludicrous. I realised that the loggerhead baby’s whole body was the same size as the leatherback’s eyeball – such is the incredible potential on this planet of ours.

The last time I watched a leatherback, the weather was noisy and wet. Tonight all was quiet on the beachfront, silent enough to hear how the leatherback groaned and heaved enormous sighs – she was exhausted with her nesting efforts. Again, the atmosphere was evocative: that half moon shining down on the enormous black mound of turtle, the sighs and moans, the silent group of humans who followed her at a respectful distance when she heaved her great bulk, sighing and moaning, down to the sea. It was an echo of the determination we saw in the day-old tiny turtle we saw earlier – the primordial will to survive that drives all life on Earth.

(Of course the other way to look at it is to call her Mabel – she looked a bit like a Mabel – and then her groans were distinctly Jewish bobbe-like “Oy, you don’t know vat I go through… oy, the aches, the pains, mein beck….”)

We drove home in a daze, feeling quite emotional about the whole thing, but determined to go out again the next night if at all possible. It was and our luck held; this time we encountered just a few leatherback babies making their way to the water. It seems that the masses – 90 or so at a time – exploding from their nests are not being seen this year, possibly because some of them did not survive a nasty cold snap that happened some time in December. But the few leatherbacks were lively and lovely, their leathery carapaces showing up the white ‘stitching’ which stretches from neck to wagging, tiny tail. Again, we walked them down the sea, watching as the small waves swept them back then drew them into the foam, before Mbongeni urged us back into the vehicle – he had to continue monitoring the 30km beach and didn’t have time for us to get all woo woo about ‘our’ turtles.

Turns out we were very lucky because the next two nights they saw tracks and that was all.

So all in all, we had a wonderful few days, the turtle times were interspersed with sunny days, long walks on the beach, learning more about this beautiful place (wild date fruit is delicious, waterberries aren’t my favourite), and just hanging out with wonderful people – both staff and guests. Shabbat was lovely there too, some interesting halachic conundrums to mess with the brain, but that’s for another time…

But the blue moon-tinged memories remain, and every now and then I am swept away by the thought of a small, round body, neck stretched out resolutely, flippers waving enthusiastically as it chases bluebottles through the aquamarine depths of the ocean – and I smile involuntarily, thinking: good luck and Godspeed, little one!

A postscript:
I’ve thought a lot about that little loggerhead. And one point came to mind: In Ashrei (Psalm 145) we say: “Poteach et Yadecha umasbia lechol chai ratzon - You open Your hand and satisfy every living thing [with] its desire.” And even while I was worrying over one little turtle and hoping (praying?) that nothing would eat it, I understood that in the sheer numbers of turtles hatching, G-d is in fact feeding many other species; in the death of one creature He opens His hand to nourish another. And who am I to say which one should live and which should die? After all, it is He Who is the True Judge of the world….

(My picture but courtesy of Wilderness Safaris.)

Rocktail Bay - Turtles in the Sand

2006-12-14T14:33:00.000+02:00

Dear all,

In which Ilana finally gets to meet several large sea turtles at the dead of night, wander through a coastal forest and contemplate life as a beach.

It’s odd how the closer a place is to you – geographically speaking – the longer it takes you to get to it. I’ve been to some of the most remote places in Southern Africa, but it took me two years to get to Rocktail Bay in KwaZulu-Natal, a mere 7 hours’ drive from Joburg! Go figure. But the wait (and grumbling "when you going to let me go see the turtles yadda yadda") was worth it, I must say.

It may be closer than Namibia say, but it is still a bit of a drive to get there – all the way via Ermelo, Bethal, Piet Retief, Pongola, Jozini and many potholes, goats and wandering pedestrians later you’re in the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park. The place is surrounded by a nature reserve on land (a World Heritage Site no less) and the Maputaland Marine Reserve at sea. The only people around besides guests and staff are villagers from the nearby communities who come to fish or collect mussels on the seashore, or graze their beautiful Nguni cattle in the coastal grasslands. Did you know that there is a different name for every cow/bull depending on the pattern on its hide? For example, a cow sporting a speckled brown-and-white configuration is called "Plover’s egg" – because the pattern matches that on the eggs of a Plover. See?

But I digress. Rocktail Bay Lodge in fact was Wilderness Safaris’ first lodge, bought over in 1992, so it is older and let’s face it, a little shabbier, than the rest. But it still shouts WILDERNESS! – 10 A-frame chalets are perched high on wooden decks in the tree canopy. Trees on a beach, I hear you ask? Well, not exactly. The camp is not built on the sea/beach side – the winds in the area would make this unpleasant and also it breaks the stunning wild view. And anyway, just take a look at the houses sliding into the ocean at Cape St Francis because of how they’re built… so why not a camp at the sea in the forest - vive la difference, say I. There’s an enormous vegetated dune – second highest in the world they say – along the coast here, covered in lush vegetation, so the camp is built in this forest but on the landward side. I love forest chalets – you’re surrounded by twirling, dancing leaves that turn to shifting, dappled shadows and sunlight as the sun moves across the sky. Branches and brown mulch-covered ground peek between the green of the foliage. This is even better in the outdoors shower – but you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you. I discovered that having a shower with elephants in the background is almost bested by having a shower in the midst of waving branches, whipping leaves and the chirping of birds, sunlight lapping one’s back – I kept thinking I was in a natural waterfall somewhere in the woods.

The bedroom is simple – feels like a tent and not too many windows which presents a challenge on cloudy dark days. But the service is Wilderness and that’s always outstanding – yep, with the old coffee in the morning delivered to your door, boy I’m getting used to that! A family of bushbabies was living in the roof, which is only sweet in the daytime when they’re sleeping. At night, their parties tended to be noisy, with lots of scurrying around, chirps and yells, loud rap music, swearing….

The view from the deck is that rippling multitude of green and brown, but in fact was aural rather than visual, surrounded as I was by the sounds of many, many birds yelling – the Red-chested Cuckoo shouting Piet my vrou! (a bit of an insomniac he was, going on a bit about Piet at night as well), a Sombre Bulbul telling Willie to come out and fight, and the rasping call of Purple-crested Lourie – all overlaid with Christmas beetles sassily attempting to compete. At night the reed frogs take up the chorus (and those bushbaby jollers). I took advantage of this deck whenever I could, whether early morning revelling in Wilderness coffee, or afternoon, watching the sun sink behind the next dune forest, the hazy light sending shafts of gold through the leaves and branch silhouettes. Great for contemplation and to try and improve my bird sound identification; the problem is, typical of such a lush environment, you can’t see the birds for the trees, only hear them. (Sorry, sorry)

Then there’s the faint tang of the sea that wafts over the dune, mixed with a scent of wood of deck and chair. This smell brings vividly to mind long-ago family holidays, you know, the ones with endless sunny days, sand in your ice cream and peeling noses. The ones with golden memories of sand castles with complicated moats getting flooded by the tide, brightly-coloured buckets and spades, being buried in the shallows, scrabble played on rainy days (okay so there were some) – do you remember?

Got carried away there, but Rocktail brings a lot of those memories back. The beach is just over the dune, so first chance I could, I grabbed sunblock and set off up the steep boardwalk through the forest, over the crest of the dune, and down. There was a bit of difficulty when I was almost sidetracked onto the Forest Walk or the Hammock Trail (great idea: a shady walk through the forest with little side paths that go off at intervals, at the end of each of which is a hammock or two strung between two trunks in a clearing. If you like the look of that particular glade you merely put up the "Do not disturb" sign at the head of the pathway and tumble into the hammock with a book or just doze – cool huh?), and of course I had to identify several birds along the way which took a bit of time… but eventually the boardwalk ended in white sand, the trees gave way to the thick, fleshy grey-green leaves of coastal plants, and over the rise – there’s the sea!

And what a sea it is. This is a 40km-long beach, remember, all ours, so there are no houses or jetties or golf courses or other vital elements of civilisation (did I tell you I’m resigning from the human race? I’ve applied for entrance to the dwarf mongoose family) to interrupt the line where bright green meets sandy white-gold, which then in turn gives way to blue and white-flecked ocean. Far in the distance to my left I could see a fisherman, but to my right – not another person. Now, compare that to almost anywhere else, and you’ll see why I like it.

The problem is that there was too much to do so I only managed to luxuriate on MY beach a couple of times. There is no lifeguard obviously; bit of a drawback if you want to go far out, but I’ll take that problem over crowding between the flags with lots of other bodies any day. Imagine the only company being the roar and suck of the ocean, a few Sanderlings trotting along the shoreline and a lone Fish Eagle battling the wind.

Anyway, I’ll stop raving about ‘just’ a beach and tell you other stuff you can do there. There’s a trip out to Black Rock, which is a fossilised sand dune eroded in pointillism mode, a protrusion on the endless smooth sandy beach. I sat as the sun went down, just me, a bleached log, and 40 ghost crabs working the intertidal zone. Whenever I stood up or turned my head, they stop, eyes on stalks popping in terror, then scuttle off on tiptoes, reminding me irresistibly of 8-legged Victorian ladies lifting their skirts to hurry away from an unladylike scene.

Then there’s Lala Nek where you can snorkel amongst a great assortment of fish – including eels and devil’s firefish (It’s also a great place for a beer at sundown.), the Hippo Pools where a large pod of these mammals hang out – very weird seeing hippo at the coast! – and a visit to the community but we didn’t manage that. Although we did drive through ‘the community’ – meaning huts and houses scattered amongst the grasslands, ragged children waving hello and a man passed out on Ilala Palm wine – in fact, so well passed out that we thought he was dead for a while….

There’s also a trail through the forest, into the grasslands and then back to camp along the beach. This was spectacular, complete with perfect day, hot hot with blue blue sky so that the forest was shady and the grasslands searing, snake in the grass, birds on the wing and lots and lots of trees to get to know – Gugu was my guide and knew them all.

He is shy and has the sweetest accent – you’d like to bottle him and take him back to Joburg, as Zev said. (By the way, this time I was with Mike Myers, our photographer, and friends Leeron Mazor and Zev Krengel had come down the same week, so we had a lot of fun, aside from all this nature raving.)

But the piece de resistance, if I may be so bold, is the Turtle Drive. Bit of background needed so patience please: On this stretch of shore, for the last aeon or so (how much is an aeon anyway?), during the summer months, loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles drag themselves up the beach, find a good spot and dig a nest where they lay a hundred or so eggs at a time. A couple of months later, these hatch and the phenomenal sight of hundreds of turtle lighties scrambling down to the sea takes place. Of course with birds and lizards and everything trying to eat them there’s the survival rate of two in a thousand but that’s Mother Nature for you. Those two, if they’re female, will return to this selfsame beach to lay their eggs in turn and so the cycle continues. Of course lately, humans think it’s really intelligent to either dig up the eggs and eat them, or decide turtle meat is delicious or just get the turtles caught in fishing lines (see disclaimer above re leaving the race) so of course the turtles are endangered. But not all humans: since the 1960s, the Maputaland Sea Turtle Project has been hard at work monitoring every turtle that arrives on the beach, tagging them, counting, protecting the nests etc. When the project ran into financial difficulties, Wilderness guides started doing the monitoring – which means that every night from October to December, at low tide (so as not to damage the beach too much by impacting the sand and its delicate life forms, we drive below the high water mark, see), intrepid guides – Gugu, Andrew or Mbongeni – drive a 30km stretch of beach to count and tag turtles. Every night. No matter the weather. Or the fact that they put in a full day guiding. Such commitment is sterling and rare. And if any guests want to come with, they’re welcome to. Do we want to?! What a question!

I ended up on three drives mainly because I can’t keep away when there is once-in-a-lifetime stuff happening. The first one I was too tired to appreciate as low tide was from 10:30 to 1:00 and I’d had no sleep the night before: there were 8 loggerheads (muttering "turtle shmurtle" by the eighth admittedly) and a gorgeous leatherback (measuring an awesome 1.9 metres long – now compare that to your pet tortoise!) just finishing nesting. She was promptly ‘adopted’ by a 12-year-old kid and his mom – for 500 Azanian ront as we say, you can adopt a turtle and this helps us fund the project of course. And the third night there were like 24 or something, I lost track and then the sun rose and we saw Fish Eagles on the beach and you know how I get sidetracked by birds. But second night was not just successful from a turtling point of view but highly atmospheric - almost Tolkienian in its tempestuousness. (I wrote this up on my deck one golden afternoon, and the contrast between it and the ‘dark and stormy night’ may account for rant – apologies.)

When we set out – 11:30 this time; we’d had time for an hour’s snooze after convivial dinner beneath the Natal Mahogany tree – the stars had disappeared and low, grey clouds began to press down on the air – even in the darkness we could see their grey-blackness as we bumped down in an open game drive vehicle to the beach. As the headlights lit the way ahead of us, the sands seemed grey-brown and there were eerie, bright white blobs darting here and there – the ghost crabs living up to their name. Shame, those in the path of the oncoming vehicle didn’t quite know what to do: darting this way and that, they clearly were unable to work out which way lay safety. They’d dash left, then right, then left-RIGHT LEFT LEFT – then just give up and stop – right in the way of the wheel of death, aaww. I imagine their bulging eyes on stalks squeezed shut as they think: Oh no here it comes… thunk. (I’m sure eventually we’ll have to have a Ghost Crab Monitoring Project but there seem to be plenty at the moment.)

A kilometre along, we came across the first loggerhead. Loggerheads are not as big as leatherbacks, sort of ‘medium-sized’ – meaning it averages 1 metre in length and weighs up to 140kg – and its shell shape seems a cross between a torpedo and a tear-drop. This one was just finishing patting down the sand over her nest and while her large flippers were still carefully arranging the sand so that it is somewhat camouflaged from all those predators, Gugu quickly measured her and found that she’d been tagged before. Much excitement as her tag number was BB471 – turns out she was tagged in 1991, which means she as at least 20 years old at that point, so we’re talking old mama by now! (By the way, even these ladies are incredibly strong – once they start moving, even if you hold on with all your might, they can drag you down to the sea with them!)

On we went, dark sea and foam on left, white ghost crabs all around us, when we saw a large leatherback just finishing her nest. Ah shucks we said, but it turns out she was just playing with us, making a fake nest to draw off predators, and the real work was just beginning. She chose a site and began painstakingly digging with her back flippers – remember she can’t actually see what she’s doing – it’s all done by instinct and feel – as we piled out the vehicle and made our way stumbling over the dark sand to her. By the way, these ladies are bigger, with elongated, streamlined dark grey or black shells – they average 1.2 to over 2 metres and weigh up to 750kg! Nice turtle, good turtle…

Meanwhile, the rain began, and lightning lit up the scene as we rushed to the vehicle for ponchos. Wilderness has these great ponchos – waterproof on outside and blanket-like on the inside, with hoods – which turned out to be vital because the rain was coming down in big ploppy drops, which the wind threw at us from all directions. Ignoring all this weather, we gathered in a respectful circle around the leatherback, as Gugu took measurements and tagged her both with a metal tag on the flipper and a microchip. When leatherbacks start the nesting process they aren’t disturbed by anything, in fact, they go into a trance of a sort and don’t notice any clipping and flashing happening around them.

And obviously they don’t care if they’re getting wet either. So there we stood, like some kind of weird cult in our hooded cloaks, rain pouring down, lightning doing the special effects monster house mood thing. In such atmosphere, it seemed to me that we were priests or supplicants worshipping the Great Mother Turtle, representing of course Mother Nature herself, the miracle of birth and beginning of a cycle of life.

The pounding of the waves and the lightning echoed the raw creation of life on Earth as it crawled out of the sea millions of years ago – and as this ancient animal created new life herself, releasing billiard ball-sized eggs gently into the hole she’d dug. This image became stronger as we all took turns to kneel down to see her drop the glistening eggs, making obeisance to motherhood and to life itself as our shoes filled with rain and sand.

(Of course the other image that came to mind was that of the Great A Tuin herself moving through the multiverse with four elephants on her back and the Discworld on that – but if you haven’t read Terry Pratchett I can’t help you here.)

She laid about 70 eggs or so, and then began slowly and with infinite care and patience filling the hole with sand, patting it down firmly. I marvelled at the effort she took with every stroke of her flippers. By now we were impatient, but that could have been the fact that it was now pouring buckets. We eventually gave in to the elements and, leaving her to finish off, we stumbled back to the vehicle. Remember this is an open vehicle so you sit down SPLAT into a puddle on your seat. Gugu drove a while longer (he has to do the full 30km for it to be a scientific monitoring system) but couldn’t actually get any further in the driving rain and decided to turn back for home – to our heartfelt relief. On the way back, the rain and lightning continued unabated and in fact continued all through the night, but you know what they say: there’s nothing like snuggling into a warm dry bed with rain drumming on the roof after a good turtle sighting!

Of course I haven’t described the other activity that Rocktail is known for and that’s the diving on reefs where no-one else is, swimming with dolphins and whales and even whale sharks, but that’s because I didn’t get to do any; combination of bad weather and not getting my act together. But please God I hope to return to Rocktail soon to make sure I’ve completed ALL the activities (including that Hammock Trail, never did get to do that), not acceptable to leave it in the middle, right?

Anyway, with that, Chanuka sameach to some and happy new year greetings to others. PS: Some pics below of the place and a leatherback turtle in the dark and the rain...

Jack's: Of Space and Silence

2006-08-17T08:45:00.000+02:00

Why are you so afraid of silence, silence is the root of everything. If you spiral into its void a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear. (Jelaluddin Rumi)

Funnily enough that’s just what I thought (only not as well), when I was lying in a warm bed, looking up at the Milky Way splayed across the sky – in the middle of the Makgadikgadi Pans in the Kalahari. Yes, you read that right, I was lying in bed looking up at the stars. No, I wasn’t in a tent. I was just in a bed. A bed sitting out by itself in the middle of the flattest piece of Earth I’ve ever seen. Admittedly there were other beds scattered around, their sleepy inhabitants snuggled up against the nippy night air, but each one is far enough from the others to give me the impression that the Earth, the sky and I are alone in the universe.

Okay, okay I’ll go back to the beginning. I was lucky enough to go for a few days to a place called Jack’s Camp, which is on the edge of the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana. The saltpans, just so you understand, are enormous, stretching forever across a big area in Botswana, south-east of the Okavango Delta and west of the bushveld of Zimbabwe; a greater contrast to the wetlands of the Delta you would be hard-pressed to find. The pans are the remnants of a superlake that took up most of southern Africa seven million years ago (or whatever floats your boat), and then, because of plate tectonics, the earth – and the rivers – moved. Over the aeons, the lake dried up, some areas with enough water to become bushveld, river, Victoria Falls or Delta, while here it became bone dry. It’s flat as the eye can see, and covered in salty, sandy crust. It’s fun to walk on, all crunchy and crackly – like walking on bubble wrap.

That’s because in the wet season it is covered in water and short grasses, but in the dry season i.e. now, it dries up, leaving a crust of caked mud with air bubbles - and with shrimps and other small creatures that lie dormant, waiting for the rains to bring them back to life.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Not a whole lot of life out there then is there? On the dry pans, there is no life. There’s just us. In the day, we get there by quad bikes, by night, we’re all there is. More minimalist you won’t find.

Obviously you can’t have a camp here, can you? But of course the pans end and the grasses begin, and that’s where Jack’s is. It sits on an island (of course you can’t tell it’s an island in the dry season, but they assure me it is) covered in long, dry rustling grass, tall palm trees and other bushes – a true oasis in the desert. Even though it’s the dry season now, there was so much rain recently that there was still water in front of the camp, and some left-over flamingos – in the wet season hundreds of thousands of the pink birds arrive and wade the salty waters, as well as – get this – the second largest migration of wildebeest and zebra in Africa, thousands of them moving through the short, seasonal grasses. We missed them by not much, sadly, but there you go then.

We also missed the other major animal sightings – the brown hyaena were denning but went all shy and retiring on us, so we never did get to see them even though we sat near their den and sipped beer patiently for an hour. We also missed my personal favourite: a habituated troop of meerkats. Apparently you spend the morning with them, just hanging out with the cute critters while they do their life thing, scrabbling for insects, alarm calls at raptors, socialising… Ah well, another time.

But let me tell you more about the camp. It's just stuffed full of personality. The history, on one leg, is that in the 1960s, Jack Bousfield established a camp in the area where his father and grandfather had explored and hunted. Jack’s son Ralph has taken it over, called it after his father, and his blue eyes glitter with enthusiasm when he shows us around his home – and he really does consider it as such. Personally I’ve never seen a home quite like this but that’s all part of what makes this place so different. It is in fact a museum, a place dedicated to and evoking the past – of his own family as well as of the country in which he lives. The lounge, dining room, billiard room and library areas are cluttered with glass cases filled with bones, fossils, egg shells, stuffed animals, and Stone Age tools. Old, faded photographs and drawings cover the walls; furniture is of heavy, dark wood. The canvas material is, oddly enough, pink with a starry design; this is apparently a copy of the officers’ mess in the tents of the British Army. Even if pink and fossils aren’t your thing, you have to appreciate the vision behind it – of the importance of preserving or remembering our history, both personal and as a species.

My tent is at the end of the island, a long walk on narrow sandy paths with waist-high dry grass rustling on either side. I love the dark wood, the four-poster bed, brass basin hidden in a writing desk looking thing, outdoor shower under a palm tree (but of course!) and – get this – the toilet that looks just like a large armchair! The view from the tent is just right for awe and contemplation. My eyes need a wide-angle lens to take in the proverbial sea of grass, stretching to the horizon that is perfectly round, edged with palm trees where the sky comes down to kiss the earth.

Our first afternoon had been the brown hyaena-less game drive, although we had seen a variety of larks and pipits, amazing Black Korhaans, jackals and ground squirrels – large, gopher-like, not at all what I thought they’d look like. Our guide, appropriately named Super – and he was, super-sized 6 foot 10, super guide, super smile – knew everything, and exuded a calm assurance that all was well in the world (that’s why I like the desert, you’re so far away from the madness of the reality of human "civilisation"). We ended the day with one of those very swish dinners, with guests from all over the world, including George and his son George (go figure) from the US and Rick and his daughter Rosie – Rick being an ultra-rich, loud, very funny British guy, go figure again.

You’re woken in the morning by a gentle call and a silver tray on which sits a pot of steaming coffee in a tea cosy (or is that a coffee cosy?), cup, saucer and biscuits. When asked the night before if I wanted coffee or tea, I turned up my nose at this "uber-safari" concept, but I must admit that when it arrived the next morning I rather sheepishly enjoyed it….

On our only morning there we went off for a walk with four Bushmen. Apparently you can call them that, I thought it was insulting but they say not and they should know. I can’t remember the names of the four except Cobra, a man who looks older than his 65 years in typical Bushman fashion; his face wrinkles have wrinkles of their own. He’s called Cobra because he loves snakes and if you find one in your tent, he’ll come and lovingly take it away. And no, he won’t kill it either and won’t talk to you again if you do. The other three had names with those complicated clicks and tsk sounds – spelt with // and ?s in them. I think one was called //am. Or perhaps it was ?am.

They wore clothes, but for all that, I’ve never met anyone more at home in their environment. They carried spears and steenbok skin bags, and walked with a swinging gait which they can keep up for hours; next to them I felt ungainly and out of touch with my surroundings. They stopped often to show us tracks and dung, dig up tubers and other roots, explain the uses of the plants and tell stories of the animals. Did you hear the one about the Yellow-billed Kite who once lent a needle to the chickens?

Well, they lost it. The Kite was so angry he told them that until they found it he would hunt them from the air. Since then, you see chickens pecking in the dirt looking madly for the needle, while the Kite hovers above them…. It conveys perfectly the frantic pecking of the fowl, the silent soaring of the raptor – and their relationship.

They made fire using sticks (we wanted to offer them a match but it seemed a bit unsporting) not just to demonstrate this amazing art, but to smoke their home-made tobacco, and showed us how they made a trap for birds with the fibrous bark of a baobab tree. We walked for hours under blue sky and hot sun, the gentle clicking of their language rolling over and around us.
It was while watching Cobra and the others make their fire that I realised that this place stands firmly on the edge of yesterday. From the pans that took seven million years to be what they are today, to the colonial quality of the camp, to the Bushman way of life that is preserved and celebrated, the camp and what it represents thrives on nostalgia and on all that was good of the past. (Having said this, we all know that "the good old days" concept classically ignores all those pesky little details that made colonialism such a marvellous concept – not.)

In the afternoon the quiet past meets the roaring present – quad biking through the pans. (Yes I still love quadding…) But before we roar off into the sunset (well, to the left of it to be exact), we have to have the correct headgear – a kikoi that is wrapped Bedouin-fashion around the head. A kikoi is a brightly coloured piece of cloth also known as the ‘Kalahari cooler’ since in summer all one can do in the incredible heat of over 45 degrees Celsius is lie in your tent with a wet kikoi over you to catch the breeze. The aim now though is to keep the dust out of our hair, and to make us feel like Lawrence of Arabia, the ends of the fabric whipping and rippling in the wind as we roar down a narrow track that stretches crisply through the whiteness to the end of the world. (We have to keep to the track so that we do not destroy the fragile environment of the Pans of course.) All around me there is only whiteness and flatness all the way to the deepening sky – 360-degree emptiness.

We stop for sundowners, watch that red sun slip spectacularly under the earth, and play games with the nothingness: try walking straight across the pan blindfolded – most of us curve one way or the other, some almost turning a complete circle. At dusk, we all take 150 steps away from each other, lie down and watch the stars blink on one by one. The silence is so intense that I swear I can hear the Earth humming to itself as it turns on its axis.

On our way back to camp, we see a roaring campfire just off the track. Gosh, says Super in mock surprise, what can that be? Gosh, it is a place to stop for pre-dinner drinks and then dinner – a three-course succulent repast that is brought and made right out here in the middle of nowhere.

Stewart the chef is clearly very good at his job! (My repast was a little smaller and had a lot of tinfoil in it but was no less good for all that.)

But wait, there’s more. The next surprise is that, on the pretext of showing us a fossil hippo, Super leads us out into the darkness (the fun bit here is that you don’t need a torch to light your way, you can walk for miles in pitch darkness and not bump into anything, except other night-vision-challenged humans of course) and springs the greatest surprise of all: Beds set up, spread out from each other, complete with warm duvet, pillow, and hot water bottle, squatting oddly in the space and the silence. It’s easy to know which bed belongs to you, because your toiletry bag or toothbrush is on it… There’s a fire, a loo, and the guides keeping watch, but that’s all quite a way off, making us feel safe, yet intrepid – great combo.

Some people stayed, others opted to return to camp – me? What a question. The chance to snuggle down in a warm bed and see more stars than you’ve ever dreamed of, to struggle to stay awake and watch the Scorpion turn and slide down towards the edge of the globe, to feel the silence reach way down inside of me – does not come along often. The whole Planetarium spread out above and to each side of me – before long, the eyelids drooped and I felt myself spinning through the universe amongst those twinkling, whirling suns…. And then before you know it, it is morning. I don’t have to move much to watch the sun rise, and the colours seep into the world again. (And wave blurrily at Rob and Chris somewhere in the distance.) Then, stumble off to the fire, kept going all night, and grab fresh coffee and muffins… it doesn’t get much better than this.

And in fact, it didn’t, because we had to swiftly quad bike back to camp, (man, that was COLD!) quickly shower, grab breakfast, say goodbye, and charge bumpily to the airstrip (although en route, we did screech to a halt for a caracal – superb) to get on the plane to wing our way regretfully to Maun and then Johannesburg. Sigh.

When I need space to breathe, and silence to hear, I now know where to go.