Weekly Picture Story
The view from Piekenierskloof Pass over the Swartland, en route from Cape Town to Clanwilliam and the West coast. It looks especially attractive in the soft light lent at the rising and setting of the sun. But this is sterile land, where biodiversity is sacrificed at the altar of monoculture, particularly wheat. Beyond those mountains, to the rich waters of the cold Atlantic, and behind me, in the Cederberg mountain wilderness, are the real places to visit. For this week’s place to stay, I’m suggesting nothing dry, but rather a cool looking spot on the edge of the Atlantic, Strandloper Ocean Boutique Hotel, in the picture-book coastal village of Paternoster. I visited the village 20 years ago, before my life took the wildly interesting turns that it has. It was remote, quiet, rugged and beautiful then, apparently it’s a bit busier today, trendy with the Cape Town crowd. Maybe I’ll get there before you (!) http://www.strandloperocean.com/
An intense heat has swamped South Africa’s western Cape province of late, resulting in an extreme drought and varying states of emergency regarding water consumption in Cape Town. The heat has started to dissipate, ever so slightly in this last week of March 2017, mostly noticeable in the cooler early mornings and evenings. Thoughts of cool bring to mind the onshore breezes and lurking fog-banks of the #WestCoast with its tell-tale cold blue waters, rich in nutrients, nursing the semi-arid shoreline. They bring the Cape Gannets, the exquisitely painted diving seabirds seen in the photograph, which nest in their thousands on a small island in Lamberts Bay harbour. Such thoughts of a cool west coast also bring to mind the much anticipated and prayed-for #winter rains. More than relief, the much anticipated consistent soaking winter rains will lay the foundation carpet for the patchwork dazzle ’n blur of Spring colour at the end of winter’s tunnel. It’s a world of Daisies, Bulbs, Fynbos and Succulents, of Vetkoek, Roosterbrood and home-made Ginger-beer, and you really shouldn’t miss it. The accommodation this week, #bushmanskloof, was ranked no.#3 of Africa’s top lodges. From here you have the world’s largest collection of rock-paintings in the Cederberg, a marketing ploy if ever there was, but a good one, and probably true. http://www.bushmanskloof.co.za/
It was December, and we were heading south in the game-drive vehicle, away from the rocky Karoo slopes to an arid savanna dominated by wavy grass and shattered fragments of shale. Content because we had spent some time with a cheetah, lazing in ubiquitous fashion under a bush, we were looking for rhino. And then we saw this dark lump on the road ahead that wasn’t a rock. From a distance we could see that it was moving, We stopped, I hopped off the vehicle, lay in the road a long way off, my seven year-old Fynn at my shoulder, not budging so as not to become part of his immediate scenery, not to scare hm off. Elbow resting on tiny, sharp stones, left hand cupping the lens, I watched his steady progress. He was quick and relentless on his mission, his scaly padded feet crunching the gravel as he cruised straight past without even a tortoise glance. http://www.samara.co.za/lodges/karoo-lodge/
Smiley is a delicacy amongst African peoples in South Africa’s townships and rural areas, selling for about R60 each, according to this woman, who at 4pm is cleaning her 10th smiley of the day. Cape Town’s Langa township is the oldest in South Africa, formed in part due to early 20th century racist thinking that was fairly typical of the time. Langa’s creation has a bizarre connection to bubonic plague. The stories behind such scenes will be behind tours I will be launching and taking around Cape Town and South Africa. http://www.districtsixguesthouse.co.za/
This is apparently an example of the largest nest on earth. Home to as many as 500 birds, it’s a sociable weaver’s nest, a feature of the drier, south-western parts of South Africa; the southern Kalahari and northern Cape Karoo. A natural architectural phenomenon, the structures are so big, with as many as 100 ‘chambers’, that they can collapse the trees and the telegraph poles they’re built in and around. The chambers face the ground, making it more difficult for the Cape cobra or boomslang (tree snake) and the pygmy falcon to hunt them. Having seen so many of these nest though my life, I had a sudden yen to know which trees the nests are built on, and google threw up Acacia erioloba, Boscia albitrunca and Aloe dichotoma as answers. This is the acacia erioloba, on Witsand Nature Reserve, same place as last week’s image of the Springbok. https://www.witsandkalahari.co.za/ hashtags: #witsand #kalahari #sociableweaver #africanstorybook #angusbegg #immedia #northerncape #witsandnaturereserve #SAT #southafricantourism #northerncapetourism
This is an elderly springbok, South Africa’s national animal, at a waterhole in Witsand Nature reserve, in a southern corner of the arid Kalahari sand system. From the fact that it was alone, and heavily scarred on its nose, I knew it was a bull. The scars are the result of rutting, a battle for dominance that he probably lost to a younger male; you can just make out the scars below the brown blaze and his eyes.I was in a hide, which made it possible to get this close, although every time I moved, to change lenses or to swat a fly, he dashed off, slowly returning a little later. That happened five times. Witsand is pure magic for the bush enthusiast who doesn’t need the ‘Big Five’. It consists of massive, blue sky by day and a gazillion starts by night, especially at new moon. Accomodation is in a handful of beautiful and private, large thatched chalets, positioned in the bush so that one isn’t in sight of the other – which led me to feel I was the only one there. For this reason the animals also feel they have the run of the place, with mongoose, jackal, striped field mice and birds visiting the bird-bath daily, “ Unfazed by the humans”, says Owen, the Witsand tourism manager who gave me a bed for the night. In the less than 24 hours I spent there, duikers were always browsing around the camp.The camp has a pool, as it gets very hot in summer, and there are hikes and walking trails laid out.I’ve been wanting to visit for years, and on driving back home to Cape Town from Jo’burg I had decided to drive a little west via Witsand; a quieter road with no tolls and plenty of discovery. It was a good choice. PS – Ask Owen why the camp has unlimited water. And about the pangolins and the farmers and the animal rehab centre. https://www.witsandkalahari.co.za/
Being so familiar with Africa’s wildlife, when I heard that India had more wildlife species than Africa, I just had to get back there. When I finally made the trip this past October 2016, I made a conscious decision not to google or research it, content with delighting in what I saw, ‘cos that’s the feeling I get when in discovery mode. I felt curiously at home. It wasn’t the stories of corruption in local newspapers, but rather the lapwings, ibises, leopards, hogs, crocodiles and antelope, species common to my southern African home in physical surroundings that were occasionally very familiar. The reason ? The Indian subcontinent was apparently not geographically connected with the rest of Asia until about 40 million years ago. Before then it was part of the super continent of Gondwanaland, but more of that next week. While taking a break from our tiger-search in Panna Tiger Reserve, having a snack overlooking a gorge-plus-waterfall with my new Hungarian photographer-buddy Gabor, we came across a pair of long-billed vultures building their nest on the cliffs below us. The one was collecting branches from a forested area below us to the left. Each time it returned to its ‘construction site’, it would hug the cliffs, disappearing under overhangs, almost as if giving us the vulturine finger. This made focusing with a 500mm handheld a touch challenging.
These brothers, part of a hunting coalition of three, I photographed in Zululand three years ago. The specific reserve is one of the few places cheetah are safe in this consumptive era we live in – unless someone in the east finds their spotted skin to be a historic cure-all for declining vision caused by too much screen-time. I’ve recently returned from India, and I believe a warning to authorities in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana is the fact that habitat loss and hunting saw the Asiatic cheetah become extinct in India 60 years ago. Apart from a few reported to be still alive in arid eastern Iran, these are the only remaining populations of wild Asiatic cheetah. The cheetah was reportedly a favorite animal of the Mughal emperor Akbar, who reportedly had an army of 1,000 cheetahs which accompanied him on his hunting expeditions. In 2010 the Indian government spoke about reintroducing cheetah, as it is apparently the only animal to have gone extinct in India. However with the last three shot dead in 1947 by a Maharajah (who shot over 1000), and previous attempts at reintroduction literally having been shot down, enthusiasm for the project seems to have died. It seems some Arab sheiks are also fond of the cheetah; cubs are today being stolen from the wild to be kept as pets in lavish air conditioned households in the desert. from ’other wild. A torch-bearer for cheetah throughout her life has been Namibia’s Laurie Marker-Kraus. Information about cheetah and her work can be found below. http://cheetah.org/
You may have heard that lions are under threat. With CITES COP 17 in Johannesburg now done ‘n dusted, these magnificent beasts, like this Zululand lioness ‘shot’ a couple years back, are no better off, largely because trade in lion parts is still permitted. And with tiger bones in short supply in the environmentally bankrupt markets of China because of intense poaching, lion bones are in demand; dodgy traders passing them off as those of the tiger. This feline was a pleasure to watch, irritated by flies on a late afternoon at one of South Africa’s better game reserves. A good memory considering that just last week a lion just on the Mozambican side of the Kruger National Partk was killed using cyanide, a poaching incident that also killed a multitude of vultures http://www.andbeyond.com/phinda-mountain-lodge/
After entering the Cape Point of Cape Town’s Table Mountain national park, follow the first turning to ‘Olifantsbos’ (elephant bush). A ten-minute drive will deliver you to a small carpark and the start of the Shipwreck hiking trail. I know not the name of this plant, tucked into a half-shaded part of a sand-dune, but I loved the texture. So, curled up into an awkward ball on the trail, with the rest of the group by now way ahead, I did what I could. The wrecked and scattered bits of old ships and the variety of sea-birds made for morning magic. http://www.capepointroute.co.za/liveit-capepoint.php
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