Archive for the ‘Africa 2008’ Category

June 3 – Zulu Nyala and Emdoneni Cat Rehabilitation Centre

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

11 am

Back from the morning game drive and sharing a cup of coffee with Evan on the veranda. As he says, “it’s a tough life…”

Nyala at pool

Nyala at pool

The day began with nyala and vervet monkeys by the pool and just beyond the trees. On the game drive we saw many giraffes including two young ones, a whole mess of warthogs with their young, three male kudu and two females hidden in the bush, an entire bachelor herd of impala, a hippo that scared Gina when it suddenly moved, lots of nyala and a mixed herd of impala and nyala at a watering hole with vervet monkeys in the trees. (Deuced hard to get good photos of the silly beasts, though — they move quickly.)

nyala

nyala stag

kudu

male kudu

giraffes

giraffes

impala

impala stag

The mornings are very misty in the hills and it is cold. South Africa is certainly greener and less dusty than I had expected. But COLD on early morning and late afternoon drives in that open vehicle.

11:25 p.m.

I petted a cheetah that was in the process of drinking chicken blood this afternoon, plus a serval that was chowing down on a chicken carcass. Everyone had a chance to pet the serval but the cheetah only allows himself to be petted as long as the blood supply holds out in the bucket. The guide said that would allow 5-6 people to pet him; I practically elbowed little old ladies out of the way to make sure I’d be in that group. Sigh…

Cheetah

Cheetah

Our afternoon trip to the Cat Rehabilitation Centre at the Emdoneni Lodge & Game Farm was a great treat for all of us. We saw four serval, three cheetah (including the one male who allows himself to be petted), four or five caracal (including one who literally leaps off the fence into the air to catch the chicken carcass thrown to him) and a number of yowling African wildcats (small like house cats but wild and very aggressive).

The tour was just at dusk so we could watch the animals being fed, so no game drive tonight: dark and cold on the way back to the lodge. Got some photos but not so many in the failing light. Switched to video and got some interesting footage.

[Note: Firefox 3 users may need this add-on to see YouTube videos.]

The jumping caracal:

The African wildcat:

More impala at dinner tonight. We keep asking for warthog. (They’re so ugly that they’re beginning to grow on us.

June 2 – Zulu Nyala and environs

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Full full day! Game drive this morning, Zulu Village Cultural Show this afternoon, game drive again this evening. Hard to keep track of what happened when with no time to sit and think!

daybreak at Zulu Nyala

daybreak

The day started with a nyala outside the door and the does just to the side. The breakfast buffet was excellent, then on the morning game drive we saw impala, warthogs, nyala, a hippo, giraffes and the second of our Big Five: the cape buffalo.

warthog

warthog

nyala doe

nyala doe

impala

impala doe

giraffe

giraffe

buffalo

Cape buffalo

hippo

hippo

Broad-tailed whydah

Broad-tailed whydah

We also saw a bird with a tail so long it flew only in dips. (Turns out it’s a broad-tailed whydah.) The long tail is part of its summer dress; it loses the tail in winter, so we were fortunate to see it in its summer plumage.

Quick lunch and off to the Zulu cultural display. It was interesting even if clearly created for tourists. (The Zulu dancers all wore skin tight shorts under their skins — some were so discreet that you couldn’t really see them, others were bright red or with side stripes. I mentioned them to one dancer; he just smiled and said admitted simply: “NOT Zulu…”) Evan wanted his picture taken with the medicine man; when I took it, he motioned me over as if to look at the digital picture and then chanted “money, money, money” under his breath.

fighters

Zulu fighters

medmen

Medicine men

In our second game drive we got to see another of the Big Five — the rhino. Not out in the open so no real photos, but still very large and very intimidating! More giraffe, some wildebeest but too far away for photos. However, we got great views of some zebras just before the sun was setting.

zebra

zebra

zebra

zebra

We tried to set the schedule tonight for the rest of the week but the weather is very unsettled so I’m not sure we’ll get in all of our entire ambitious schedule. We’ll see. The guide is making serious efforts to steer our schedule choices (based as much on his interests as on ours, I suspect…) but he is generally knowledgeable and besides he is also cute. He and Evan spent much of the evening trying to negotiate a swap of impala horns for good binoculars. (The guide is absolutely green with jealousy that Evan lives near a Cabela’s store.) Gina went down to the tennis court to see the stars (no lights there so no light pollution) and was scared by a bunch of nyala (“there were a LOT of them!”).

Tomorrow, weather permitting, it’s a game drive in the morning at the Cheetah Rehabilitation Center in the afternoon. For now, it’s off to bed — 6 a.m. comes VERY early!

June 1 – Johannesburg to Zulu Nyala

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Despite my concern with the issue of the name on the ticket, I had no problems with the flight to Richards Bay. When the ticket agent was confused by the mismatch of name on passport and ticket, I simply waved the email from the one SA Airways Express agent who said it would be fine as long as I had my birth and marriage certificates and the documents themselves, and she shrugged and handed me the boarding pass. After that, nobody cared: all that was needed was the boarding pass, not the passport. And nobody on South Africa Airways Express weighed carry-on luggage so no problem there either. (For that matter, they didn’t weigh the checked baggage either: they had all four of us put our luggage up at the same time and then asked us if we’d weighed the bags.)

deHavilland Dash 8

deHavilland Dash 8

The flight — on an old deHavilland — was interesting. Evan and I had to change seats and sit in the exit row since the people sitting there originally didn’t speak English. We got a more thorough than usual lecture about being able to guide people out to safety AND blocking the exit with our bodies if the exit was NOT safe. It was also interesting that we flew over thousands and thousands of acres of what were obviously tree farms. Turned out they’re eucalyptus trees originally imported for use for mine props and now used for building construction.

Richards Bay airport

Richards Bay airport

The airport is small and there was a whole troop of some kind of apes (either vervet monkeys or chacma baboons) along the runway! When I say the airport is small, it may be easier to imagine when I say that the luggage from the flight is loaded into a van that makes multiple trips between plane-side and the terminal where it’s unloaded by pushing the bags through a rubber-strip curtain.

Nyala stag

Nyala stag

We were able to see game even on the drive into the Zulu Nyala property, but did have a bit of a problem when we arrived at the Zulu Nyala Heritage Lodge, where Gina said we were staying: they had no record of the reservation! Fortunately, it was only because we were actually staying at the Zulu Nyala Game Lodge, which frankly is gorgeous — a glitch that, we all concluded, was in our favor.

First sight of elephant

First sight of elephant

Our first game drive was at 4 p.m. with a very young Afrikaaner guide and the same four young MBA graduates of Georgetown who had been on the flight with us to Richards Bay and who rode out to Zulu Nyala with us. Very nice folks all. We’re using an open-sided vehicle typical to South African game reserves. The drive itself was magical — we saw our first hippo, various antelope types (nyala, impala), a giraffe. We also saw our FIRST of the Big Five — a trio of elephants including a young one:

[Note: Firefox 3 users may need this add-on to see YouTube videos.]

They came close enough to the Land Rover to be actually scary (if we hadn’t been so much in awe and wonder that we forgot to be afraid)… (Dana did confess at one point that she was frightened when she was zooming in on one elephant until she realized the zoom made it look a LOT closer than it really was.)

One note: it is winter here. Days are relatively warm — light jacket weather — but early mornings and nights are cold. Coming back to the lodge in the open vehicle in the dark, it was VERY cold. It doesn’t help that the weather is a little dicey — not rainy but overcast. I suspect that “cold” will be a common word during this trip.

Back to the lodge in time to clean up for dinner. Meals are buffet style and very good. Impala stew is tasty (very lean, a little like beef and nothing at all like chicken)…

May 30-June 1 — to South Africa!

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

It is just before 5 a.m. SAST and I’ve been up for almost an hour — a combination of too much excitement and jet lag. It feels like it’s been at most 24 hours since we left the States, but with the time changes and all, it’s now two days later!

The looooong lens

The looooong lens

No problems at JFK at all. The Chicagoans arrived without incident along with all their bags, we meandered over to the international terminal, checked in with South Africa Airways, got some food, waited around some more and finally boarded the plane.

SAA flight taking off from JFK

SAA flight taking off from JFK

Last sight of US: Long Island NY

Last sight of US: Long Island NY

I grabbed a photo or two of the departure and we all settled down for the flight.

SAA serves excellent — and abundant — food. We had a nice dinner (Evan had salmon, I had beef), watched some videos, talked for a while, slept for a while and finally — some 4100 km after we left New York — saw the lights of the African coast. It was way too dark to see anything in Dakar but we were all intrigued by a kora — a gourd-bodied guitar-like instrument — that one of the new passengers brought on board. We had another meal (breakfast), more dozing, more chatting, another meal (lunch, with poor Dana trying to wake Gina up to make a choice between meat and fish).

Africa! Africa below!

Africa! Africa below!

Finally the light was good enough to see — Africa! Africa below us!! And then we were on the ground in Johannesburg.

The passport and customs check was thoroughly routine, but it really hit us in the arrivals hall at JNB: “we’re in AFRICA!” A group hug didn’t begin to express the joy and wonder of it all.

We were met by a driver from the property where we stayed overnight. Evan engaged him in current-affairs discussions and I have to confess to being frankly shocked by his xenophobic attitudes expressed so freely: I’ve never heard anyone defend genocide before nor complain that the police were stopping ordinary citizens from setting fire to illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. We also saw homeless folks in the outskirts of the city burning fires for heat and cooking and are struck by the generally negative view of South Africans as to their future — there’s still a very serious black-white divide and the current black-against-black violence has not helped at all. And living behind gates and walls with barbed wire and/or electrified fences is not my idea of living.

But we put that all aside when we arrived at the hotel which is lovely and exotic (thatched roofs, African colors and appointments, and even some zebras on the property which Evan HAD to see — by flashlight!). Another meal (dinner) and finally to bed.

This morning I had one moment of absolute panic when it seemed that the portable storage unit I bought for photos wasn’t working. Turned out it was just a battery issue (the way I was carrying it appears to have turned the unit on and totally discharged the battery!) and it works fine now with it charged.

Walked around a little this morning — the grounds are lovely and there’s a large dog (the owners say it’s a wolf) who keeps trying to get into all the rooms. One more meal at 7 a.m. (breakfast!) and then the Fearless Foursome is off to the airport for Richards Bay.

Fountain at guesthouse

Fountain at guesthouse

Dog at guesthouse

Fearsome foursome

Fearsome foursome

Anticipation: Uh oh…

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Weight restrictions. Geez Louise, weight restrictions. How do you carry a kazillion pounds of camera equipment when the airline says you can only bring 17.6 pounds of carry-on baggage onto a plane???

The test packing yesterday and today was a marginal success. Marginal, because I have no real trouble getting to the 20kg (44 pound) weight limit for checked baggage. Even with the camping gear — sleeping bag and all — I’m managing to come in at or under the limit there, and if I do what I’m thinking of doing and trade in the full sized tripod for a small tabletop unit (there’s really not all that much use for a tripod anyway), I should be just fine on the checked baggage.

But the carry-on is another story altogether. I want to carry on every bit of camera equipment that I would be absolutely devastated if I didn’t have. That means, in addition to cameras and lenses, the storage unit, batteries for all, and chargers for all. And getting all of it into one bag and under the weight limit is NOT going to be easy…

Sigh… off to see what else I can jettison or move into checked luggage without causing a panic attack…

Anticipation: ONE WEEK to go!!!

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Okay… I’m not excited. No, nope, not me. The fact that I’m bouncing off walls and scaring my cats is JUST a coincidence…

I finally settled on the camera gear to take. I’ve been dithering (horribly) going back and forth and back and forth over whether or not to try to rent a very long lens (100-400 zoom) and finally decided to bite the bullet and do it. I will have both of the lenses (the 70-200 f/2.8 and the 100-400) for at least a little bit of time to decide whether I’ve made the right decision or not, and who knows… depending on the weight issue, I may end up taking them both!

And speaking of the weight issue… today’s agenda: test pack the camera bag and the suitcase and see whether I even come close to staying within the weight restrictions…

Anticipation: Less than two weeks to go…

Monday, May 19th, 2008

I managed to distract myself nicely from going completely bananas over this trip by escaping to the National Genealogy Society conference in St. Louis for five days. Getting down into the details of finding German Church records from Thuringen from the 16th century sure took my mind off the details of going to Africa in the 21st century!

I still have this nagging fear that I’m going to forget something. I’ve made a list, I’ve checked it twice, I’ve put backups on backups in the list, and I’m still convinced that something critical is not going to be there when I need it.

Oh well… let’s see here:

Camera: check.
Lenses: check.
Batteries for camera: check.
Charger for camera batteries: check.
Device to charge the charger for camera batteries: check.
Passport, medicines, tickets: check.

I think everything else will take care of itself…

Anticipation: Three weeks to go…

Friday, May 9th, 2008

… and a cat who used up at least one of his nine lives…

I woke up this morning, dreaming of the trip (as usual), hauled myself out of bed for an early morning meeting and stopped dead in my tracks. There, in the middle of my bedroom floor, was the lanyard for my iPod. Of course, it was no longer attached to the iPod… and the iPod was nowhere to be found.

Now I love my cats. They’re actually still catlings — not yet a year old (though Clancy is closing in fast). But they have GOT to keep their cotton-pickin’ little paws off my iPod. You see, I have this grand idea of recording the sounds of Africa as well as the sights. And my iPod — a second generation Nano — is one of only two ever made with really high quality sound recording capabilities. And there’s this handy little Griffin iTalk pro microphone you can use to record sound with which you then use in iTunes to turn your recordings into WAV files. Well, of course, I just had to buy it for the trip.

And there I was, this morning, with a microphone and no iPod and two furry suspects. I had to dash off for this meeting, but started turning the house upside down again tonight when I got home. No iPod here, no iPod there, and still two furry suspects (more likely Clancy than Ciara — it’s his style). I went online and found that getting a second generation Nano now would set me back a very large sum of money — the cheapest refurb I could find was well over $100 and the only new one I could find was well over $200. (I could get a brand new Nano with more capacity for less money, but not the high quality sound recording capability.)

After a good deal of effort and a great deal of whining, and an enormous number of threats against the life of at least one cat, the iPod turned up under the radiator in the dining room. It still works, the microphone works very well, and the cats have been reprieved… At least for now…

Anticipation: 30 days to go!

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Oh my… it’s May 1st. And the flight out to South Africa is on May 30. I can’t believe it… just 30 days to go.

At times this whole trip doesn’t seem real. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for so very long, it’s just very hard to believe it’s really going to happen. I mean, packages keep arriving with gear I’ve ordered for the trip, and my credit card and bank account most assuredly reflect the fact that I’m certainly paying for the trip (and will be paying for it for a long time to come). But it still somehow doesn’t seem real.

And there is so much to look forward to:

When we first arrive in Johannesburg, we stay overnight at the Zulu Nyala Country Manor. (For more on the Country Manor, check out photos here or here.)

The next day, we fly South African Express Airways to Richards Bay, where we are met by folks from the Zulu Nyala group and motored to the Zulu Nyala Heritage Lodge. There are so many things to look forward to there, especially the game drives and other activities there. (For more on the Zulu Nyala trips, check out these wonderful photos, or the photos at this blog here or here.)

In addition to those, I think we’re planning to go to the Tembe Elephant Park and the Hluhluwe Umfolozi Park.

At the end of the week, we fly back to Johannesburg, and will spend another overnight at the Zulu Nyala Country Manor. That final Saturday night, Fred will fly in and join us, so we can all at least have breakfast together Sunday morning. That day, Evan, Gina and Dana will fly home, and Fred and I will be off on our additional adventure.

First, we fly to Maun, Botswana on Air Botswana. (Read the blog on how not to do business as to buying those tickets…) We’ll be met at the airport by someone from Grant’s staff where we will leave all of our gear except what we need for the Okavango Delta. That’ll be a short charter flight up to Gunn’s Camp. We’ll stay there for three nights. Activities there include mokoro (or mekorro or mekoro or…) boat rides and game walks.

On Day 4, we fly back to Maun, meet up with Grant and (after stopping off to stock up on the necessities of safari life… yep, beer, wine and other spirits!) it’s off to the Moremi Game Reserve where we will camp at the Khwai campsite. We’ll be there for two nights.

On Day 6, we head into the Chobe National Park where we will camp at the Savuti campsite. On Day 8, we go further north in Chobe to camp at the Ihaha campsite on the banks of the Chobe River. On Day 9, we will spend one final night at a campsite at Kasane and do a sunset cruise of the Chobe River.

On Day 10, we’ll transfer by land over the border into Zimbabwe (if the political situation allows) or Zambia (if Zimbabwe is too unsettled) to spend two nights in the area of the Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

Then on Day 12 (June 19), we head back to Johannesburg, one more night there, and back to the States on June 20.

Sigh… I absolutely can NOT wait…

Planning: Getting drugged up and shot

Friday, April 25th, 2008

No, not that kind of drug and not that kind of shot. These are the travel medicine kinds of drugs and shots.

So first, when I was talking to my niece about firming up the plans for South Africa, I told her I would have to get all the necessary medical stuff taken care of. She blithely informed me that she had had all that done last year when she went to Ghana on a humanitarian mission (she is a Ph.D. audiologist; her father, my brother, is a medical doctor; they’ve done many humanitarian missions over the years). Well, unfortunately, I didn’t go to Ghana last year, so I had to find myself a travel doctor.

Now the first thing you have to realize is that, no matter how good your insurance is, it probably won’t pay for immunizations and the like that are exclusively for travel purposes. I haven’t quite figured that out. If I came back from Africa with typhoid and malaria, they would treat it like any other claim. But they won’t pay much less to prevent typhoid and malaria? Sigh… nobody ever said insurance had to make sense.

The next thing anybody should do when contemplating a trip like this is drop in to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and, particularly, its Travelers Health section. There, under Destinations, there’s a list of every conceivable place you might want to travel with the CDC’s recommended pre-, during and post-travel care. Fortunately, the recommendations for South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe are all the same.

First, you need to get up to date with routine vaccinations. Okay, so I’m 15 years overdue for tetanus, diptheria and pertussis. What the heck… that’s only one shot. Measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), varicella (chickenpox): been there, done that, usually more than once. (I have five brothers and two sisters and I was born before 1957. If you think I didn’t have every childhood disease known to man, you have another think coming.) Besides, it sounds better to think I have immunity than to think I’m too old to have the vaccine recommended. I’ve already had the one adult booster for polio that’s recommended, and we won’t be staying in Victoria Falls long enough for me to need another meningitis dose.

Then the hepatitis stuff. Hep A could be spread through food or water and I’m the type never to remember not to get ice in my drink, so yep, gotta have that one. I’m not at risk for Hep B in the usual ways (I’m not planning to start a torrid affair with someone who might be infected and I don’t share needles) but with my luck I’d get hit by a bus, need a blood transfusion and pick it up that way. So yep, gotta have that one. Fortunately, they put the two into a single vaccine shot, so we’re now up to two.

Typhoid gets spread through food or water, and I still won’t remember to leave the ice out, so yep, gotta have that one. That’s three.

Rabies. Rabies? What the heck…? Isn’t that something like a bunch of ultra-painful shots in your stomach??? Time to consult Dr. Google. Okay, nope, it’s not that bad. It’s still a whole bunch of shots (three in 28 days) but it’s intramuscular. But rabies? Really? I emailed Grant. His reply: “Does occur here on isolated occasions, just don’t bite any dogs and you will be fine.” Since I have yet to bite a dog, I’m nixing that one.

Okay, now what?

DRUGS! Two in particular. One to prevent malaria. You get the prescription for that one, and start taking it just before you leave and continue for a week after you get back. The other one to treat … ahem … well … traveler’s diarrhea. Otherwise known by an appropriate local name (Montezuma’s Revenge in Mexico, Delhi Belly in India, and the like). An antibiotic to add to Imodium or whatever similar over-the-counter thing you use.

Next: finding a doctor who will give you all this stuff. Some people are lucky. They live in states or counties or cities where there’s a good local health department that does this. I’m not one of them. So I used the links on the CDC website to locate a doctor in my area. Turns out that there’s an International Travel Program at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, not too far from my home.

The doctor, Daniel Hart, is — as usual — way too young to be a medical professional. (Why is it that the older I get, the younger the doctors are? I mean, I don’t mind young doctors, but I’d like them to look like they’re old enough to have graduated from high school…) He also seemed surprised that I had done my homework, read through the CDC website, and knew what I needed. Hey, I may not be a member of Generation X or Y or whatever, but Dr. Google and I are very good friends…

So I’m now almost fully shot up (I need one more Hep A-Hep B shot before I go, plus another to complete the series in six months) and have my malaria and antibiotic prescriptions. Now, of course, I have to remember to fill them, and to start taking the malaria pills before I leave, and…