Like everywhere, Ngorongoro lions are struggling. The 9-11 prides of 100-110 lion have probably shrunk to two-thirds to three-quarters that.
That’s my anecdotal guess and I’m not sure anyone’s done a real count recently. But as we game drove down the Sopa side road from our exclusive camp at Lemala, we immediately encountered a female from the Big Tree pride who was really beaten up.
She had blood on her face and haunches, and often that means nothing more than that she was just at the kill. But the right side of her face was horribly scratched and that meant much more, and her belly wasn’t very full. When she walked she limped.
That was our first lion in the crater. We’d see another 14 before the day was over, including the magnificently maned lion of the Muinge River pride.
All that we saw looked fabulously healthy, with big bellies suggesting we’d arrived one day late to see some action. In fact, one of the Big Tree males lumbered across in front of us into the veld and took our viewing right with him to an earlier kill, as he scattered the hyaena and jackal.
But something was wrong, or perhaps better said, different than before. Traditionally there are many, many more females than males, because of the male’s violent competition with one another and the fact that they’re often kicked out of the pride before they know how to hunt.
But during our Kisiel Family Safari, and consistent with what I’ve been slowly seeing over the last few years, the ratio of males to females is increasing.
Males are 50% bigger and stronger than females, so the obvious conclusion is that something is stressing the environment and the bigger and stronger are out surviving the weaker. Is this somehow related to global warming, or is it as some researchers have suggested more mankind meanness.
There have been more and more documented cases of lion poisoning at the fringes of national parks as the peripheral human populations increase and develop. But while that might explain East African declines, it doesn’t well explain southern African declines where human populations have achieved a more or less balance with the remaining wilderness years ago.
Other researchers like Craig Packard have documented a disease carried by buffalo that weakens the buffalo but doesn’t kill it. But when lions hunt the weakened buffalo and then eat the diseased meat, they die.
We talked a lot about this during our game drives in the crater, because lions really dominated the game viewing. This is pretty natural in the dry season, but even so, I think we had an unusual number of sightings and events.
The crater was cold! My little thermometer said the temperature just outside our tents on the down road from Sopa reached 46F for a low and never got above 60F. In part this was because it was so overcast. Down on the crater floor the sun broke through often and it was much warmer, probably ten degrees warmer.
Despite the cold, though, my family loved their exclusive Lemala camp. Every spacious tent had a propane heater, we had hot water on demand for showers and shaving, and a lovely hot water bottle was stuck into everyone’s wonderful beds!
Maasai blankets were everywhere, and everyone used them!
The dry season in the crater begins this way, with very cold temperatures, the coldest of the year. But with sufficient hot chocolate personally delivered to their tent each morning, 8-year old Nick and 11-year old Camden couldn’t have been more pleased!
“It can’t get better than this!” Grandpa Mark exclaimed.
We’ll see. The view from my tent just below the crater rim.
As many of my regular readers know I normally post only four times weekly, and I’m now in Tanzania. So for this fifth time this week (!) I’ll just let the pictures do the talking.
Three leopards, hundreds of elephant, five lion, dozens of giraffe and an unexpectedly large number of zebra featured the Kisiel Family’s first two days on safari.
Tarangire is usually the first game park I take my families to. It’s relatively close to Arusha, never fails to produce the best elephant viewing on the continent regardless of the time of year, and is simply a great introduction to game viewing.
That proved true, again, and it also lets me explain the complex situation that exists with elephant, today.
In my view there are too many elephant. That doesn’t mean there are more elephant than ever, or that there isn’t a serious problem of poaching, but it means that the habitat left to ele today is simply not large enough for them.
This seemed self-evident to me about a decade ago when normal elephant behaviors began to break down, and it was most demonstrable in Tarangire.
In the past elephant families rarely mixed. If there was a water hole or wallow of interest by multiple families, they each too their turn, giving wide berth to the other families.
Every day in Tarangire multiple families are seen together. And there is obvious agitation but ultimate acceptance that multiple families must at least temporarily merge. Although it’s hard to use anecdotal evidence and my observations are no means rigorous science, I definitely believe what I and my clients see every single time I come here is an indication there are too many ele.
And, of course, all you have to do is pull up some of the local chatter and blogs of farmers, clergymen and school teachers who live near ele reserves like Tarangire.
So this is a time throughout East Africa to be particularly cautious about ele.
So you can imagine how I felt when the manager and staff of Tarangire Sopa Lodge where we’re staying seemed incapable of keeping three ele from nearly entering reception, playing around with the lawn hose, and walking up and down the balconies of the rooms as if they were checking the serial numbers on the patio windows.
This is courting disaster. And it’s hard to explain this to my clients. The kids, especially, thought it was “cool” and they’re right, it was thrilling and clearly not something you’d expect.
But it’s also dangerous. One security man threw a few rocks at the ele, but no one turned off the water, no one seemed to have a elephant horn (a loud screaming high pressure device that sometimes works) and no one offered or perhaps was trained to shot a blank above their heads.
So they lingered throughout most of the afternoon, making it difficult for me to keep the kids out of their sight.
We had a great time in Tarangire, and I’m glad to say a safe one as well. We had wonderful ele encounters out on the game drives, getting remarkable close to those we judged safe.
But if lodges and camps can’t figure out a way to keep familiarity at bay, disaster is around the next corner.
As she walked past my verandah and over to the verandah where Ryan, Hadley, Sophie and Cam were watching her, I remembered a number of horrible stories about what elephants can do and have done to me and my clients.
What do kids do the first morning after arriving in Africa at 2 a.m.?
Normally, sleep. In fact sleep so deeply, whether they’ve slept or not on the planes, that they wake up completely disoriented.
But not so my Kisiel Family! Playing the numbers, I slept a little bit more than usual, since I met them on the now very popular Turkish Airlines flight that daily arrives Kilimanjaro at 1:10a.
Immigration and customs is pretty easy at 1:30a at night in Kilimanjaro, and so we were on our way to Serena’s Lake Duluti Lodge hardly a half hour after the plane landed. It was about a 40-minute drive … in the dark … but young Nicholas positioned himself in the front seat, stiffened his back and followed the car’s headlights on the pavement for any trace whatever of lion.
Fortunately for Arusha residents there aren’t any, but that didn’t deter Nicholas from his half-hour vigil.
The two-lane paved road from the airport is fine, with numerous speed bumps so no one feels the least uneasy except that it’s so dark.
Turning off into any of the lodges in the area right around Arusha, though, means the first experience on a very badly kept dirt or gravel road. And that wakes everyone up. Our experience, though, lasted all of a few minutes.
I already had the keys to the room so quickly assembled the 14 in the family, aged from 6 to … well, grandparents’ age … and explained simple things like having to double-flush the toilet and keeping a flashlight at your side at all times because of Arusha’s constant and troubling power outages.
And I sent them to bed telling them not to be scared of the hadada ibis in the morning, whose sunrise call sounds for all the world like Napoleon’s charge at Waterloo.
Three a.m. rarely needs more encouragement for hitting the sack, but it was in the middle of the American/Ghana world cup match. I watched it for 13 seconds before falling asleep.
It’s always a delight sharing my clients’ experiences of their first waking moment in Africa. More and more flights are arriving at night, so there really isn’t a lot of orientation available until after you’ve gone to bed, slept, and then are awakened by the honking of the ibis.
The word most clients use to describe their first lighted scene is “jungle.” It’s not wholly accurate, of course, since it’s much colder than a real jungle. Today we woke up to temperatures in the lower 60s.
That’s because this area around Arusha, the foothills of Africa’s fifth highest mountain, Meru, are a mile high. But looking out over your room’s deck, it does look like a jungle.
Our particular view is of a beautifully landscaped hedge of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and forget-me-nots, separating the wild and thick bush beyond from the individual rooms.
And that includes lots of wild bananas, massive mango and mahogany trees, a peppering of acacia (we get many, many more of those on the veld) and every once in a while a glimpse of the crater lake Duluti.
I was enjoying my coffee on my deck, trying to delay going too early to the breakfast room since I expected they would all come quite late.
But not most of the Kisiel family! They were down early, eating and enjoying their first morning long before I expected!
I and Kenyans woke this morning to the news of a bloody terrorist attack near Lamu. But what worries us even even more is that the U.S. might restart the Iraqi war.
CNN’s “State of the Union” is the most widely watched American show in Kenya. It comes on live at Sunday dinner time.
So Kenyans who woke the next morning to actual terrorism watched with even greater horror as Sen. Lindsay Graham called for a virtual reverse jihad.
The U.S. Right spent Sunday warning of a “califate” that would be a super threat to the U.S., an ISIS that would rebomb the World Trade Center.
This is utter nonsense. Don’t take the bait, America. What is going on in Iraq is a civil war, not global jihad.
Nairobi’s leading newspaper in its leading editorial this morning claimed the resurgence of war in Iraq “serves as graphic testimony that Western military adventurism in the region not only failed to extinguish the flames of extremism, but might have added fuel to the fire.”
“Stepping into the bloodbath of Iraq would be madness,” was the headline in one of London’s leading Sunday newspapers.
Why are we more afraid of terrorism than driving over a bridge ready to collapse or dying of cancer?
As I wind up my three-day visit to Nairobi I realize how horribly warped American paranoia of terrorism is and yet how impossible it seems to remedy.
Terrorism is increasing. The Rand Corporation’s most recent report shows a 58% increase in significant jihadist groups, a doubling of fighters and a tripling of attacks.
Obama’s own government report, The Country Reports on Terrorism submitted to Congress on April 30 claims terrorist attacks increased by nearly 50% from 6,700 to 9,700 from 2012 to 2013, resulting in 18,000 murders and 33,000 serious injuries.
There’s no reason to doubt these numbers. And here are some more:
The number of homicides in the U.S. averages between 13 and 15,000/year, or roughly 80% the number of worldwide terrorist killings. The number of highway fatalities in the U.S. annually is nearly twice the fatalities caused by worldwide terrorism. The numbers of U.S. homicides or highway fatalities in relation to U.S. fatalities caused by terrorism doesn’t exist, because since the Boston Marathon bomber, there haven’t been any.
What are we afraid of? Or more specifically, why do we fear terrorism more than the highway or the gunman in the classroom?
Kenya has had an unfair share of terrorism fatalities, injuries and damaged economies, because it has been targeted by terrorist groups for its proxy war against al-Shabaab in Somalia, a war that it would not have chosen to do, nor been capable of doing, without serious pressure and military assistance from the west, primarily the U.S. and France.
So as Kenya’s rate of terrorist harm has increased dramatically in just the last few years, France’s and the U.S.’ has declined.
Yet there is a palpabale fear in the U.S. that this is not the case. That fear is the success of terrorism, making its victims’ communities feel threatened out of proportion to the facts.
Imagine if the trillion plus dollars spent on the wars of retribution and against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan had been directed instead to America’s leading cause of death, cancer and heart disease, both which average 25 times greater than the worldwide deaths from terrorism.
With that amount of money might we have already achieved a robot car whose driver, even if drunk, would be unable to cause an accident thereby reducing American fatalities, currently 2-3 times worldwide fatalities caused by terrorism?
Clearly it’s not the deaths that bother us. So it’s not the threat of fatalities that must bother us, it’s the challenge to our power. A relatively few deaths caused by terrorism create a proportionately greater fear and insecurity.
DUIs, suicides, cancer, school shootings … we’ve learned to live with and do not seem to threaten our way of life. We must learn to live with terrorism in the same way. As an actual threat, it’s actually much, much less.
Kenyans know this. The country is booming (except for tourism). Everything from Google to IBM to Caterpillar to GM is investing heavily here. The energy of its youth, the rapidly increasing level of education and the imaginative ways difficult problems are being solved is becoming a model for the world.
But the beautiful white sand beaches, among the finest in the world, and in the incomparable wilderness and big game are being abandoned by world travelers.
There has not been a tourist assault death here in more than two years, nor an injury; nor have any foreign investors been bumped off or maimed.
Those are pretty good numbers for any business person. But as explained above, numbers mean little when it comes to scaring people. Terrorism, the wanton killing for ideological reasons, scares people more than potholes on I-80.
So as irrational as it may be that you will choose to visit New York instead of Nairobi, where any way you run the numbers your chances of being killed or hurt are much greater, you’ll feel better doing it.
And that’s why terrorism is so successful. And that’s why it’s more important than ever that we start to educate ourselves to the priorities of need we truly have.
Nairobi is transforming faster than a teenage girl getting ready for the prom.
I arrived on time with Swiss from Zurich at 6 p.m. sharp. The airport is like a transformer being born, huge amounts of new terminal construction. As always airport staff was prompt, courteous and professional. The bus that took us to the temporary international arrivals hall was clean and swift.
I bought a visa, picked up my luggage in the new somewhat hiphop carousel area (with its popular music, many ads and neon red painted piping) walked out into the beautiful Nairobi air, picked up a 100,000 shillings in a snap from an ATM, ordered a cab, bumped into an old friend, and was in the car heading into town in 18 minutes and 14 seconds after we landed.
And I got to my hotel two hours later.
It’s “Members Night” — the local vernacular for Friday night party time. I was on the three-lane superhighway into town, designed for us to speed over the underpasses and under the overpasses, but the traffic in both directions was absolutely unbelievable.
First of all, it’s one giant industrial city from the airport to the city center. The new buildings are immense and many still in construction. The cars on the road all seem new, from BMWs to Hummers to the main city brand, Toyotas.
My fabulous cab driver new all the backroads, which were also clogged but at least were moving. When we did stop we had time to buy excellent CDs, all copied music and music videos pirated from major stars around Africa, for Ksh 100/ each. That’s about 90 cents. Each CD had the requisite 13 or 14 songs.
At least it gave us something to do when stopped in traffic. Because after all, you can’t trust a hawker with a pirated music CD. You’ve got to play it through!
When we finally got to the fabulously new and spectacular Villa Rosa Kempinski there was new delay, which I understand is true at every hotel. Every car is thoroughly patted down, with lights and metal detectors, before it’s let in to the normal cul-de-sac.
The security guys are friendly, excellently dressed as if coming from a ball, and spoke perfect English (to me) and German (to the clients in front of me).
Then at the entrance to the hotel several attendants took my luggage — no, I couldn’t take it myself, because it had to be carefully scanned and searched.
I had to walk through a metal detector that was more sensitive than the TSA one I walked through in O’Hare.
Then, finally, I checked in. And like so many hotels today in Nairobi, you aren’t just checking into a hotel. You’re checking into a huge walled complex of multiple restaurants, shops, fitness centers, pools and outdoor cafes.
The vibe in Nairobi is amazing. This city will one day rule the world. But for the moment, for tonight anyway, it’s almost as if a war is going on.
Photo by EWT client Ann HendricksonAs I head to Nairobi here are some last-minute news bits about safaris in East Africa.
First, the Kenyan tourism sector is collapsing because of the bad publicity of last month. Several British tour companies evacuated guests from the Kenyan coast only a day before a large bomb went off in Nairobi.
And just this week, a moderate Muslim leader was assassinated in Mombasa.
As a result the Tanzanian circuit is chock-a-block full. We were even having difficult booking space for February, 2016! Yes, I didn’t say 2015, but 2016.
Upmarket properties, which are usually much smaller than the larger tourist lodges, are being deluged with requests.
Second, global warming is really effecting the circuit. The great wildebeest migration normally stays in Tanzania’s Serengeti until the middle to end of June. This year it the first of the great herds crossed into Kenya the end of May, three to four weeks early.
The reason is that the rains are good in the north, spurning the herds onwards. I also remember there were many early births this year, for the same reason, and that could also move the cycle forward.
I’m looking forward to a wonderful trip with a wonderful family from Boston. (Well, actually, the grandparents are from Boston. As with many families today, the children and grandchildren are scattered hither and yon!)
I’ll be trying to post blogs of our safaris as often as I can.
My Cape/Botswana safari this year tracked nearly exactly my experience for the last eight years running: fabulous Cape touring then moderate though diverse game with several truly exciting experiences, ending at VicFalls.
I really don’t think Cape Town needs much promotion. It’s my second favorite city in the world, absolutely gorgeous, and the historical, cultural and wilderness opportunities I think are unmatched except perhaps by San Francisco.
So if like most Americans your Cape Town experience is augmented by a game viewing experience, that’s what you analyze and compare.
Eastern South Africa (Kruger) is fine for game viewing, but Botswana is much better. Not necessarily for the quantity or variety of game, but for the exceptional scenery and geography, and for the exclusivity.
Twice in the last four years I’ve watched a wild dog hunt, and that’s breath-taking. Four of the last five years I’ve seen wild dogs. Wild dogs is becoming Botswana’s signature attraction. (By the way, it may also be Kruger’s. There are now a reported 500 dog in Kruger.)
We saw two lion kills, both of buffalo. And really most uniquely of all, our two days in the Okavango Delta and three days in the Pans represented game viewing experiences that simply have no comparisons elsewhere in Africa.
Those of us in the safari business are loathe to compare one area with another, or even compare the same area in different seasons. But I realize this is an important consideration for the consumer, particularly the first-time consumer.
In addition to the extraordinary experience on two separate game drives of two different wild dog families, the week-plus game viewing safari included a dozen lion; hundreds-plus elephant, Cape buffalo and impala; dozens-plus giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, springbok, mongoose, hippo, kudu, lechwe, baboon; and multiple sightings of hyaena, warthog, reedbuck and sassaby. – Bill Banzhaf
We all also saw a wild, reintroduced white rhino.
Certain of us also saw crocodile, sitatunga, monitor lizard, bat-eared fox and eland.
There were some very special sightings as well: Gorgeous, almost super zebra that were red-maned and beige-and-red tailed. With two exceptions, the dozens of times we saw elephant they were all male.
We watched for some time two inter-acting and very large impala families, an extremely curious situation that led some of us to wonder if it were a single super family exchanging harem masters.
The first lion kill was an extraordinary scene. Somehow the three harassed lionesses with a single vulnerable cub successfully hid their buffalo kill from the rest of the world (except us) keeping vultures, hyaena and competing lions away. – Bill BanzhafThe weather was perfect for northerners racing from a terrible winter. The hottest days, perhaps touching 90F were in Moremi, where there were also the coldest nights (likely in the lower 50s). But the majority of the days didn’t exceed the mid 80s or sink below the mid 60s. Skies were mostly crystal clear with enough dust for absolutely breath-taking sunsets.
(Note: I actually prefer about a month earlier, when the game viewing is even better. But the temperatures are 5-10 degrees hotter. The dramatic afternoon thunderstorms at that time I consider a real plus.) – Bill Melville
The two extraordinary days in The Delta, with minimal game viewing, gave us the unique experience of a desert in flood and all the beautiful water plants and marsh birds of a special part of the world, of exceptional species like the painted frog, and with opportunities for fishing.
The Pans (Makgadikgadi and Nxai, among many other smaller ones) are equally unique. These are salt pans formed over centuries of heavy water run-off followed by rapid evaporation. So during the rains they are the heart of Botswana’s game viewing, attracting hundreds and thousands of animals.
But year-round the scenery which they define is hard to explain and its stark beauty hard to exaggerate. There is, indeed, a monotony to “starkness” but when properly absorbed it’s spiritual.
Far fewer animals are seen on a Botswana experience than East Africa, although about the same number of species. But the quantity of wildlife in East Africa is so much greater.
When compared with a game viewing experience of similar length in East Africa, this was much more relaxed. Perhaps only half as much time was actually spent game viewing as we would do in East Africa, although the activities were more varied than the vehicle game viewing that dominates an East African experience.
But that needn’t be the case for everyone. East African participants can easily exclude themselves from some game viewing to benefit from the down time that is normally written into a Botswana experience. And enthusiasts in Botswana can with some effort increase their activity time.
On a Botswana safari there is much less interaction with the local people (outside of the staff, of course), in part because there are so few people in the country to begin with. There is virtually no city or town experience of any kind. It is strictly bush. – Steve FarrandYou fly from camp to camp in Botswana, never drive (with rare and usually down-market exceptions). Most of the time you’re driving from place to place in East Africa, through populated countryside, towns or villages.
But though you fly much more in Botswana than East Africa, the planes in Botswana are much inferior to those in East Africa. That’s a criticism I’ve been leveling at Botswana for years: their planes are configured much too small for the average traveler.
In East Africa your driver/guides meet you at the airport and remain with you until you leave. In Botswana you pick up a new set of driver/guides at each camp.
There are more upmarket accommodations in Botswana (though a good number in East Africa, too) and they are generally better (and more expensive): that usually means larger rooms with more furniture that is also more comfortable. Bathrooms are usually more modern and spacious in Botswana than East Africa. Electricity and wifi is usually more available and reliable in Botswana than East Africa.
The staff and food in both areas is professional and varied, but expect generally better local guides in Botswana than East Africa. On the other hand, guides are very specialized in Botswana, experts in small regions and usually not as familiar with the culture, overall wilderness and current affairs as your guide will be in East Africa. – Brad Heck
Exclusiveness is more likely in Botswana than East Africa. On our safari of 8 days we encountered vehicles other than our own and those of the camp only three times and then very briefly. In Ngorongoro Crater on virtually any day of the year, you’re likely to encounter dozens of other vehicles, sometimes all competing for the best position at the lion kill.
Now having said that, I hasten to add that personally I feel very sensitive about this and usually conduct an East African safari where half or more of the time there are none but my own vehicles. But in a few important places like the crater, that’s impossible to arrange.
Botswana’s scenery is wonderful if mystic. But East Africa’s scenery is more grand and dramatic, from highlands to volcanoes to the expansive plains of the Serengeti.
So the comparison is made but flawed: for your first safari go to East Africa. But once Africa’s taken over your soul, you’ll have to visit Botswana, too! – Steve TaylorAnd, oh by the way, what a wonderful group of travelers I had this time! Remarkably special for me, and something I’ll always remember!
As my two months guiding in Africa comes to an end I’m of course very anxious to get home. But it’s hard to leave the African wilderness.
As a friend and good client, Steve Farrand, said to me, today:
Africa resets your soul. No matter where you’ve been in Africa or where you find yourself next, it’s a spa for the heart and mind.
I think the African wilderness remains so digestible yet unpredictable that you can more easily set aside the nagging responsibilities of the modern world without turning off the inquisitiveness and excitements that earn us success in the modern world.
Simply, you come to fully appreciate the here-and-now. I’ve always wondered if this is true only of the foreigner who finds himself removed to a distant and beautiful place or is equally true of the Africans who live here.
Of course I’ll never know: You can’t enter someone else’s soul. I only know it’s true for myself. – Bill Banzhaf
Like Iguassu, Niagra and Angel, Victoria Falls is a stunning creation of nature, a Disney production of Mother Earth, commercialized to be sure yet still a pure wonder.
Imagine an alien world where there is so much water and so many water falls that the prize of a holiday is a piece of highveld Montana. But for us earthlings, sheaves of water tumbling from high rock is so rare that it’s beauty incarnate.
And Victoria Falls couldn’t better fit the description, because it’s likely that visitors here have spent a good amount of their vacation in flat near desert, as we did in the Makgadikgadi and as many others do in the Kalahari, where an errant stream or evaporating pan represents paradise.
Then, suddenly, you find yourself standing in front of a mile of tumbling water! We’re here at high flow. That means well over 100,000 cubic feet of water/second, the most of any falls on earth.
It is neither the highest (that’s Angel) or widest (that’s Iguassu), but because it’s a single curtain of water just over a mile wide and 350′ high it’s usually considered “the biggest.” To be sure it’s the most powerful looking of all the falls. Seen as most of my folks have done, from a helicopter, it’s almost impossible to imagine the amount of falling water.
A third of the falls are in Zambia and two-thirds are in Zimbabwe. We’re staying in Zambia, and I haven’t booked any trip to the Zim side since 1999. That’s when the misery of Zimbabwe began, and it’s only gotten worse.
Properly designed, there’s no real personal danger to going to Zimbabwe, but the unpredictable power outages and worse, the unexpected fuel shortages, can terribly disrupt a planned holiday.
But there’s no reason to stay on the Zim side. As I write this most of my folks have walked over the bridge and are spending the day in Zimbabwe and in the prettier and more spectacular Zimbabwean Falls national park.
The only regret I have not staying on the Zim side is not being able to stay at Victoria Falls Hotel, one of my favorite in the world. (My wife and I designed our master bathroom on the VicFalls hotel!)
But my clients have the whole day over there, and they plan to visit the hotel and have a meal or its legendary high tea.
And the accommodations now available on the Zam side are fabulous. We’re staying at a wonderful boutique resort, Tongabezi Lodge, right on the Zambezi River. But there are so many other good options, too.
The Royal Livingstone Hotel was designed to exactly replicate the Victoria Falls Hotel. It does a pretty good job of it, right down to the magnificent dark wood bar. Like the Falls Hotel you can walk down from its backyard to the falls.
All – and actually many more – the activities available from Zimbabwe are available exactly from Zambia. This includes the helicopter touring, river rafting, bungi jumping, microgliding, golf, horseback safaris, fishing (for Tiger Fish!), canoeing or kayaking, elephant back safaris, spas galore, quad biking, discos if you want them … it’s endless. This is a waterfalls resort!
We’ve had a super safari. And while Victoria Falls was only an option, 14 of my 15 people are here, and it’s hard to imagine a better way to relax and remember the exciting times we’ve all enjoyed together!
If ever Zimbabwe rights itself – and I just can’t imagine that happening soon, even if the despot Mugabe dies – Livingstone, Zambia will have so progressed in tourist services beyond Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, that I think at least for a very long while to come this is the side to stay at.
Our final game drive in Botswana ended with a wild dog kill!
The story of wild dogs is one of the most hopeful, positive stories of the African wildernesses! And for us to have experienced it was a totally unexpected bonus to a great safari in Botswana!
We were looking for leopard. In fact, for three hours we were looking in vain for leopard. We had seen all the other Big Five and the driver/guides, especially, were worried that we wouldn’t find numero cinko.
It’s a bane of leading a safari when the trip is winding down and some of the expectations for animal sightings haven’t been met. I’m personally very philosophical about it, and I hope I convey that calm obviousness to my clients, and frankly, I think most of my clients accept it.
But to be sure the bulk of tourists to Africa don’t. They have a checklist to be compared with the friends who recommended they go in the first place, and a competition of successful vacation planning that seems to drive so much American tourism.
And the driver/guides know this well, because they are dependent upon their tips. Find a leopard, and the tip is 50% higher. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s the way it is.
And so in my own case it means trying to convey to the driver/guides that my clients aren’t normal; they understand luck in a way a normal tourist might not. With my own drivers in Tanzania I’ve successfully conveyed it, but elsewhere I’ve never wholly achieved that goal.
And so for three hours we bushwacked through Botswana looking for a leopard and seeing nothing else.
Then as the light was falling and no leopard had been found, we raced to the sundowners being set up by one of the three drivers at a pond’s edge.
And as we just came in view of them, I saw the dog.
It was classic. Every wild dog family today is somewhere between 10 and 25 individuals if there are juveniles. The family is composed of the alpha female and male, perhaps several of the males siblings or cousins, and the juveniles.
We arrived on the scene with 9 juvenile dogs strung all over the place and impala snorting and pronking and prancing in every which direction. This is typical. The hunt normally begins at sunrise or sunset (except when there’s a full or almost full moon, then maybe at night, too), and the juveniles are the ones who begin the hunt.
Most all of the time the prey is impala.
And right after beginning the assault, the juveniles get kicked to near smithereens. I immediately saw two juveniles limping. One had his right foreleg dislocated and the other was limping on his right rear leg.
The impala scatter helter skelter freaking out. The alpha female or male then chooses a target individual and chases it up to speeds of 40 mph (twice the speed of an impala) and brings it down. That we didn’t see.
Four out of five attempts are successful. That makes the wild dog the most successful killer on the African veld. (Lions are successful maybe 1/4 or 1/5.)
The alpha adult then lets out a single high-pitched hoot. We didn’t hear that, but we immediately saw the reaction: The 9 juveniles immediately perked up and began running in near formation towards the call of victory.
The alpha female came out of the bush and met them at the edge of a pond and regurgitated a bit of the proof that the impala was down.
They all got instantly hyper, defecating and jumping in the water, raising their tails, prostrating themselves to each other, whining in a hectic, frantic 15 or 20 seconds of celebration before then all running off back to the kill.
We followed through the bush and there the alpha male was eating, but he stopped to let the younger of the family consume what was left of the impala.
Literally in two minutes it was all gone. And it was nearly dark. Likely they would do it all over again before complete darkness, since it was hardly enough, but we had to go.
What an extraordinary way for us to end a fabulous safari in Botswana!
It isn’t just game viewing, it’s the extended stories about what you’re seeing that make the wilderness so fascinating.
As expected our best big game viewing in Botswana occurred in the Moremi Game Reserve, for us on Chief’s Island. On our first game drive we encountered a lion kill of a smallish female buffalo.
There were three mature lionesses on the kill with one squealing cub that couldn’t have been more than 2½-3 weeks old. That in itself was interesting, since lion litters are routinely 5-7 cubs of which usually 4 survive for at least a month; plus the fact that normally mothers won’t display their cubs at quite this young an age.
But there was only one cub, and when we arrived all three lionesses were leaving the kill to water, and the poor cub was squealing louder than a pig at slaughter. As the lionesses lumbered through the grass, their distended bellies slowing their gate, the poor cub was jumping madly after them while falling behind.
The mother didn’t seem to care. It was clear which was the mother, since her mammary glands were bursting at the seams: an indication that she’d lost all the others in the litter already, and a further caution that the poor remaining cub could be endangered by her producing too much milk.
Later she’d try to nurse the cub, but he was as round as balloon and had obviously already had his fill. In such a situation, her glands might infect.
Finally the cub just couldn’t keep up. He turned back into a nearby forest and toned down his whining. The females proceeded to a puddle of a waterhole, probably dug by an elephant, and drank their hearts out.
The cub started to squeal, again, and as the mother got her necessary fill of water, she perked up to listen to him. Either she was sated with water or anxiety, and left the other two lionesses to find her cub and bring him back to the kill.
Several times she tried to pick him up as lions routinely do, but for some reason she’d drop him after just a few short instants. I don’t think it was anything he was doing, because once in his mother’s mouth he went totally limp as cubs are wont to do.
And why she was bringing him back to the kill was another mystery. He was far too young to eat, and the kill was an invitation for battle. The lionesses had carefully buried the intestines in sand to reduce the smell, and they’d pulled the carcass into a bush, but the vultures on the trees were proof their treasure had already been discovered.
At the kill the little tyke rubbed and rolled all over mom, but despite her attempts to get him to nurse, again, he was just too full.
Finally the mother lioness got too nervous and disappeared into the forest with her cub, and the whining stopped.
The background supplied to us by the Chief’s Camp drivers helped enormously to understand exactly what was going on.
The three lionesses were two daughters of one mother, and they had never successfully reared cubs. The daughters were about 4 years old, so that in itself was unusual.
The three were constantly harassed by the males in the area. The current pridemasters, two younger males who we never saw and were reported to be “patrolling” the perimeters of their territory and were unaware of the buffalo kill, had dislodged a single pride master several years ago and killed four of his cubs.
This is common lion behavior: a new pridemaster kills all the cubs of the previous pridemaster.
The current little cub was from the first litter sired by one of the new pridemasters, but one of the guides felt that one of the pridemasters might kill the cub (and might have killed the cub’s siblings already) because he was not the specific one who sired him.
That’s interesting but as far as I know undocumented behavior. Multiple pridemasters are almost always brothers or cousins from the same family, and if the theory of natural selection which explains pridemasters killing cubs really governs behavior, then they would be close enough genetically to accept each other’s progeny.
The first successfully raised litter is always the most challenging for the mother lion. It could be that multiple conditions, including the unnatural floods of the last several years as well as the constant male harassment, just rattled the young mom too much.
On the second day we saw the lionesses finish off the carcass. Killing a buffalo is no small feat even for three lionesses, and their still raw wounds attested to that. But since the pridemasters never found the kill, the females gorged themselves to their hearts content.
We left the scene with the rollie pollie little cub feisty and healthy. But I know his chances of survival aren’t good, given the stress filled scene we’d been so lucky to explore these last few days.
Guides make or break a wilderness trip, and this is so much truer in places like the Okavango Delta, which is difficult to truly appreciate without adequate interpretation. Fortunately for us our guide here was outstanding.
Think of the Okavango Delta as similar to the Everglades or Amazon. Of course it’s as different as it is the same as these other wildernesses, but in all three cases the particular feature is a unique biodiversity that isn’t immediately apparent, visually overwhelming because of the density of plants, and at least some of the year with a very uncomfortable climate.
Jungle, in other words.
The Delta is a “jungle” swamp, the outcome of the enormous flow of water coming off Africa’s ridiculously off-center continental divide spilling over the Kalahari Desert. And because the Delta’s flow from year to year can be so radically different, the topographical features are constantly changing. With a few major exceptions like the enormous land mass in the middle of the Delta called “Chief’s Island” the water channels, smaller islands, thousands of lagoons and marshes are in nearly constant flux.
To make things even more complicated, there is no Okavango Delta defined by any wilderness area or natural geography. Moremi Game Reserve includes part of The Delta, but since the Delta changes from year to year, you can’t buy a map of the static Okavango Delta. And as a result, numerous camps and lodges call themselves Delta camps with some abandon, and many visitors to Botswana believe they have visited The Delta when they probably haven’t.
The guide makes or breaks a Delta trip.We stayed at a real Delta camp, Xugana Lodge. The island on which the lodge is situated is surrounded by water, as you’d expect, and so vehicle game drives aren’t possible. Everything must be done by boat, although there are a few nearby islands where the boats drop folks for walking.
Birders have no problem appreciating the Delta. We have been particularly lucky, catching several migrants that would normally have left by now, such as the Greater Marsh Warbler. But the resident species from the African Fish Eagle to the spectacular Malachite Kingfisher are abundant and relatively easy to find. Truly rare birds like Pell’s Fishing Eagle are becoming so popular that their whereabouts are often known throughout the year.
There are animals in The Delta, to be sure.
We saw quite a few elephant, which of course seems to be true everywhere, today. But the elephant are essential in cutting out the channels from year to year. As the flow declines in September and October, the elephants choose paths through The Delta that are likely to become next year’s channels.
We also saw the water animals, the red lechwe and puku, two land antelopes that survive at water’s edge. We hope yet to find the rarer sitantunga, an antelope that remains in the water most of its life, has webbed feet and births in a nest of reeds.
We got remarkably close to a 3-meter long croc that had recently feasted and was deep into dormancy. And hippos are virtually everywhere, sometimes as in our case, right outside our bungalows!
But despite this panoply of bigger game, it is never as abundant or visible as in any more common wilderness reserve like The Pans from which we just came, or to Moremi Game Reserve to which we’re heading tomorrow.
So the essential appreciation comes from learning about the intricacies of this mighty biosphere. Our guide explained at length the flows of The Delta and how that sculpts the landscape from year to year. He taught us about the water lillies, and how the two main species complement each other opening and closing at day and night. We tracked the path of ancient elephants by the unusual stands of palm trees, and most popualr of all, held the half-thumbnail size painted and long-toed frogs, whose voices exceed most normal lake frogs at home.
We caught brim and cat fish and fried them up for dinner! We watched Pied Kingfishers and Fish Eagles dive for their prey. And we enjoyed our sundowners overlooking our own private lagoon, literally miles from the next tourist outpost, providing that essential remoteness that allows the casual visitor to understand the intractable power of the wild.
What surprising things we saw in the Makgadikgadi Pans! Red maned zebra, giant crickets, wattled cranes, tons of ele, and what’s left of the Botswana migration.
We stayed at a relatively new lodge on the Botete River, a river that had all been lost more than 30 years ago when Lake Ngami dried up.
But three years ago it was in full flow once again, as it had been for centuries, and the animals returned!
The Botete defines the southwestern boundary of Makgadikgadi Pans national park. Together with Nxai Pan and a bunch of smaller pans this contiguous area is one of the most unique in the world.
During the heavy rains in the beginning of the year, these pans pool ever so slightly with water. The Kalahari sand soil drains water quickly, though, and without the constant thunderstorms of January and February, the pans are often dry.
At that point they resemble any great sand lake depression found around the world. Their uniqueness comes from the precious sets of grasses and plants that flourish at the perimeter of the pans and bloom in the rains.
This attracts the herbivores and triggers their migration from more wooded areas with more permanent sources of water. But the extraordinary nutrition of these new grasses and plants is just what the zebra and wildebeest need as they prepare to calve.
The destructive veterinary fences erected throughout Botswana in the last half century destroyed most of the herbivore migrations and greatly reduced their numbers. But what’s left now moves between the Kalahari and the Pans, and we caught it on its southern movement from Nxai Pan towards Makgadikgadi Pan, the shift triggered by the end of the rains and the onset of winter.
We saw the migration happening during a long day trip from our camp in the Makgadikgadi north via Baine’s Baobabs into Nxai Pan.
What we saw were dozens of elephant and probably a hundred giraffe all methodically moving south. Zebra are actually supposed to be the bulk of the migration, and we did see dozens but not more. But among those we did see was a striking red-maned zebra with a red-and-beige tail!
I’ve seen unusually colored animals throughout my career, including white and silver haired lions, and even a white wildebeest. But I’ve never seen a primary color variation as with this particular zebra. There was no doubt it was natural, as he had just swum across the Botete and thoroughly soaked himself.
In Nxai Pan we saw the lingerers, good numbers of wildebeest and zebra. They were nibbling at the last of the green grass. We also saw lots of springbok in Nxai that will not migrate, plus a good number of gemsbok.
Botswana, like all of the southern African countries, maintains “boreholes” (well stations with automatic pumps) throughout their national parks. These are specifically designed for the wild animals to help them cope and prosper in the very intensely dry winter of southern Africa.
It’s a wildlife management technique that remains controversial, but the fact is that without these boreholes there would be so few terrestrial herbivore herds left in Botswana, and so many fewer lion families, that big game would be drastically reduced, limited to the Delta, the area’s few natural aquifers and river systems.
Without boreholes, the Pans would of course retain their mystical beauty, but would essentially be without much big game. Whereas what we were lucky enough to see, while not approaching the concentration of East Africa’s herds, was certainly as good or better than anywhere else in southern Africa.
And the remoteness, otherwise untouched and harsh beauty of this fragile area of our planet, is an absolute wonder to behold.
What I will remember mostly of our just ended week in The Cape is how white South Africa looks.
I hasten to make no judgment about this right away. But the facts speak for themselves. For a country less than 5% technically Caucasian, easily 80% of every one of our days was populated by whites only.
Now obviously we were tourists and visiting tourist destinations, and in today’s world where we as Americans routinely visit, the overwhelming percentage of tourists are white.
The Waterfront area of Cape Town had a greater diversity as it should since this was a major national holiday weekend. But I dare say it never was a majority of other than white faces.
Television presenters were mostly nonwhite, but television guests were mostly white. The South African business meetings that intersected our own holiday making at the wonderful Lanzerac Hotel in Stellenbosch were nearly all white.
The beautiful beach suburbs and Table Mountain suburbs of Cape Town with their elegant mansions and beautifully manicured lawns are almost exclusively white.
And Stellenbosch itself, until you actually drilled into the college campus, was a town filled with white tourists and residents and even a majority of wait staff and store owners who were white.
It’s less than two weeks before the next important national election, and it’s been twenty years since apartheid ended. On our trips to and from Stellenbosch, the airport and The Cape Peninsula we passed multiple times the “Cape Flats” – an endless, it seemed, sprawl of mostly tin housing.
They were not white.
There were hopeful signs at various points of public housing moving forward, but it was mostly an unbelievably large, sprawling slum.
I am constantly amazed at the patience of the African, of his ability to suffer, and I try to be inspired by the overarching hope that must sustain that patience, because contrary to many detracting commentators, it is not some innate futility of personality. It’s patience.
And it’s forgiveness, as embodied by the great clergyman, Desmond Tutu.
But such humility and spiritual generosity does not alone a progressive society make. This election cycle is different from the previous in the rancor of its competitors and in the threats of those slipping in the polls (like the ANC) to redistribute “white land.”
Ultimately that will happen if social progress isn’t sped up. We listened throughout the week to our older white guides lamenting the departure of their white children who were unable to obtain decent jobs in a South African society currently heavily weighted with affirmative action.
Yet while those children may be gone and the opportunities for nonwhites improved, the visible whiteness of The Cape remains striking and surprising.
History is neither a liar or a fool. The stories of the past are clear, and while the patience of its peoples differs greatly, it will not sit back and wait for promised equality forever.
Whether it means yet higher taxes to speed up national housing, or some painful land redistribution or even more radical wealth distribution through controversial methods like nationalization, South Africa in my view must makes some radical turns to defuse its tinder box.
The explosion may not be imminent, but it is inevitable if its leaders are unable to speed up the process of promised equalization.
Jim and his group spend the next week in Botswana which unlike so much of Africa has very limited internet connectivity. AfricaAnswerman’s blog posts will likely be delayed.
Our several days in and around Stellenbosch ended with exciting “Eagle Encounters” at The Cape’s premiere raptor rehabilitation center.
Everyone got to “let an arm” for great birds to perch on. The center takes in about 400 birds annually, of which a remarkable 65% can be rehabilitated and released into the wild.
The remainder, most of them house pets, can’t fend for themselves and become part of the public exhibit.
We got a private demonstration of rock kestrels, barn owls, jackal buzzard, the magnificent Black Eagle, and the extremely endangered Cape Vulture.
We were shown how to handle all the birds but the vultures, which are simply too big for an untrained handler.
The “wine country” of The Cape is often poorly defined as, in fact, almost every part of The Cape from the very edge of the city to the Karoo has beautiful wine estates.
Even to refer to the triangle between the wine producing cities of Franschoek, Paarl and Stellenbosch as “the wine country” is also somewhat misleading, because Stellenbosch in particular is considerably more diverse than simply a wine and farming community.
Stellenbosch, in fact, is one of the most historic parts of South Africa and any attempt to understand the country’s complex history would be impossible without understanding Stellenbosch.
Today the city is principally known as the seat of Afrikaans and as the city of the country’s principal Afrikaans university.
Certainly one of the most conservative if rigid communities in South Africa, a simple glance at the city and university complex proves that diversity is pressing in. I remember hardly twenty years ago seeing a great divide in racial color here: waiters, drivers, even traffic cops were black, but virtually every student, consumer and tourist was white.
That’s changed and today a casual glance into the campus of the University of Stellenbosch reveals a rainbow of people. Unfortunately, this doesn’t continue into the town, where white tourists and white long-term residents seem to dominate the buying part of the equation, with black seeping into only the sellers side.
We enjoyed several days here, staying at the beautiful if near perfect Lanzerac wine estate. We enjoyed several wine tastings in the region and a cellar tour. There are hundreds of wineries in The Cape and the vast majority are very small, producing hardly 50,000 bottles annually. But this smallness translates into an incredible array of wines and also maintains a historic uniqueness from one winery to the next.
The scenery in the area is awesome, with jutting sandstone mountains and perfectly manicured vineyards laid on the semi-arid slopes.
On Safari: Crater Lions
