Check the video below for an invitation to wander with me through the African wilderness on my latest solo African safari, this time into the South-east of Angola. Enjoy!...
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Earth Art and a Story
It was visible from some way off, this ancient camel thorn. It demanded to be viewed in its full glory, with nothing of the shrub-land obscuring it. Even in death it still towered over its surroundings, more mesmerising than in life. A piece of sublime earth art. It tells, with agonising clarity, of hundreds of years of life in its brutal world. How it had hopefully pushed out its new growth. How the rough winds and the eland bull’s horns had torn at it and split it, how the long droughts had slowed it, then stopped it, and its...
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Terror
The right front paw of a wild dog. We found this single imprint in a sandy spot that was bare of vegetation. But we found more, when we looked around carefully – six, eight, maybe ten more sets. Their paws are soft, so their sign is easily missed… We had been wondering why the bush had been so strangely empty of medium-sized and smaller ungulates for something like the last two days – almost no zebra, no hartebeest, no impala, no kudu, no waterbuck, no wildebeest, no eland… The ones we did glimpse seemed unusually skittish. The wild dog...
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The Bruegel Picture
This week’s picture is like a Bruegel painting. It carries many stories, of wandering and of bush people and of an opportunistic Chefe du Posto, and a gentlemanly old chief and a rogue hippo in a far place; much too much to try and squeeze in here. But let me start with a few remarks about the picture itself. Maybe some of the other stories will emerge, each in its own time. It is like that with stories. Each one comes when its time and its place is right. The picture is of the living area of the dwelling...
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Water Tales
You can listen to the voice recording below, or read through the story. Enjoy! It took two days of meandering tracks and then three days of hard bush bashing to reach the pan. By then I had about sixty litres of water left. If I did not find water here, I would have to return to my previous source when I was down to about forty litres, or I might not make it back. That would limit my stay at the pan to a maximum of four days. The pan was a huge calcareous flat some four hundred...
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Unremarkable Routine
You can read through the text below, or listen to the voice narrative. Enjoy! Sometimes I feel like sharing the mundane of bush wandering; the parts that are not interesting or educational or dramatic, but part of the wilderness experience like the front door key is part of urban living. It is things like the careful checking of the vehicle at stops, the routine of finding a camp site, of preparing for the night, of having meals… The daily bush routine – which, in the African wilderness turns out to be is more of a framework than...
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Generous Reprieve
You can listen to the voice narrative or read through the text below. Enjoy! Our camp was dry and grumpy and listless. We had walked all day in the arid heat with dry and sticky mouths and throats screaming for more than the few mouthfuls of water we allowed ourselves, and we never saw a single animal or even a fresh sign. But then, the sun crept out below the clouds, and for one last time exploded the dullness into riots of colour and light. I dropped what I was doing and poured out the little wine left and...
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