The photographs from the Kwandwe Game Reserve have been uploaded with a lot more ease than the previous photograph album.

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We said a sad goodbye to Kwandwe and then in a car for the 2 hour drive back to Port Elizabeth (or PE as the locals call it).  We drove through Grahamstown which has some lovely colonial architecture in the middle and some extraordinarily deprived townships (or “informal settlements” as they call them here) on the outskirts. We had a latte in the airport and Hannah was mistaken for a star of the latest Harry Potter film which tickled her a bit.

We landed at Cape Town and were met by Oliver the C C Africa driver for the drive into the center.  Oliver talked and talked and talked and talked on the way in.  He could talk for Africa in the world cup of talking.  There’s a lot of development going on in Cape Town for the football world cup which is coming to South Africa in 2010.  In the UK we talk about the Olympics in 2012 as something which is a show case for the UK and which will generate jobs but at the end of the day, who cares?  Sure, Sebastian Coe might have been unhappy but losing the Olympics is a small price to pay for making Lord Coe slightly less smug.  In South Africa, the World Cup will have an enormous effect on the economy.  Big infrastructure and development projects are happening all over the country.  On the way into Cape Town, Oliver pointed out the “informal settlements” that we were driving past.  They are pretty desperate places.  The first two looked terrible.  The third one was a building site and the fourth one had been replaced with some newer developments.  The replacement houses aren’t going to win any prizes in Conde Naste Traveler but they’re a huge step up from a shanty town.  It’s a good sign of progress.

We were met at the Cape Grace hotel by the receptionist Boris, an Austrian, who was obviously on youth opportunities hotel training.  We were tired and grumpy after a lot of traveling but Boris wanted to take his time showing us round the hotel.  His Boratesque phrases made us all giggle a bit.  When I handed over my credit card, he said “naaiiiice” just like Borat.  Cue some snickering from the peanut gallery.  Also an interminable description of the opening hours of the library (“should I take notes” I said) was pretty amusing.  When we got to the room, Boris insisted on showing us the room:  “here’s your sewing kit, here’s the TV guide, here’s the drawers and here’s….the wardrobe”.  Eventually I ushered him out of the room and we unpacked.

Cape Town

The Cape Grace is on the Victoria and Albert Waterfront in Cape Town.  It’s pretty much indistinguishable from any other docklands redevelopment anywhere in the world.  If you imagine the South Street Seaport in New York, it’s just like that.  Lots of chichi little shops and restaurants.  Absolutely nothing wrong with it and in some ways it’s a sign of the development of an urban middle class in South Africa which is a good thing.  After all the good food at the C C Africa lodges, we had fish and chips on the harbour wall  and settled back into urban living for the next few days.

Today was a big lion day.  We joined our ranger Phill on a cold wet morning and while we were sipping coffee the tracker Dali noticed some tiny specks of white about 10km away.  We brought out the binoculars and indeed it was three female lions.  So we jumped in the vehicle and headed out into the reserve in search of lion.  It appears that the “done thing” is to refer to plural animals as the singular.  You don’t find tracks of “hyenas” you find the tracks of “hyena”.  Maybe it comes from the old hunting days.  The famous phrase “the big five” which is so heavily used in the marketing literature for game reserves also comes from the old hunting days.  The big five – lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo – were the animals that were most likely to kill you while you were trying to kill them.  Cape buffalo are actually quite boring looking animals but due to their propensity for coming back and goring you if you didn’t shoot them first time, they’re in the “big five”.

We stopped off at one of the big dams to view some tiny ears and eyes in the water which were hippo but we didn’t see much more than that.  There were ostrich and a beautiful black backed jackal on the way.  I think we’re getting better at spotting animals.  There’s a search pattern for animals which you don’t have when you first get here but over time, you get better at spotting things.   There are an extraordinarily large number of antelope like animals here in South Africa.  They range from the tiny duiker who are about the size of a household cat all the way up to an Eland which weighs just under a tonne and is as big as a horse.  There are a lot of evolutionary niches for fast vegetation browsers and the antelope have filled a lot of them.  Kudu, springbok, gemsbok (oryx), nyala, haartebeest (the animal in the picture on the right), …there’s literally 20 or 30 of these animals.  It’s easy to get focussed on the big carnivores or the elephants and hippos but these animals are quite stunning.

We found the three lionesses with their eight cubs up on a high bluff on the other side of the Great Fish River.  There wasn’t a lot going on and once again, the lions were sleeping.  So we drove up over the high ground through some unusual landscapes.  The Kwandwe game reserve used to be farm land and it’s only gradually returning to its natural state.  When you come across signs of farming it’s very odd.  We got a great view of Ecca Lodge where we’re staying from the other side of the reserve (hurrah for long focal length lenses).  The lodges are quite well designed to fit in with the landscapes.

On the way back we came across a different pride of lion.  There is an old male, an older female, two young lionesses and a two year old male.  The young male is just at the stage where he’s becoming a threat to the older male and so there was a lot of slinking around going on and the old male growling at the young male.  It’s all a bit incestuous since the young lionesses are the old males daughters and the young male’s sisters but both the male lions are attempting to mate with them.  According to Phill they don’t worry too much about the inevitable genetic degradation for the first three generations but once it’s gone on too long, they have to move the male lions to other reserves and import new males to make sure that recessive traits don’t take hold.   After a huge brunch, we headed back out to find the three lionesses and the two male lions again. 

On the way there, I finally managed to get a picture of a warthog.  Warthogs are very common in this region but they’re incredibly skittish.  As soon as you stop the vehicle, they zoom off into the bush with their tails sticking up.  They’re very tough little animals though and Disney really captured both the personality and the movements when they drew Pumba in the lion king.

We found the male lions and two of the lionesses in the middle of an old pecan orchard.  Once again, the young lion was keeping his distance and the old lion was guarding the young lioness who was about to come into oestrus.  It was slightly worrying to know that there was another lion somewhere in the vicinity but we couldn’t see her.  Then Phill, who had impressed us with his “ferrari safari” approach to driving, got the vehicle stuck!  Suddenly everything got very tense.  Neither Phill nor Dali was terribly happy to get out of the vehicle and even though we bounced up and down trying to move it, it was stuck.  We were behind a large bush and so we had no idea where the lions were and there was the ever present worry about the one lion that we hadn’t seen.  Clearly radioing for help would have been a insult to Phill’s driving experience so eventually Phill and Dali got out the huge high lift jack and jacked up the front of the vehicle and we got out.  Much relief all round.

As the sky darkened, we drove up round the high savanna and saw a black wildebeest going completely potty as it ran around its territory just for the fun of it.  We also got a good shot of another of the antelope species:  the national animal of South Africa, the springbok.  We stopped near a waterhole and Hannah and Isabelle learned some tracking from Phill and Dali.  Springhare and hyena tracks were found.  Trish and I had a welcome gin and tonic and the sun set slowly over the bush.

Home for a long enjoyable dinner with Phill who entertained us all evening with alternating funny and gruesome stories of the other guests.  Some who had been funny and some who had…err…been eaten.  Phill assured us that this didn’t happen very often but after the incident with the vehicle getting stuck, it was food for thought.

This was our last night in the South African bush and in the past 7 days, we’ve seen some incredible sights.  There is something different about seeing animals in the wild compared to a zoo or indeed compared to the Discovery Channel.  The fabulous guides and trackers make it easier to find them but it’s still an adventure…

The album of some of the photographs we took at Phinda has now been uploaded (with great difficulty).

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I’ve been spending a lot of time taking pictures of animals on this holiday.  The trusty Nikon 8800 that I’d used on the trip round the world

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We had a great sleep last night interrupted by the bat which has taken up residence in our cabin and which spend most of the night fluttering around. 

On Day 6, Trish had arranged for us to join the carnivore research project at Kwandwe.  Introducing carnivores into a game reserve is one of the most challenging tasks.  Seven years ago, Kwandwe was farm land where they had ostrich and goat farms.  After fencing it, they introduce the original “prey” species and carnivores.  At Kwandwe, they have a very detailed research project to follow how the carnivores interact with the prey species and with each other. We joined Graham (the head ranger) and Charlene Bissett (who is doing a Ph.D on the carnivore interaction) at 6.30am for an orientation and then we were off on the vehicle to follow the lions, leopards, cheetah and wild dogs.

It was extraordinarily cold this morning. (Izzy says: I spent the beginning of the drive huddled in the back, praying for death)  The wind was whistling down from the Drakensberg hills and it felt more like a camping holiday in Inverness rather than an African safari.  On our game drives up to now, the animals are found by the tracker who looks paw prints and “spoor”.  However, Charlene has a big advantage:  most of the animals that she tracks either have radio collars or radio implants which put out a <beep> on a particular frequency which can be tracked using a sort of directional aerial.  Even though Charlene could direct us in the general area of the animals, the tracker still spotted the animals in the distance. The trackers have an amazing ability to spot blobs in the distance and say “Oryx” or “Zebra”.  Old technology beats new technology again.  I spend my time looking at logs and patches of grass and saying “leopard”.  I’m always wrong.

We were really lucky to find the alpha female lioness with her three cubs close to the airstrip.  In the night, she had killed a kudu (a large antelope) and both she and her cubs were still feeding on it.  They were very relaxed about us being in the vehicle very close to her although when the vehicle obscured her view of the carcass she was very keen to keep it in view.  Watching a lion rip apart an antelope is a chilling experience.  It’s also a smelly experience as the lion rips open the intestines with their…err…part digested matter.  Eventually, both the lioness and her cubs had their fill and ambled off into the dense undergrowth for a bit of a sleep before coming back and eating some more.  We also managed to find the alpha male lion up in the hills who had killed a small warthog and was lying under a bush chomping his way through it with great relish.  Whatever Walt Disney might have made us think, Simba eats Pumba pretty much all the time.  There was a flood in Kwandwe last year and the warthog population exploded.  The lions have realised that it’s a lot easier to catch a warthog than a antelope with big pointy horns.  Hakuna Matata…

It just got colder and colder.  You might think that animal research in Africa is a nice life but there’s a lot of sitting around in trucks listening to <beep> and not seeing anything.  We had headed north over the Great Fish River following the signal of two leopards.  Although leopards are actually the most prevalent large cat in most of Africa, they’re almost impossible to see.  They’re solitary and have great camouflage.  You’d think that a big yellow and black spotty thing would  be hard to miss but after using the beepy device to locate the animal to a 10m square patch of bush, we still couldn’t see it.  Two hours of looking and we were no closer to sighting.  We did find the skeletal remains of a Pumba who had almost certainly come off worse in an encounter with the leopards.

We got back to the lodge around 1pm and had one of the lodge’s famous “brunches” which helped us warm up from the bitter cold.  It was a bit of shock to look out of the window and see an enormous bull elephant in “musth” drinking out of the swimming pool.  Every now and then, male elephants come “into musth” when they are ready to mate.  If you look closely at the photograph (just click on it), you can see the glands behind his eyes weeping.  Probably fortunately you can’t see his engorged penis dribbling urine down his legs which is another sign of musth.  Anyway, bull elephants are dangerous in this state so we kept our distance and took a few photographs with the camera on max zoom.  When you arrive at the lodge, they tell you not to walk around at night because animals might come into the camp and, of course, you think “yeah, right”.  But it can be quite dangerous if you come across a six tonne animal who is feeling a bit frisky…

After the excitement with the elephant, it was straight back out with Charlene and Graham to search for more leopard.  Graham managed to take the vehicle up some quite unbelievable hills and gullies to get us close to the source of the signals.  These stripped down Toyota Land Cruisers really can go just about anywhere.  I suspect that fluffy 4x4s like the appalling Porsche Cayenne and the BMW X5 would fall apart on the roads around here never mind the off road driving.  However, even though Graham got us into some hairy situations and places,  two hours later, we hadn’t found anything.  Even Graham’s fake warthog in distress calls didn’t work.  Once again, the leopard had eluded us.  In some ways, it was quite refreshing to spend all this time looking for something and not finding it.  If I need to see a leopard, I’ll go to Linton Zoo.  Trying and failing was a better experience by far.

We then spent a good hour getting our vehicle out of the place we’d got it into and decided to see if we could find the wild dog pack in Kwandwe.  After a sighting of a jackal, almost by chance we almost ran over the wild dog pack at a very recent kill of another kudu. Wild dogs are a very interesting species in Africa.  They used to be widespread and successful due to their quite high breeding rate and their amazingly high kill ratio.  Wild dogs are endurance hunters.  They chase an animal for kilometers until it’s knackered and then kill it.  Their kill rate is nearly 80% whereas something like a lion or a leopard will only manage a kill 10 or 20% of the time.  However, they have some rather unappealing habits including just eating the animal when they catch it.  They don’t “kill” their prey like lion.  So, all during the 1960s and 1970s, wild dog were hunted not just by farmers but also by “conservationists” in places like the Kruger National Park.  One day people woke  up and said “err…there aren’t many wild dogs left” and of course, the efforts of the conservationists had nearly made wild dogs extinct.  They are slowly being reintroduced to game reserves although they do occasionally have bouts of canine distemper which wipes out large numbers.

By the time we’d finished with the dogs, it was dark and had started raining.  It felt more and more like a camping holiday in Inverness.  Getting back in the dark through the driving rain in an open topped vehicle with no windscreen was a little bit of a trial but a combination of stupid jokes and huddling under ponchos got us home.  Today was a fabulous day and a great insight into the research that goes into reintroducing animals into these areas.