Footloose with Diana

Namibia and the Skeleton Coast - Oct/Nov 2011

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In October 2011, Kit and I took a month-long tour around Namibia and South Africa with Overseas Adventure Travel. Namibia is a little-known (at least to those in the U.S. country directly above South Africa on the western coast of Africa. It's a relatively new country, dating from 1990, and has been occupied by the British, Germans, and South Africa during its history.

You can click any of the photos to see them larger. When you get to the bottom of the page, click "older posts" to keep going on the trip in chronological order.

Here's our motley crew; Kit is the third person from the left, for those of you who've heard lots about her, but never met her:

And our redoubtable guides, Rudy !Naibab and Ludmilla Beukes showed us all there was to see and made the trip so wonderful; Ludmilla is a seasoned Namibian guide, but she's new to OAT, so was with us to see how Rudy does it. You can read a bit about Rudy in this National Geographic article.

Our first stop was the 1907 Christus Kirche (Christ Church), an artefact of the German occupation of Namibia, which was once called German Southwest Africa. It's a source of some controversy because only the names of German casualities of the settlement wars are posted on the walls. There's some sentiment for tearing it down since it's a reminder of painful times.

Windhoek - Gardens

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These are the beautiful gardens fronting Tintenpalast, the old Parliament building in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Those of you who know me well know to expect lots of photos of plants...
The drive is lined with alternating purple and white jacaranda:

I never did find out what this beautiful tree is, but I regret there were no seed pods on the tree for me to bring home:

You get a lovely view of the Christus Kirche across the gardens:

A bronze cast statue of the Herero chief, Hosea Kutako, who was best known for his vociferous opposition to the South African rule:

Parliament building

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Built in 1913 as the administrative headquarters for German South-West Africa. The name Tintenpalast means 'Ink Palace', in honor of all the ink spent on the typically excessive government paperwork it generated.
The exterior has beautiful metal decorations that show many of the birds and animals in Nambia. Click each of the next two photos to enlarge them and see how many you can identify:

Our next stop was Katatura, which means “the place no one wants to live,” to which the native population was forcibly removed in 1961 in order to build the downtown business district. The majority of Windhoek’s half-million population lives there today. In the market, we saw this woman weaving a basket with her son in her arms:

Typical market display of beans and, in the foreground, mopane worms, the caterpillar of a moth that is fond of mopane trees; it's a major source of protein for indigenous peoples, esp. in the northern part of Namibia. And no, it doesn't taste like chicken... Someone described its taste as being " like seasoned cardboard with a definite hint of timber," which pretty much covered it for me. I imagine it's an acquired taste.

The market includes butcher stalls, so there's plenty of meat being barbecued nearby on the "braai," or grill.

A Herero woman we saw at the market, wearing the typical Victorian-era dress and headdress of the Herero. The Herero peoples were yet-another object of German genocide beginning in 1904:

Penduka and farewell to Windhoek

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Our next, and final, stop in Windhoek was Penduka, which means "wake up," a women’s workshop where they do embroidery, batik, beadwork, pottery, sewing, and glass beads from broken bottles. They've decorated the exterior of one of the buildings with wonderful paintings:
Here are some samples of their batik, which is done with a flour paste, not wax.
We d luncheon on a man-made lake run by Penduka and all the staff turned out to do a little dancing, drumming and singing for us.
Naturally the first thing that caught my eye at the airport was this wonderful and weird succulent tree:
Our chariot for the flight to the Kulala wilderness:

...but we had to wait until this odd little craft took off ahead of us...

Kulala

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The view from the air coming in doesn't really prepare you for the beautiful Kulala landscape. Bushmen called this area "The Land God Made in Anger," and Portuguese sailors weren't much kinder, referring to it as "The Gates of Hell."
As you can see, though, it wouldn't seem to merit those epithets; it's really quite beautiful, in a stark sort of way.

There were good rains in the fall (our spring), so the Bushman's grass is thick in most places.

Kulala Wilderness Camp

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The Kulala Wilderness Lodge is set right up against some hills in the Kulala park. As you can see, there's a main lodge and individual tent/cabins:

Our home for three nights. The stone portions of the structures are the bathrooms, while the rest is thatch-roofed tent:

The staff greeted us with song!

Our lovely spacious room with its wooden floors and mosquito-netted beds:

The "loo with a view"

All the bathrooms have a large picture window in front of the toilet for idle musings while looking over the plain:

More Kulala landscape

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There are fairy circles in this park area; no one knows what causes them, but you see them dotted around everywhere and nothing grows in them

A beautiful end to the day:

The Namib-Naukluft Desert

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At 55 million years, the Namib Desert is the oldest desert in the world. It gets less than .04" of rain a year, so most of its animals rely on dew and underground rivers that come to the surface occasionally for moisture. Its dunes are spectacular and stretch many miles inland from the sea. Some dunes are a thousand feet high and largely stationary. A few hardy souls rose very early to see them from a hot air balloon:

We had a high thin cloud cover the morning we went, so the shadows on the dunes at sunrise were not so dramatic as they might have been, but still quite beautiful. Notice the grazing oryx in this first one:

Dancing White Lady Spider

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One of the denizens of the dunes is the Dancing White Lady spider, which doesn't make a web, but instead makes a silk-lined burrow in the dunes. It's sometimes called the wheel spider for its habit of cartwheeling down the dunes to escape predator wasps. Here's the burrow of one that Rudy found:

She's a big girl, eh? They can get up to 20cm in size:

Namib dunes

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Dune 45 is a popular one for climbing, not as easy as it looks with that fine powdery sand. Every morning, all those footsteps are gone again.

Dead vlei (marsh or lake), formed when the Tsauchab River was cut off from the area by encroaching dunes about 900 years ago. All the acacia trees died, leaving their skeletons to populate the dry salt pan.

Not far away, though, is Sossusvlei (meaning "dead end marsh"), which still had quite a bit of water in it from the fall rains, and the waterbirds to go with it.

Sesriem Canyon

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Sesriem Canyon was carved by the Tsauchab River and is only about a kilometer long and about 100 feet deep at its deepest. The name means "six belts" in Afrikaans, so called because settlers in the area had to drop buckets attached by six belts of oryx hide linked together in order to reach the water permanently available in the canyon and still used today by animals.

You can see the sedimentary layers in the walls, and the sheer force of the water when it runs high in cutting out these holes and steep walls.

What's left of the water after this year's rains:

Birds

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Besides the beautiful landscape of this area, its dunes, salt pans and canyons, it harbors a surprisingly amount of wildlife for a place so arid, especially birds. Here's one of the amazing (and huge) nests of the Sociable Weaver Bird, which can contain hundreds of nests and may fell the trees they're built in from their sheer weight.

Two views of the rather shy Korhaan:

A pied crow

A stately female ostrich:

Critters

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A beautiful oryx; when he stands in profile like this, so it looks like he only has one horn, you can rather see how the legend of the unicorn might have come about:

A beautiful herd of female springbok...

...and their handsome protector:

In the hottest part of the day, the only thing to do is hang out in the shade until it begins to get cooler.

The Kulala Wilderness Camp has dug a well to provide water for the animals. Except for hyena, and one pair of introduced cheetah, there really aren't many predators for them to fear:

A dune beetle of some kind, looking for shade in the heat of the day, and very persistent about dogging us to get it.

On to Swakopmund

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On the flight from the Kulala wilderness, you can easily see the dunes rising up off the floor of the desert:

Salt pans and small watercourses that allow some plant life appear once in a while:

The remains of the 1909 wreck of the Eduard Bohlen are now a quarter of a mile inland from the sea, which has silted in the intervening area:

A ghost town, remnant of the short-lived diamond rush in the area:

Salt ponds feature all over the area, some colored by minerals:

The name of Swakopmund derives from a Nama word which essentially means "shit opening," referring to the dead animals carried down to the sea by the Swakop River when it's in full flood. Charming, eh? The town was founded in 1892 as the main harbor for the Imperial German colony, since the British had already snagged the better harbor of Walvis Bay, a few miles south. When the country was taken over by South Africa in 1915, all harbor activities were removed to Walvis Bay and the town languished until uranium was discovered nearby.

Swakopmund

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The jetty at Swakopmund:

Swakopmund still shows the tidiness of its Germanic origins, and was used recently as "The Village" in AMC's remake of "The Prisoner."

Precious and semi-precious gems are big business in Namibia. These boulders of amethyst and tourmaline are outside a gem gallery in town.

The Hansa Hotel

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We stayed at The Hansa Hotel in the heart of town, with its lovely central garden and an assortment of birds:

A weaver bird...
...and a couple of weaver nests:

Not sure what these charmers with the red beaks are.

Guano, salt and lichen

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Guano for the fertilizer industry was and still is a major business, provided by the plentiful seabirds feasting on whatever the Antarctic's Benguela current brings up:
Beautiful salt crystals are found in the area and just left for sale by the roadside on little stands using the honor system:

Fragile lichen fields are found up and down the coast and some attempts are made to preserve them.
Shipwrecks still occur along this treacherous coast, like the unfortunate foundered tug, Zela, which came to grief while being towed to Angola

Flamingos in one of the salt ponds.

Cape Cross

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The seal-shaped entrance gate to the Cape Cross seal colony, one of the largest colonies of Cape Fur Seals in the world.
Over 200,000 of them generate the strong smell of urea

Mother and one of last season's pups enjoy a little snuggle time, which will be short, because it was just about time for the new generation of pups to be born....

...and for the dominant male to get busy breeding next year's crop

The original 1486 Cape Cross, planted by Portuguese seafarer and explorer, Diego Câo, is represented now by two crosses, one a concrete replica and another carved from Namibian dolerite.

Walvis Bay

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The main business in Walvis (Whale) Bay is no longer whales, but oysters. There are about 8 million in the Bay at any given time, growing on lines strung from plastic barrel floats:

Pelicans are attracted to the tour boats by fish

Here comes one now!

A cheeky gull hopes for a nibble

There's a large fur seal colony here in Walvis Bay, too:

Junior, a seal acclimated to the tourist boats by fish handouts, is quite happy to come aboard and be petted and have his picture taken, so long as the fish holds out...
A winsome fellow, you can see by the external ears that he's not a true seal.

On to Damaraland

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Flying from Swakopmund to Damaraland, in the north, you can see how the terrain changed from the featureless terrain of the northern coast to something more akin to Arizona.

The gravel you see in the foreground, by the way, was the bush landing strip...

The landscape of Damaraland

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One of those amazing succulent plants that find a way to thrive in this harsh place:

An oryx takes advantage of the expanse of dry grass left over from the good rains Namibia had this past fall.

Very volcanic-looking, this area:

Damaraland Wilderness Camp

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The "little plane that could" brought us safely to Damaraland:

Namibia is the only country in the world that provides for protection of the environment in its constitution. One of the ways they ensure success at that goal is the establishment of local conservancies, led by local people, who receive training and support in managing communal land and wildlife and allowing the local community to work with private companies to create and manage tourism, from which the entire community benefits. There are about 50 of these conservancies in Namibia and the one in Damaraland, the Torra Conservancy, is the most successful of them. They recently built the Damaraland Wilderness Camp, operated now by a private company with the goal of training local people to eventually take over management of the Camp. We got the warm welcome we'd come to expect in Namibia from the staff:

And our accommodation barely met the definition of a tent! We'd have been happy to stay in perpetuity...

Himba Village

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While in Damaraland, we visited a Himba tribal encampment. A pastoral people, the Himba raise livestock. As a people, they suffered from the same attempt at genocide by the Germans in the early 20th century and because of their proximity to the Angolan border, many died in that conflict. Terrible drought in the 1980s killed most of their cattle and forced many of them into cities and refugee camps. They have had a resurgence since, and have formed conservancies to protect their ancestral lands and benefit from tourism. This is typical of the huts they live in:

This tree holds pots, bags and other day-to-day items belonging to the tribe:

A kraal protects livestock from wild animals at night:

The Himba women cover themselves in a mixture of red ochre and animal fat, both for beauty and protection from the sun. This is a grinding stone for making the ochre into a powder.
And everywhere, there are cute kids!

Himba women

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On of the most notable things about Himba women is their elaborate hair styles. Dreadlocks are covered in a red ochre mixture, and at the end of each braid is a tuft of hair which they apparently buy at local markets. Differences in the hairstyles and jewelry tell you whether a given woman is married, has children, etc:
I have to say, of all the village visits we have had on various OAT tours through the years, this one made a lot of us very uncomfortable. The only translator available was occupied by another group, so we weren't really able to talk to the women. Since they were bare-breasted, I think we felt rather exploitive:

Jakob Basson Combined School

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OAT supports schools and orphanages in each of the countries it conducts tours through, and in Damaraland they support the Jakob Basson Combined School, which is a boarding school since distances between villages in the area are so great. At least some of us found it charming to see a reminder of home on one of the kid's backpacks:

The ninth-grade classroom we visited:

Aren't the girls beautiful?

After visiting the school, we headed off for lunch, passing what our guide Rudy calls a "Kalahari Ferrari:"

The northern part of Namibia gets more rainfall than the south and you can see there's even some permanent water in the rivers:

Further down the riverbed, however, was an even more welcome sight, lunch laid out under the shade of a spreading mopane tree:

This is the life, eh? So very "Out of Africa!"

Twyfelfontain

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Twyfelfontain, "doubtful spring" in Afrikaans, has been occupied for 6,000 years by hunter-gathers and, more recently Khoikhoi (what we call bushmen) herders. The name refers to the inconsistent spring in the area. A white settler farmed here after World War II, but the unreliable water source eventually drove him out. This is the remains of the farmhouse.

The landscape, mostly mica shist, is daunting, but quite beautiful:

Little Rock dassies find it a congenial home, just the same:

Plants at Twyfelfontain

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Although the reason for visiting Twyfelfontain is to look at ancient pictographs in the rocks, there's plenty to appeal to us casual botanizers...

Pictographs

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Twyfelfontain is Namibia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site for its over 2,500 pictographs, produced by the Khoikhoi peoples in the sandstone. The oldest might be as old as 10,000 years and probably ended around 1000 A.D. Some, like this flamingo, aren't even found in the area, and indicate that there might have been contact with the coast, 100 km. west of here.

This charming pictograph shows a young giraffe nursing from its mother

A rhino?
An elephant:

A giraffe flanked by antelopes, birds, and two human footprints:

A pictogram of two linked water sources:

A lion with a long tail ending in what looks like a human hand, surrrounded by a giraffe and assorted antelopes:

The desert elephants of Damaraland

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Desert elephants aren't a separate species of elephant, but have simply adapted to the harsher climate of this region. We were very fortunate to encounter this group in a dry riverbed:

As everywhere, elephants are very destructive, pushing over trees to get at the branches or to scratch an itch. They were working hard to pull down the lowest branches this tree had to offer:

One of my fellow travelers, Ted Doll, took some nice video of this group if you'd care to take a look.

Isn't the baby adorable?

They weren't afraid of us, but they did steadily move off, keeping the baby well protected.

Birds in Damaraland

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A yellow-billed hornbill:

Black-shouldered kite:

The ridiculous guinea fowl:

Egyptian geese:

Some mysterious, and rapidly retreating, fowl...probably a Namaqua sandgrouse:

Hoofed critters of Damaraland

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A female kudu:
Rock dassie - fits in rather nicely, doesn't he?

I wish I had a better shot of this male kudu; click the picture to blow it up and admire his twisted horns!
A couple of Hartmann's Mountain Zebra:

A steenbok:
Female spotted hyena:
Giraffe, of course.

Etosha

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Another small plane took us northeast to Etosha, where the terrain changed yet again and was somewhat wetter:

Part of the great salt pan in Etosha, impossible to accurately capture in a photograph, as it's 130 km long and as wide as 50 km in places.
One of many beautiful sunsets we were lucky to experience in Namibia:

Plenty of plant life, too!

Acacias laden with sociable weaver bird nests:

Birds - Etosha

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One of my favorite African birds, a Kori Bustard, one of the heaviest birds still capable of flight (although it avoids it, if possible); males can reach 4'9" in height.
Tawny Eagle:

A pair of ostrich:

A Martial Eagle:

White-quilled (or Northern black, just to be confusing) Korhaan:

Blacksmith plovers:

Elephant and Rhino - Ethosha

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A few elephants horned in at the local waterhole:

And an eight-year-old dominant male Black Rhino visited our lodge's waterhole and salt-lick virtually every night, although he always waited until the light was dim and it was tough to take a decent photo:

Lions

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Some played coy with us, but...

...it was mating season, so some threw caution to the winds.

Then, of course, they needed a nice long drink

Somebody's pretty beat; this can go on for a week or so, 20-40 times a day, and they don't hunt (so they don't eat) during this period. No wonder he's bushed...

Giraffe

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This handsome fellow visited the waterhole at our lodge; he was very wary and it took him a long time to try to decide whether to drink.

But drink, he eventually did, in that awkward way of giraffes:

Then it's only polite to stand guard while someone else gets into that thoroughly awkward position to drink, too:

A few in the bush:

Bushbuck and Black-faced Impala

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My apologies for the large number of photos of this gorgeous bushbuck and his mate, but bushbuck are, hands down, my favorite African antelope:

Notice the white ring around the rear, sort of a perfect target:

This is the shy black-faced impala, indigenous to this area of Africa only. To me, they look like the "rare plum-hued topi," frankly, but never mind...

They can drink oddly in their own way, too:

Oryx, zebra, and wildebeest

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A handsome pair of oryx at a waterhole:

On the move:

After the oryx leave, the zebras move in:

Their constant companions in the grassland, the cattle egrets, who love the bugs the hooves kick up:

Cooling off at the waterhole with their friends the oryx and the sprinkbok:

Someone needed a drink:

A lone wildebeest (gnu to you) who hung around our camp's waterhole and never seemed to connect up with other wildebeest:

Some smaller creatures

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Black-backed jackal:

A spotted hyena and a wary springbok:

A couple o' chameleon:

Warthog, a face only a mother could love:

Cheetah!

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Sometimes it pays to get up an extra half-hour early; eagle-eyed Kit caught this mother dawdling by the roadside in the half-light:

She had a couple of adolescent cubs with her, but they stayed too far away for photographs.

Cape Town, South Africa

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The view from our hotel window; that's Table Mountain at the back right:
The old City Hall:

The much-photographed Malay quarter, with its brilliant paint jobs; it's a largely Muslim district:

Castle of Good Hope

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The oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, the East India Company built the Castle of Good Hope between 1666 and 1679, mainly as a replenishment station for ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope:

Victorian Cape Town

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It's hard to say how long it will last, but at least now there is still quite a bit of Cape Town's Victorian architecture around. Parts of it look a bit like New Orleans:

Cape Town from above

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From Signal Hill, you can get a nice view of the harbor:

And the Cape Town Stadium, built for the 2010 World Soccer Cup:

Down to the Cape of Good Hope

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Beautiful views....

Beautiful protea, which cost the earth here, growing like weeds...

And the occasional supercilious ostrich...

Cape of Good Hope

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A flowering tree at the home of the supercilious ostrich; never did find out the name of it.

More pincushion protea:

The ranch where the supercilious ostrich was raised sent a few breeding pairs to this park proximate to the Cape of Good Hope a few years back.
As you can see from this youngster, one of many we saw, they're thriving:

Cape of Good Hope

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The Cape of Good Hope isn't the southernmost point of Africa; that's a couple hundred kilometers east of here, but it gets all the good press.

And it certainly is striking:

Many generations of seabirds nest here:

The Cape point itself:
You can see the lighthouse, that tiny white structure, at the bottom right, the building to the left was the former keeper's lodging - the light's now automated:

Baboons are a read hazard; there are many road signs warning you to keep your windows rolled up and not to feed them, as they can be quite dangerous.

Boulders Beach

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Boulders Beach is quite a picturesque little seaside town:

But its primary attraction is a permanent colony of African penguins (formerly known as Jackass penguins, after their characteristic bray).

Right now they're molting, so not perhaps at their most attractive:

The (Dutch East India) Company's Garden

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Cape Town was originally founded in 1652by Dutch settlers to grow vegetables and fruit to replenish ships rounding the Cape on their way to and from India. It fell on hard times while rule of South Africa ping-ponged between the British and the Dutch, but has been restored since the early 19th century (a pear tree from the period still survives in the Garden):
The Gardens have a gorgeous view of Table Mountain:

Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) was a sickly grammar school boy sent to South Africa in hopes the climate would restore his health. That expectation was realized...and how! He consolidated all the small diamond holdings in the Kimberly area into the De Beers Diamond Company. An ardent fan of British imperialism, he also founded Rhodesia, which became the independent countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Naturally, the Company's Garden would have a towering statue of him:
Lots of beautiful trees and flower beds

Macaya bella, a beautiful shade-flowering shrub:

It's popular, even traditional, for wedding photographs.

Duck pair and brood:

Victoria and Alfred Waterfront

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Although still a working harbor, most of the Cape Town waterfront is given over to things touristic. This Ferris wheel provides a terrific view of the area...
...including an unequaled view of Table Mountain.

A view of Table Mountain's famous "tablecloth" coming in in the afternoon:

Kirstenbosch

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Kirstenbosh, formerly Cecil Rhodes' pig farm, was bequeathed by him to the nation and is one of eight national botantical gardens in various biomes of South Africa. Nestled at the foot of Table Mountain, it preserves only South African native plants, many of which look quite familiar to those of us who live in California:

Mountain dahlia (Liparia splendens):

A protea whose color comes from coloration of the leaves, not flowers:

Another gorgeous protea, Tufted Pincushion (Leucospermum oleifolium):

Outeniqua yellowwood (Podocarpus falcatus), with its beautiful shaggy bark:

Kirstenbosch has a huge collection of cycads:

A strange gardenia, Gardenia thunbergia, sometimes called forest gardenia:

Beautiful views of Cape Town and Table Mountain from Kirstenbosch:

Stellenbosch - wine tasting

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Stellenbosch was founded in 1679 by the governor of the Cape Colony, who named it after himself, naturally. Much of it was settled by Huguenot refugees and is now the center of the South African wine industry. It was a bit rainy when we set out to visit...
Hartenberg Winery:

...so we did the only thing possible under the circumstances: we tasted wine.
This is the ultra-modern tasting room, in the former stable block, of Rustenberg Winery:

A pair of hadeda ibis hanging out at the winery:

Stellenbosch - the town

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The Dutch influence is easy to see in the charming little town of Stellenbosch, which is mostly given over to tourism and the promotion of the local wine industry:

Lots of public art was scattered around town, including this aardvark head, made of recycled automobile tires:

Kalk Bay

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It's been nearly 40 years since I last drove on the "wrong" side of the road, but I managed to make it to Kalk Bay before messing up. The package tour with OAT was over and we had rented a car and booked some B&Bs for another week of seeing South Africa on our own. We're on our way to the famed Garden Route, a stretch along the south western coast of South Africa which I had traveled on my first visit here in 2000. I'd heard there were lots of good antique stores in Kalk Bay, though, so we headed there first. Look at these cute changing booths on the beach just outside of town!
The old train station in Kalk Bay:

Wonderfully decorated bookstore front in town:

I'm a fool for old buildings and this is one of the best:

Gorgeous coastline on our way from Kalk Bay east to Hermanus:

The Hideaway in Swellendam

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The Garden Route of South Africa has the second mildest climate in the world, after Hawaii, perfect for flowers and beautiful gardens, so it's well named. Our first stop for a couple of nights was at The Hideaway; it's run by a lovely English couple, Stephen and Jackie, who stayed here once and then bought it on a whim - they're naturals for the business, too! It's beautifully appointed, well priced, there are no extras as everything's included, they make reservations for you at different restaurants around town or fix you a lovely "light" supper (seriously, they don't know the meaning of the word 'light,' but you won't go to bed hungry!) -- well, I'm gushing, but believe me, it's entirely justified.

The outside of our room:

The spacious and charming inside:

The lawn and gardens, where the proprietors and the guests gather for drinks and nibbles about 6:30 pm, amply entertained by both the company and their kitten, Per.

Gaura, one of my favorite garden plants and one I can't keep alive in my own garden, no matter what, even if it is a North American plant that's considered an invasive weed some places...

Swellendam

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Neighbors of The Hideaway are potters Felicity Potter (what else could she have become with that name?) and David Schlapobersky, who run Bukkenburg Pottery Studio in addition to having a lovely flower and vegetable garden, along with a few sheep, and three cute terriers:

Swellendam

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The third oldest town in South Africa, Swellendam was an administrative center for the area beginning in the 1700s, eventually revolting from the bureaucratic incompetence of the Dutch East India Company. It's predominantly an agricultural area today, with some beautiful old Dutch colonial buildings. This is the Drostdy, the administrative seat, a clay and unbaked brick building with a thatched roof, looking much as it did in 1844:

The Nederduitsch Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reform Church):

Bontebok National Park

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We were so fortunate to have Adin Greaves, a prime mover behind the establishment of this park, drive us around and show us the animals and plants here. This is the bontebok, quite endangered:

A beautiful land tortoise, just hanging out in the road until we disturbed him:
This is what his shell looked like with the dust washed off:

A male rhebok...
...and one of his consorts:

Weaver bird nests:

Bontebok Nat'l Park - plants

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Protea

OK, it's ice plant and we see it at the side of every freeway in California, but they harvest the fruit here, called sour fig, and make jam from it. Hmmm - that gives me an idea...

Bontebok Nat'l Park - yet more plants

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Oudtshoorn - La Plume Guesthouse

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We drove north through beautiful mountain passes, to Oudtshoorn, in the Little Karoo, where we stayed at La Plume Guesthouse , the family home of the third generation who own the ostrich farm here, opened in 2005 as a guesthouse. It's one of the former "Ostrich Palaces" built by farmers made rich by the boom in the ostrich feather trade of the last 1800s, a boom that crashed in 1914. This area has the largest ostrich population in the world, still selling feathers, but also meat and leather from the birds. They thrive in this semi-desert area inland from the southern coast of South Africa.

The view from the guesthouse:

Our lovely room, the former master bedroom of the family house:

Is this a seriously well-appointed bathroom, or what?

The dining rooms

Ostriches

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The next generation of dinner, wallets and hat adornment:

The owner of La Plume, Bartel du Toit, with an ostrich egg; all eggs laid by his stock are collected and incubated instead of the birds raising their progeny themselves:
A couple of freshly hatched chicks...

...and one a few days older:

The Knysna Heads

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Knysna is a Khoi word which probably means "straight down," a reference to to two headlands that flank a deep but treacherous channel. You can see from the water action why there are at least a dozen shipwrecks and why Knysna never became a major harbor.

Knysna and Buffel's Baai

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Never a shortage of cool plants when you're on the Garden Route:

Buffel's Baai (Buffalo Bay), a gorgeous white sand beach with really scary surf

Birds of Eden - Louries

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East of Knysna is Birds of Eden, the largest free-flight aviary in the world. Its premier resident is the Knysna Lourie or Turaco, a very shy bird hard to see in the wild. Pretty, eh?
Buffoni Green Turaco:
Green Turaco:
Hartlaub's Turaco:
Bare-faced Go-away Bird (well, you sort of have to know what its call sounds like to understand that name...):

Birds of Eden - parrots

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Jandaya conure on right:
Jandaya conure on left and Electus parrot on right:

Red-masked conure:

Blue-fronted Amazon Parrot:

Blue and Gold Macaws:
Amazon Gray Parrot:

Birds of Eden - ducks

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Rosy-billed Pochard:

White-faced Whistling Duck:
Northern Pintail Duck:

White Mandarin Duck:

Fulvous-whistling Ducks:
Common Shell Duck:

Mandarin Duck:
Carolina Wood Duck:
Common Moorhen:

Birds of Eden - birds on stilts

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Caribbean Flamingo:
Greater Flamingo:
African Crowned Crane:

African Spoonbills:
Cattle Egret:

Birds of Eden - swans, geese & cormorants

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Cormorant:

Barnacle Goose:
Black Swan:
Spotted Dikkop:

Birds of Eden - cockatoos

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Sulfur-crested Cockatoo:

Ducorp's Cockatoo:
Medium Sulfur-crested Cockatoo:

Birds of Eden - parakeets and doves

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Mustache parakeet:
Rose-ringed parakeet (I think...):

...but it might be an Indian Ring-neck parakeet:

Alexandrine parakeet:

Lace-neck dove:

Barbary dove:

Rock Pigeon:

Birds of Eden - jays, starlings, thrushes and weavers

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Royal or Golden-breasted starlings:
Purple Glossy Starlings:

Golden Palm Weaver:

Inca Jay:

Olive Thrush:

Birds of Eden - Pheasants

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Golden Pheasant:

Golden Pheasant and Knysna Lourie:

I'm not sure what kind of pheasants these are:

Birds of Eden - toucans, ibis, and...tamarins?

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Scarlet ibis:

Hadeda ibis:

Channel-billed toucan:

Monkeyland is right next door to the Birds of Eden aviary, so when we saw this little Golden-handed Tamarin raiding the bird feeders and lounging on the railings, we thought there'd been a jail-break. But no, the keepers say the tamarins are too small for Monkeyland, so they're on exhibit here. They just eat fruit and don't bother the birds, although it didn't appear to us that the birds were all that sure of this:

Cango Wildlife Park - Oudtshoorn

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Somehow I forgot to include these photos when I was working on the section about Oudtshorn, but the way blogs are timed, I can't go back and insert it where it belongs, so just bear with me. Kit was interested in petting cheetahs and the one place I knew we could do that was at the Cango Wildlife Park in Oudtshoorn, so we headed off to check it out. They have lots of wildlife besides big cats; here are a few:

Dik-dik, a tiny antelope that might weigh no more than about 15 pounds fully grown:

Some kind of starling:

Bat

A South American Pale-winged Trumpeter:

Hornbills:

Leopard, indifferent:

White tiger, bored:

Spotted-necked Otter, not really interested in being photographed:

Ring-tailed lemurs:
Marabou stork:

Cape vulture:
Red River Hog:

Pygmy hippo:

Kit pets her baby cheetah:

Mine's a bit more blasé about the whole thing:

And that, I'm afraid is the end of our four-week-long sojourn in Namibia and South Africa. After 30+ hours in transit home, I'm happy to stay put for a while, although I do have a few possible destinations in mind for next year... ;)

Tanzania

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In November, 2010, Kit and went to Tanzania. I'd been there last in the 70s, when it had no tourist infrastructure to speak of, but lots of animals. Sadly, although it now has the tourist infrastructure, it has far fewer animals. Still, it was a worthwhile trip and they seem, belatedly, to be trying hard to do something about the decline in the wild animal populations.

Remember you can click any photo to see it larger, and at the bottom of each page, keep clicking "Older Posts" to see the remaining photos of the trip.

First stop in Arusha, the capital city, was the Shanga Shangaa (http://www.shanga.org/Shanga.html), which provides work opportunities for disabled people. I was interested in going because they make beads from recycled bottle glass, but they do much more, including making sewn goods, metalwork, and even run a restaurant along the stream that borders the property.

Bad photo, I know; I was having camera problems, but here you can see woman sewing on pedal-operated machines, backed by strings of wine bottles.
Old bicycle parts run some of the glass grinding operations.

Arusha's sparkling modern cultural heritage center, which has a wonderful art gallery and a shop selling anything and everything a tourist to East Africa might want (including, of course, tanzanite)

A friendly card game among the local critters:

Tangarire National Park

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Tangarire is a large park quite near Arusha, although we stayed at a tented lodge nearby instead of in town, which was much more fun. Here's a view of Lake Burunge from the front deck of our tent:

Can't say they don't have a sense of humor at the park:

One of the major attractions of Tangarire is the wonderful baobob trees, which look like they were ripped out of the ground, then stuck back in the hole upside down. And yes, that's the first animal you'll see standing in its shade, but you won't see many again in this blog for a while. I've decided that instead of being strictly chronological, as I usually am, nobody probably cares which park this or that elephant or zebra is in, so I'm clustering all the animal photos at the end by species.

Strangely, baobob do actually flower:

My favorite African tree, though, are these beautiful flat-topped acacia, which the weaver birds love, too, as you can see from all the nests festooning this one:

Great shaggy things (although some weaver species are tidier), but they must do the job.

Tangarire continues

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A nice picnic site, esp. if you are an elephant or a vervet monkey:

Sausage tree (Kigelia africana), and you can certainly see where it gets that name:

The area is dotted with Maasai villages and one morning we visited one. All the huts are mud daub over sticks with grass roofs, every last one of them built by the women.

Here's the headman and a couple of his kids, with our guide Godloving on the right (and no, I did not make that name up):

The kids are cute as they get:

Maasai women

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Beautiful, aren't they?

The came out to dance and sing for us:

Maasai men

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The men's major duty, it appears, is to tap a vein in one of the cattle in the morning and drain off a little blood for breakfast:

Oh, and dance a little when the tourists come 'round...

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The tourists get to "help" with thatching a new roof for a new wife:

A roadside market on our way east toward Ngorongoro Crater; I love this woman's outfit!
Tanzania is famous for its Makonde carvings, but the Makonde tribe lives in the south, where there is little tourism. They've taken to sending young men to the tourist areas in the north to work and send money home. You can see they produce their beautiful works with the simplest of tools in the crudest of workshops.
For our trip to Ngorongoro, we stayed at the beautiful Tloma Lodge near the Crater. The grounds are exquisitely landscaped with flowering plants, as you can see here. The Lodge also grows most of the produce it serves in a huge market garden on the property.

Ngorongoro Crater

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A UNESCO World Heritage site, Ngorongoro is a volcanic crater some 2000 feet deep and 100 square miles in area. Although animals do pass in and out of the crater, it takes some doing, so most of the animals here are born and die in the Crater. It gets quite a bit of rainfall annually, although we were there in the dry season, so you can't see much evidence of the water from these photos. When I was here in the 70s, you could see huge herds of animals spread across the floor of the crater from high up on the rim, but not nowadays.

Serengeti

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Serengeti, a name to conjure with! It covers 12,000 square miles in the northwest part of Tanzania, extending up into Kenya (where it's called Maasai Mara National Park). Its name is well-derived from a Maasai word meaning 'endless plain.' Our tented camp is quite luxurious; each tent has a flush toilet and hot showers, the latter fed by camp employees hoisting water to the rooftop cistern via buckets filled from large cauldrons heated over wood and available only after we return from our game drives.

The camp backs up onto a magnificent kopje, an Africaans word for the many rock outcroppings found all over Serengeti.
The camp is on a site favored by the late documentary filmmaker Alan Root, who also did a lot of work for National Geographic. Below is a thatch-roof open platform where he used to live when he was working in Serengeti.

And you can see from the view why he picked that spot:

Serengeti kopjes

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Kopjes are common in the Serengeti, especially in the area of our camp, and they provide microclimates that harbor all kind of plant and animal life.

Several kopje we saw provided habitat for the magnificent Euphorbia candelabrum you see on the right in this photo:

Other rock tricks

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Kopjes have provided both an art canvas and a source of music for the indigenous peoples in Serengeti. These are fairly contemporary paintings of Maasai warriors with their shields:

This rock is pitted with depressions caused by being struck with rocks, as Godliving is doing below, to make wonderful and unearthly musical tones.

And the swifts make their messy nests there as well.

Acacia

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I am and always have been enamored of the African acacias. They are graceful and elegant trees and provide food for giraffe, homes for weaver birds, thorned fence enclosures for Maasai goats and cattle, and much more.

One of my favorites, the yellow-barked "fever tree," Acacia xanthophloea, which early settlers thought was the source of malaria, not realizing that it was carried by mosquitoes supported in the swampy areas that these trees favor:

Serengeti plants

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The aptly named Fireball Lily:

Not sure what this is, but I can't resist a plant with glaucous foliage and purple flowers:
Sunrise at camp the last morning we were in Serengeti:

The Road to Olduvai Gorge

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Maasai boma, an enclosure of huts, along the road:

Young Maasai are sent out to forage for themselves after their adult initiation ceremonies; these probably get most of their money by flagging down tourists along the road and charging for photos of their beautifully decorated faces, a practice our driver strongly disapproved of. He couldn't have been very surprised, though, since about all Maasai men do otherwise is sit around the camps while the women do all the work.

Well, it's now spelled "Oldupai," but still has the same magic:

Birds!

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Yes, I know you thought we'd never get to the animals, but here they are, beginning with the birds. I know very little about birds, but those in Africa are truly diverse and spectacular. Not sure what these chaps are (I did say birds are not my strong suit, didn't I?), but they're handsome things, aren't they?

Goldfinches at the feeding trough at Tloma Lodge

Yellow Oriole

My favorite African bird, the Lilac-Breasted Roller; I couldn't get a good photo in flight, but the underside of the wings is a beautiful dark blue, as if this bird needed anything else going for it:

White-headed buffalo weaver:

Yet more birds

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Blacksmith plover or lapwing:
Magpie Shrikes:

Red-cheeked Cordon Bleu, buffalo weavers, Fisher's lovebirds, and a bunch of other feathered creatures taking advantage of a mudhole:

A young Red-billed Hornbill:

Water birds

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Some type of Kite:

Anhinga:
Flamingo at the salt lake in Ngorongoro Crater:

Egret:
African fish eagle:

Ground birds

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Helmeted Guinea fowl:

One ostrich in pursuit of another:

Secretary bird, so-called because the feathers on the head look like the quill pens stuck behind a clerk's ear:

Kori bustards; hard to tell size because there's nothing to scale in these photos, but these are huge birds, standing 2-3 feet tall:

Maribou stork

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The feathers may make beautiful boas, but these have to be among the ugliest birds on earth:

Still more birds

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African crowned cranes:

I believe this is a tawny eagle:

Another lapwing:
The inevitable vultures:

Not sure what this guy is, but he has such handsome feathers:

Agama lizards, jackals, and hyena

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Beautiful blue and red agama lizard:

Black-backed jackal:

Hyena just strolling along...

...and one soaking himself in roadside mud:

Warthogs

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A cute little family group of warthog:

Like they don't look silly enough anyway, they have to kneel to eat:

Hello, I must be going!

Giraffe

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Maasai Giraffe:

Sometimes they have to reach pretty high to get food:

Baboons

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A baboon pissing contest is not pleasant...

Vervet Monkeys

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"I know there's food in this jeep somewhere...:

One isn't supposed to feed them, of course, but this was at a picnic area where people clearly do so all the time, so they just hang out on the railing, waiting until you decide you can share a bit of watermelon with them...

Cute baby!

Zebra

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A herd of these is referred to as a "dazzle of zebra:"

Gotta love the braided effect of the tails. This is a pregnant female and another female with her youngster:

Young ones tend to have brown coats until they mature:

Giving tourists the rear view seems to be popular...