November 13

November 13, 2018

Letaba Rest Camp

On the porch, on  a hot clear afternoon, at Letaba.  Very bright, no clouds visible from where I sit. Very little stirring in the camp.  Gina taking a nap.

We left Biyamiti yesterday morning.  After the bush walk on Sunday, Simon, the camp ranger, invited us on the morning game drive out of Biyamiti.  He only had two guests booked and so extended that generosity, and we took him up on it. He told us that the evening before, he’d seen three male lions just the other side of the weir where I’d spent some time shooting.  That’s of course how it goes – if I had gone maybe a couple hundred more meters down the road, I’d have likely bumped into those boys….

The game drive was lovely, with a beautiful sunrise but, alas, no lions. It’s a pretty long drive from Biyamiti to Letaba, maybe six hours of steady driving, so we took a break at Lower Sabie for breakfast along the way and made it to Letaba at about 3:30. It was clear and hot and not much was stirring.  We did see one lioness along the road north of Satara, but she was a long way off and she just moved from one patch of shade to another through the heat haze.

Letaba is in the central section of the park, well north of Biyamiti and Lower Sabie, and it’s much drier here. They obviously didn’t get as much of last week’s rain and it’s barely greened up at all.  The mopani trees here are beginning to leaf but I think they leaf whether there’s been any rain or not – they’re on their own schedule.  Mopanis are beautiful and when leafing, the bush fills with their butterfly wing-shaped, sparkling yellow green leaves. I took a short drive after arrival yesterday, but didn’t see a lot.  This morning we suffered from good intentions unrealized, and we slept in. We prepared a quick breakfast of corn flakes and yogurt and watched the vervet show.  I speak badly of vervets sometimes, but I actually admire their intelligence and gumption.  Basically, they’ve figured out that they’re smarter than the average tourist and they’re right. They roam through the camp in gangs, looking for opportunities to take food and I’m sure that they are successful every single morning. I don’t want to seem to be smug about it – both Gina and I have been outwitted by vervets at some point.  Most tourists see them as nuisances but, again, I secretly admire the little bastards. This morning,  in our part of the camp some tourist in his plaid shorts, polo shirt and sandals with socks took it upon himself to proclaim vigilante law and began patrolling with a slingshot, flinging rocks around at the vervets.  These monkeys have seen it all before and this little self-righteous shit was not big concern to them – they just drifted on to another part of the camp.  What is it with people like that?  You just have to secure your food, and if other people get raided by vervets, they’ll learn their lesson and it won’t happen again. And if it happens twice, well, good for the vervets.  It’s not that hard.  But there’s some kind of authoritarianism latent in human nature, isn’t there. Some kind of stern father complex that wants these little creatures to obey our property rights like little children. I gave the guy the stink eye and shook my head, so I’m sure he felt properly and thoroughly chastised. Grrr.

And with sleeping in and exercising my own self-righteousness, we didn’t get out of the gate until 0545. It sounds early, but the sun is well on the way to being up, and the period of ideal light is approaching the end.  It was cool this morning, high 60s, and we began with a very clear sky.  Then there was just the whisper of a few very soft clouds. Then, there were hundreds of soft, pastel clouds in the sky, eventually merging into a rumply sort of overcast, then breaking up again into hundreds of soft clouds and then disappearing altogether.  It was actually quite a show which I only noticed because we drove around for hours without seeing much at all. Saw some cape buffalo – what are called in Afrikaans, “dagga boys”, dagga being a word that apparently means mud, or cement. These are older, male buffalo who reach a point where they either get pushed out of the herd by younger, more vigorous males, or they can no longer keep up with the constant movement of buffalo herds.  They tend to congregate in small groups for protection – maybe 2 to 5 – and they tend to stay near rivers and drainage systems, where there’s water (buffalo must drink every day) and availability of soft grass. The term dagga boys refers to these old bachelors, who will frequently wallow in mud to cool off and relieve themselves of parasites.  They’re actually very dangerous to encounter on foot.  Because they’re separated from the herd, they are more vulnerable to lions and so they become much more reactive.  They’re on a hair trigger you might say. The three I ran into just stopped and watched me from the bush.  I’ve been around buffalo a lot and have never felt much risk while in a vehicle, but I was careful to give these old men some room. They seemed edgy and they’re pretty unpredictable, to me at least.

So another long, uneventful drive.  We’ll go out again for a couple of hours late this afternoon.  Time is running out for us here in South Africa – we’re here tonight, two nights in Olifants and then the last night in Orpen, before heading back to Jo’burg to fly overnight to Kenya. I’m hoping for better shooting in Kenya because so far, it’s been very unproductive for me.  I don’t know how much is me and being out of practice and also unwilling to fight a crowd for a shot of a sleeping lion, but so far, I’ve got almost nothing to show photographically.

But I do get to drive around gavel roads in the middle of nowhere with the possiblity of coming around a corner to find a leopard or a lion or an elephant standing the road. Hard to beat that.