TR: Eastern Cape 2016

Straight after collecting our overseas visitor from the airport we set out for Dlinza Forest. This small reserve is entirely surrounded by the raucous, undisciplined African town of Eshowe, but still remains a delightfully calm, green oasis. And so all my pictures from there are of trees and so Most Uninteresting.

Not finding what he was looking for, we headed next for Mtunzini, which has a delightful, mangrove-fringed estuary in the Umlalazi Nature Reserve. For some reason the view reminded me of dome of @bookmarque's recent pictures:



Evidently Callitriche, the wetland plant we were looking for, doesn't like salt water, so we tried the Raffia Palm Monument, a few yards inland. Success! Right in the parking area, which is often more than somewhat squishy.



The leaves are about 1 to 2 mm (think 1/10 inch or less) long, so this is hardly the world's most conspicuous (or inspiring) plant. Before you ask, the flowers are tiny yellow dots -- it has yellow pollen. Here is a fragment in fruit (halfway up the vertical bit on the left you'll see tiny paired ovals, each just less than 1 mm long; that's the fruit.



And so home, and (hopefully) a good night's sleep for our guest. More later.

Hugh, thanks for the photographs and the botany lesson.

I look forward to the next installment.

>1 hfglen:

Why were we looking for Callitriche?

Very nice pictures, though I foolishly thought this was going to be about Cape Cod.

Oh, good! *Settles into armchair.*

>3 suitable1: because our overseas visitor was paid to write a report on its conservation status.

>4 stellarexplorer: *cackle* -- no, much nearer for me but much further for you!

Anyhoo, the next day we set out on the expedition proper. First, an hour looking at specimens at the university in Pietermaritzburg, then off to a place I'd never heard of before in the midlands. And so to a late night stop at Golden Gate. No pictures worth repeating that day.

Next morning, however, Golden Gate was as attractive as ever, despite the overcast weather.



Our route took us along the Lesotho border, which in this stretch is marked by the Caledon River. So we decided to take a look at the river at Peka Bridge, a quiet rural crossing where we could look at the river undisturbed. The left-hand-side of the picture is Lesotho, the right South Africa.



Yes, we crossed formally into Lesotho for about 5 minutes, and got all our passports stamped in and out, to the great amusement of all officials. Having been strongly encouraged by the Lesotho side to get out of the vehicle on the bridge and take a look, we did so. No Callitriche, but I can tell you that Tom Bombadil's Old Man Willow is alive and well and living in Lesotho (just). Mind you, this one also looks like a cousin of Harry Potter's Whomping Willow.

Great pictures and a great story.

I worked for 16 years in one of the big accounting firms (I was in the consulting division - I am not an accountant). The company won a contract to set up an institute of chartered accounting in Lesotho and several of my colleagues lived there for a number of years working on that contract. As far as I recall we also did a big consulting job for the water authority there. This would all have been in the 80s. (1980s I hasten to added before some smart alec says 1880s.)

>7 hfglen: That is a wonderful photo of the willow! Are you sure you didn't CGI its features in? I hope there was no resting attempted under it.

awesome! Grand photos. I've read some adventure novels set in Africa and sometimes it's an effort to visualize the scenery.

>8 pgmcc: That's fascinating. Can't comment on the institute, but presumably the water authority was the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme, which started sending water to Johannesburg and Pretoria about that time.

>9 MrsLee: CGI? Me? I don't know how! All I did to that one was to correct the colour temperature and crop off excess sky and foreground. No resting under the tree-- there was a razor-wire border fence between us and it.

>10 Darth-Heather: Thank you! Let me know where in Africa and if I have any I'll try to post a few relevant pictures. but remember, Africa is a big place (Cape Town to Nairobi is about the same distance as New York to San Francisco, and that's still only halfway up Africa).

>1 hfglen: I like the sound of an "undisciplined" town. It sounds like a pleasant balance between "lawless" and "sedate". Also, trees are Never Uninteresting.

>12 MrAndrew: Eshowe tends towards the "lawless"end of the scale, but not as much as some.

Anyhoo, our route now turned southwards through some "Upper Eastern Karoo" scenery, which can be fascinating, but not for seekers after wetlands. So we stopped at the Walter Battiss Museum in Somerset East, where the leading light of the local fly-fishers took our guest up into the mountains, where he found a plant that to the rest of us looks just like the one in #1, but nevertheless upset his preconceptions (Not sure I understand why.).



Walter Battiss was a highly respected South African artist, who (unlike most of that ilk) was blessed with a great sense of humour. This caused him to invent an imaginary refuge called Fook Island, of which he proclaimed himself "King Ferd the Third". The museum has King Ferd's cloak and a Fook Island flag, among other artworks. They report that he managed to change a Fook Island banknote for $10 in Rome (it wasn't him that got the bargain of the century there), and used a Fook Island driver's licence in the U.S.A. -- and the cops accepted it!

Our overnight place (wish the stay had been longer!) was Narina Bush Camp in the Addo Elephant National Park; a place I consider to be a more-than-satisfactory copy of the Earthly Paradise.



The camp consists of 4 safari tents each sleeping 2 people, a food preparation area, a boma for the evening fire and a set of rustic ablutions. There is no electricity, no cell-phone reception and no wi-fi. And no noise! You take the whole camp as a unit, and access is along a track suitable for high-clearance vehicles only; the road ends in a parking area 500 metres from the camp. The attendant comes with a wheelbarrow to help ferry stuff down the path, but after that the peace and solitude are absolute.

Next to the camp is a stream, and a small deck overlooks this delightful pool:

>11 hfglen: That is what fascinated me about the African continent - it has such a varied landscape, and is completely unlike anything I've seen in person.

I've read almost all of Wilbur Smith's series, many of which are set in South Africa, with some excursions into Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia. I did ok with the River God series while the setting was in Egypt, but had a little trouble visualizing the foray into Somalia.

I had the same problem as a child when I first read LOTR - I struggled to picture the mountains, since I had not yet seen any. :)

>14 Darth-Heather: South Africa: most of the pictures I've posted here. Our tourist authority would have us believe that we have as much variety of scenery as the rest of the world put together, a tall story! I have posted a few pictures of Zimbabwe here, and have a VERY few from Mozambique. Will post a selection in my reading thread in the next few weeks. Sorry I can't help with Ethiopia unless I borrow from a friend who went there a few months ago.

ETA: I can half-sympathise with your childhood problem: I grew up in Johannesburg, which has a small ridge (just over 500 ft lowest to highest) through the middle. But then to go to the sea involves crossing the escarpment. Almost flat on the home side, then 3000ft straight down to the Lowveld. (Thinks: I should dig out one of God's Window for you, or maybe one of my father's that he took from the top of the (Drakensberg) Amphitheatre about 80 years ago.)

Picking up the story: our guest wanted to see at least one of our national parks if we could work it in, so we decreed a day off at Addo. (We only arrived at Golden Gate long after dark, and left quite early the next morning). The original National Park at Addo was tiny, and proclaimed in 1931 to protect the last surviving dozen or so elephants in the Eastern Cape. I well remember going there in 1965 -- the bush was so thick you could walk across the top, and all you saw of the elephants was a trunk or 2 snorkelling out above the vegetation. But the elephants have multiplied, and the park has expanded dramatically, and stretches (in 3 or 4 sections) from some islands in Algoa Bay up into the mountains, where we were in #13. As the full name of the place is the Addo Elephant National Park, how can I not start this batch with an elephant?



In the Addo population, only males have tusks, and even these are smaller than in most ellies (the evolutionary influence of Victorian hunters!). The local ellies are also noted for being much more laid-back than the ones in Kruger. Apparently this is because until at least the 1960s the Addo ones were fed oranges from the surrounding farms at a floodlit waterhole (bad idea; oranges are strong-smelling, and it took ages to develop a fence that would keep them out of the orchards), but the Kruger ones remember having to dodge poachers' bullets in Mozambique -- though lately the poachers are moving into the Kruger.



One result of the recent expansion of the reserve is that the veld is still recovering, and here you can see how ex-ploughed fields have reverted to grassland and not (yet) thicket. Fortunately the ellie population has also expanded, and are doing yeoman work keeping the grassland open for grass-eaters.



The other "flagship species" at Addo is an endemic flightless dung-beetle. The road from the main camp into the game-viewing area is festooned with signs warning visitors in both pictograms and words that Dung-beetles Have Right Of Way. So here is one of them, doing its thing -- and facing right-way-round, unlike the one in the first edition of Jock of the Bushveld! Incidentally, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick lived not far from here in his later years.

(Does anybody know why the pictures from my gallery won't show in the preview? I seem to have an intermittent problem with Photobucket, but have now managed to upload these pictures and add the URLs. Let's see if they show now.)

Uh oh, can't see the photos, Hugh. Not sure why. I use the same method to post from my gallery as I do to post from other websites.

Love the dung beetle. :)

>17 MrsLee: I seem to have fixed the problem for now.

Great stuff, Hugh!

I saw a documentary about dung beetles many years ago (no memory of who produced it). I have remained utterly fascinated with them ever since. People think I'm quite weird when I mention them in conversation. Thanks for the picture.

Oh, good, I can see the pictures now, and they were well worth the wait. Elephants AND dung beetles! It doesn't get much better than that!

Wonderful pictures! I'm glad you persisted in the face of stubborn technology!

Thank you, all!

It was a very productive day at Addo, so here are a few more animal pikkies.

First, it wasn't a green dragon, in fact not even a truly dragon, but a very large water monitor seen from remarkably close by as he trundled past.



Like a snake, he uses his tongue to "taste" the smells of the air around him. Unlike a snake, he has a walk that is at least as ungainly as a crocodile's.

Recently I read that South Africa has more tortoise species than anywhere else; most if not all of these are on the IUCN Red List in one degree or another. This one is less rare than some others.



Almost every time we go to a game reserve I get to quote Flanders and Swann's Gnu song. Although we saw a gnu, and indeed a g-nother gnu, that's not what I have for you here. Here, for a change, is "that dreadful Hearty Beast": a Red Hartebeest, up close.



There was more, but this lot will take long enough to download.

Ah, I always wondered what "that dreadful Hearty Beast" was.

The tortoise has such a pretty skirt! Love the photos.

Thank you, Lee!

By now we were in the relatively new, southern section of the reserve. So it's possibly unsurprising that we came around a corner and found this remarkable view of Algoa Bay.



Port Elizabeth is off to the right, and the eagle-eyed may just be luck enough to spot one or more of Bird, Jahleel or St. Croix Islands -- all rocks in the bay inhabited only by penguins. All are now included in the National Park. The dunefield in the centre extends intermittently eastwards (to the left) for about 50 km to a place now called Kwaaihoek. This had its 15 minutes of fame in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias was pressured by his crew into erecting a padrão (cross on a pillar), turning around and going home to Portugal. They were the first European sailors to round the Cape of Good Hope, and one can see why, after the Namib Desert and the essentially uninhabited western Cape, they'd had enough. Pity, though; another couple of weeks up the east coast they'd have reached the southernmost Arab port, from which getting to India was a simple matter of hiring a pilot and waiting for the right wind. Which Vasco da Gama did 10 years later. Incidentally, the Padrão was found some 450 years after it was erected, and was placed in the library of University of the Witwatersrand after reassembly.

Seeing jackals during the day is unusual; this day we saw two. Here's the nearer:



And so we made it to Port Alfred, where we spent 5 nights in a place we could use timeshare points for. By day, we commuted to Grahamstown, 53 km away, though not all of us made the journey every day, and I took very few pictures there. But see how long it takes you to work out the lower half of the tag on this building in Grahamstown's High Street (I have added the place to LT Local).

The jackal looks like it is put together from pieces of several other animals.

I see the library used contracted Braille in its sign. My mother was actually an international Braille expert, but I never picked up more that the odd letter here and there.

Love your pictures. A trip to Africa is definitely on my bucket list!

How very interesting, Sylvia! And there was I thinking how clever that a library for the blind should boast a Braille sign -- didn't know that Braille came in contracted and other flavours. Jackals always remind me that the ancestors of dogs, German Shepherds in particular, were wolves.

>28 NorthernStar: Do please let know when you come, so we can put a "Welcome" on the mat.

And so time came to leave Port Alfred, and we headed northwards (inland). There were a few moments of tension as we had to circumnavigate a demonstration in Fort Beaufort and some decidedly third-world driving in Queenstown, but we survived. Until we got a puncture, the second of the trip, in a garage forecourt in Aliwal North. We had plenty of time to admire the sunset on the Dutch Reformed Church across the road.



The next morning, however, the view from the place we stayed made up for much.



When we'd packed up, our route took us over Naudé's Nek, which is the highest pass in South Africa accessible to normal (as opposed to 4x4) vehicles, at 2590 m / about 8500 feet. Here we are looking back towards Rhodes village from near the top.

Jackals aren't as awkward-looking as I had expected. We have coyotes here, and they look similar but more inbred and distorted in the face.

I'm so glad to see these shots of the landscape. I hadn't realized that there is so much color variation; it's really not monochrome like a desert. What does it smell like?

It's summer there now? Is it hot?

>31 Darth-Heather: The answers to all your questions are "It depends ..." :-)

Truly Frodo's line that "every spring is a different shade of green" fits the suburb where I live, beautifully. But spring in Namaqualand is every colour you can think of, and then some -- the flowers have to be seen to be believed. And so what it smells of varies with where you are. Next to an elephant dropping or a two-weeks-dead animal? or in the Western Cape, where every one of the 50-odd kinds of buchu smells different (and attractive); I once knew a man who maintained he could identify buchu species by the aroma when he brushed past them on a footpath. But in general it's so familiar that I don't smell the place unless something's unusual. Fortunately the carbide factory in Witbank and the whaling stations in Simonstown and Durban are no more; they stank.

It's late spring tending to early summer here. In Durban right now it's raining, and the weatherman is offering us a maximum of 20°C / 68°F tomorrow. Tosca, in North West Province, is expected to hit 40°C / 104°F tomorrow. And a mountain top will, of course, be colder than the resorts and farms below.

Actually, Heather, in fairness I should add that between about Christmas and Easter each year we expect to see temperatures in the low to mid-30s by day and mid 20s (both C) every night, with often sky-high humidity. That's when I appreciate being in the "outer West" at some 500 m (1750 ft) above town, parts of which are just below mean sea level. Actually now, too -- up here we are just at the foot of the midland Mist Belt, and so suburbia quite often disappears in the fog. Beautiful!

As we passed the top of Naudé's Nek the storm caught up with us and the heavens opened. We slithered down the other side, which looks like this



But the sun came out, giving us this view (from a moving vehicle) of the Pitseng Valley.



And on our last full day, we hit the birders' jackpot. Other people spend a fortune to go for a few hours to a hide on the off-chance of seeing a Lammergeyer, or Bearded Vulture. We saw three, just on the side of the road on our way from A to B. On the left, a Cape Vulture, on the right, a Lammergeyer.



And so to a place overlooking the Umtamvuna gorge, run by the daughter of a friend. And the next day, home via Durban Botanic Garden, which has an invasive Callitriche growing in the paving of a path near the pond.

(Here endeth the report, but hopefully not the discussion. Big thankyous to all who have commented / are still to comment.)

Wow, how amazing to see a Lammergeier so close! And the vulture isn't bad either.
The vistas of Naude's Nek and the Pitseng Valley are stunning. Add me to list of those who hope to journey to South Africa (and other parts) one day.