Tripped

Photos and More Photos

If you look to the right, you can see I've added a bunch of new photo albums in the past week, taking us from New Zealand and Australia right through our safari experiences. Not a lot of captioning to explain what you're looking at; hoping to get to that at some point, but if you have any questions about any of them just fire off an email or comment here.

Safari's End

My comfort factor with Trevor's Nikon didn't really kick in until our final day at Ngala, which made Kenny's ability to find wildlife that much more valuable, given how much he showed us.

We started with hyenas, a predator we hadn't seen at all in the previous four days. Beautiful animals which don't deserve whatever negative reputation they've been handed.

Once again it was a den, built into an abandoned termite mound the same way the wild dogs' den had been. When we arrived we found an incredibly curious juvenile who kept sniffing about the truck and staring at us as if he knew what we were saying and thinking about him. Here he is checking out our ranger Kenny:

The Camera Crisis

The generosity of our fellow guests on safari was only temporary, so after we left Ngala Tented Camp I knew I would need to do something about my camera, or lack thereof. As I mentioned in my post about the day the camera died, one of the owners at Arethusa Lodge had identified my problem. He had also made clear to me how limited the Canon support was in South Africa, and how costly new equipment would be if I tried to replace it there. Indeed, both he and Trevor both told me separately that they bought all their gear overseas, mostly from B&H Photo Warehouse in the U.S., which I had also used in the past.

Worse yet, Brendan at Arethusa noted, if I did find myself shopping for a replacement, the warranty would only be good within the borders of S.A., and nowhere else. The same would be true for any covered repairs I might need on my failed U.S.-bought camera, assuming it was still under warranty (it wasn't).

That left me with only a couple of options: a) find a way to get the camera repaired in Cape Town before we left the country; b) find a used camera quickly in Cape Town that I could live with; c) wait until we got to London to buy a new one there; or d) buy a new one in the States and figure out a way to get it to me in Europe so I could continue documenting the trip over our last three months as I had over the first six.

Option e) - live with the dinky Olympus point-and-shoot - was right out. Photos had become too important a part of the experience for me to consider going without.

An email to support@canon.co.za and a phone call to their recommended service center in Cape Town quickly confirmed that option a) wasn't going to happen, that it might take all of the remaining time we had in country just to diagnose the problem. That left replacement. Option b), going for used, was also dispensed with when I started to compare prices online for used equipment from South African vendors - it was as expensive as new in the States. Shopping around until I found someone with good deals might have taken all the remaining time we had, and eaten into delivery time if I was going to buy one and have it sent to me in Europe. And option c) would have left me with the same issue I had with buying new in S.A., the lack of warranty coverage when we returned to the U.S. 

So I went new, and U.S. bought. I decided to stick with the same level of equipment I had, since I already had lenses suited for it. I would just get the latest model of it from Canon - in this case, the Rebel T1i/500D. Amazon didn't have it in stock, B&H did, and at a comparable price for the body, so B&H got my business.

Then there was the sticky issue of shipping. B&H wouldn't mail it to a non-billing address overseas, so I couldn't just buy it and send it to myself care of whatever hotel or apartment we were going to be staying at. Instead I had to send it to my brother in Connecticut and then have him re-ship it to me in Copenhagen. Which all worked perfectly: no hassles in shipping, no hassles in customs, and the camera was waiting her for me when we checked into our hotel on Monday morning. And still cheaper than buying it in South Africa!

Dog Day Morning

The only way you can top a wild dog sighting on safari is with more wild dogs. Even better, with a wild dog den filled with a new litter, which is what Kenny was able to show us on our second day at Ngala.

We arrived in the early morning hours to find most of the pack missing. Only the dominant male and the dominant female were hanging around the den, while the pups from the litter were just beginning to poke their heads out to check out the new day.  The male, as you can see above, has a scruffy beard that was tinged with blood. Kenny told us he had likely already been out on a kill with the pack, fed first, and returned first, bringing food back for his mate.

She was standing guard on the other side of the den, which was hollowed out of an old termite mound.

And there were the pups, poking their heads up out of the den to start the day and then poking about its immediate vicinity after deciding it was safe.

The two adults had their ears and noses to the wind, searching for signs of the pack's return. When it happened, it was one of the most extraordinary scenes you could imagine witnessing. The dominant female, still hungry, had been whining at her mate hoping he would regurgitate another bite for her, but he wasn't interested in sharing, or had nothing left.

Then she sensed the pack and began yelping. A few seconds later, the other adults appeared. Those sounds! Similar to what you might hear from a pack of domesticated dogs, but with no barking, just whining and yelping, and across a much wider auditory range. The returning dogs coughed up the leftovers for her, and even some for the pups. Note the little one on the right with the piece of meat in his mouth:

After the mother ate, she allowed the pups to suckle.

But one of them still managed to get hold of a treat ...

... Mom, however, was still hungry, and sniffed this out ...

 

... claiming it for herself ...

A Great Kindness

I love this picture. That I have it at all, or any of the others I managed to take during our stay at the second lodge on our safari itinerary, is only because of some great good luck for us that led to some extraordinary generosity.

We left Arathusa Lodge on the morning of July 12th to take a car ride of an hour or so north to visit Timbavati, like Sabi Sands one of the other Kruger-bordering reserves, so we could stay two nights at the tented camp site of the Ngala Lodge. "Tented camp" makes it sound more rustic than it is; in fact this place was more upscale than the one we had just left in terms of furnishings and food service (not to mention price). The tents themselves are indeed canvas, but extremely roomy inside, with 20 foot high peaks and fixed canvas walls trimmed with wood lathing; there are interior toilets with stone and plaster walls and all the plumbed areas sit on top of a concrete slab - although to add a hint of romance the shower area is outside and open to the sky, if still very private.

Penguins!

As part of our Cape tour we visited an African penguin breeding facility in Simon's Town, which is an old (and still) naval base dating back to the early days of the Cape Colony. The African penguin was once known as the jackass penguin, and you'll know why when you listen to the call you hear in the background at the very beginning of this brief video clip I shot of a pair of fledglings mewling around one of their parents:

The End of Africa

There it is, the Cape of Good Hope. We visited it during a day-long driving tour yesterday with our cab driver Peter, a Jo'burg transplant who spoke too softly for us to hear most of the time but still delivered all the sites he promised. One thing most Americans probably don't know is that the lower part of the cape is actually national park land, where you can see baboons, ostriches, antelope, and penguins which are all indigenous. On our drive out of the park, for example, after visiting the Cape proper and the lighthouses, we saw these guys grazing alongside the road:

As well as this guy by his lonesome, after we had seen a group of females in the distance on our way into the park:

Someone Lost Their Lunch

Our final morning at our first safari stop brought us another first, on the heels of three days of them. The day before we had heard that Thandi, the two-year-old female leopard we had seen hunting unsuccessfully on our first morning, had killed an impala. It takes a leopard as young as this one up to four days to consume their kill, so there would be time to see her with it today, if one of the lodge trucks at Sabi Sands could find her. Which they had, even before we showed up at the spot.

As we pulled up on the road and saw the other truck off in the bush to the right, we could see a leopard on the trot with an impala in its jaws, with another leopard nearby. It turned out that the leopard with the kill wasn't Thandi, but the dominant male in the area, which only moments before our arrival had appropriated the younger female's kill for himself. Not much Thandi could do about it, given the disparity in size (he outweighed her by some 30 kilos), except stare daggers at him, as we found her doing when we got closer.

Safari Surprise Addendum

The hippo tea break wasn't even the end of our morning. We had already had two leopard sightings in two days, now we had our third - actually three more leopards, total, since this was a mother with two nearly-adult cubs. This is one of the cubs up a tree overlooking a dry riverbed; the mother and his brother were nearby. The mother was also the mother of the 2-year-old female we had seen the previous day. Here's mom lying in the river bed:

New Cuisine = Great Lunch

We've been reading all about the Cape Malay cuisine that's unique to Cape Town and S.A., and have gotten hints of it in various meals during our visit here, but today's lunch was our first taste of the authentic stuff. Outstanding - a combination of Javanese and Indian methods and local spicing that's completely its own. We both had curry that was not hot up front like some Indian types, but instead left a bit of heat on the back of your palate after you swallowed. Some of the sides look and sound just as familiar as the curries - like "rooti" bread and "samoosas" - but with unique local twists, not only on the spelling but on the flavors. And then there were all new unfamiliars like these:

 

Dhaltjies, known on the menu as "chilli bites" - deep-fried chickpea batter mixed with potato, coriander, and spinach.

The curry was also accompanied by a relish made of carrots, onions, and who knows what else. Up front it tasted a bit like American pickle relish - you know, the kind of stuff you put on your hot dog - but with more vinegary tang and then, like the curry a bit of heat on the back end that was somehow different than the curry heat. Worked wonderfully when you glopped a bit on the chicken and potatoes in the curry.

 

About the only thing we were missing was beer - the coloured population here (a distinct category from the African black ethnic groups), originating as it did in the old Dutch East India territories of Malaysia, is primarily Muslim. So no booze for you at Zorina Cafe!