This story captures the final days and hours in the run-up to an extended solo safari into the African wilderness. It has a twist too, about solving a serious unforseen problem with the safari vehicle. Enjoy!...
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Initial Planning for an African Wilderness Safari
A video to provide some idea of the preliminary feasibility investigation and planning that goes into a safari into the African Wilderness. It covers considerations like routes and travel duration, river crossing points, border crossings, fuel and water availability to establish if a vehicle safari into the target area will be feasible. You can watch the video here. Enjoy!...
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Wander the African Wilderness With Me …
Check the video below for an invitation to wander with me through the African wilderness on my latest solo African safari, this time into the South-east of Angola. Enjoy!...
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Meat!
I shot a young warthog in the grey light before sunrise. My companions strung it from a pole with strips of bark and we took turns in pairs through the day to carry it. It was hard work. It was a young boar and I had gutted it, but a warthog is a solid animal and the swing of the carcass from the pole gnaws at the shoulders and throws one off balance as one weaves through the bush. But there were no complaints; only smiles. It is a bit sad to kill an animal but as the sojourn...
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Relentless March
You can listen to the voice narrative, or read through the text below. Enjoy! The young male lion’s skull lay forlorn on the edge of a hollow. It had once held water, but now it has dried to a desolation of cracked mud. Around, a calcific flat stretched away in scrub-mottled grey to a thin blur of trees on the horizon. It was a bitter picture. I looked around. Nowhere on the bleached surface could I see even a single bone from the rest of the skeleton. Had the scavengers felt awkward about desecrating the countenance of...
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Ironic Happiness
You can listen to the voice recodrding, or read through the text below. Enjoy! We were not surprised when we caught the faint babble of men on the breeze. We had started picking up human signs a day earlier – a few tracks, a sapling stripped of bark to tie down something, a little glass jar that once contained Vicks Vaporub… We had to be within a day or two from one of those lone villages in the bush. We followed the sound and found a group of fishers. It was an overcast morning and the breeze goose-pimpled...
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Ok, all set, but where are the voices telling us to go next?
Once you have liberated yourself from the roads, and finally also from the uncertain little tracks that you might have found meandering through the bush to isolated clusters of huts where a few bush people huddle together for some human fellowship, you are truly like Alice, alone in Wonderland and… “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as...
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