The Middle World, between the Modern World as we know it, and the Wilderness, is rich in many idiosyncrasies, little marvels, charms and surprises. Here are a few that I encounter as I travel through on my safaris into the wilderness. You can watch the video here: Enjoy!...
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This is the story of a little drama that is typical of farm life, and keeps me away from building more stories about my safaris into the African wilderness. You can watch the video here: Enjoy!...
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In this story on my solo safari into the South-east of Angola, I travel through the Middle World. In Africa, across most of the more remote countryside, one finds ever fewer signs of the Modern World as we know it. Even the few artifacts that could be recognised as “modern” may be adapted to different purposes, and look different. This story is about my observations while travelling through the Middle World on my way to the wilderness. You can watch the video here Enjoy!...
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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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For this week I thought I’d return to my hinted promise of more stories about the Bruegel picture which I wrote about on the 17th Nov 2019. For some context it might be good to scan it again. This story is about a wonderful old chief and a rogue hippo and the Chefe du Posto who was with us. We left the nomadic bush family the next day and headed northeast, roughly in the direction of the Zambezi delta – as good a direction as any, I thought. About two or three days on, walking along an old elephant...
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It was visible from some way off, this ancient camel thorn. It demanded to be viewed in its full glory, with nothing of the shrub-land obscuring it. Even in death it still towered over its surroundings, more mesmerising than in life. A piece of sublime earth art. It tells, with agonising clarity, of hundreds of years of life in its brutal world. How it had hopefully pushed out its new growth. How the rough winds and the eland bull’s horns had torn at it and split it, how the long droughts had slowed it, then stopped it, and its...
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The male had planted his forefeet wide and lowered his body and lapped from the thin sheet of water running from the seep amongst the reeds. Then he had crossed the stream and lain down on the cool sand with a casualness that said, “I fear nothing here.” It is his right front paw in the centre of the picture. The left hind is partly visible on the edge to the left. The marks to the front of his toes are small drag marks made by his pads as he lifted his paw forward. If you look carefully you will...
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The right front paw of a wild dog. We found this single imprint in a sandy spot that was bare of vegetation. But we found more, when we looked around carefully – six, eight, maybe ten more sets. Their paws are soft, so their sign is easily missed… We had been wondering why the bush had been so strangely empty of medium-sized and smaller ungulates for something like the last two days – almost no zebra, no hartebeest, no impala, no kudu, no waterbuck, no wildebeest, no eland… The ones we did glimpse seemed unusually skittish. The wild dog...
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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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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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