Berna's travelblog » wildlife

Kalahari desert

marco — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:39:46 +0000

Since 6 years ago, when Sarah and I discovered the BBC planet earth series of documentaries, our travels have been strongly influenced by Sir David Attenborough’s narrations. Whenever we were close to some amazing thing we had seen on the series, we would try go see it our-self. Some were easy targets like the Proteus in the Slovenian caves of Postonia or the Gunung Mulu caves in Borneo. Some others were way more trickier to get to like the razor-sharp limestone pinnacles of the Gunung Mulu national park or the Atacama desert and the Uyuni salt flats and some were a royal PITA to get to, like getting to the amazons from La Paz.

Unfortunately, since almost a year a I travel alone. A very different experience, but nonetheless a very interesting one.
Where travelling in couple gives the opportunity to share your discoveries with the one you love and create lifelong memories, travelling alone makes you think a lot. Sometimes the travel is action packed and you have no time but most of the times there are a lot of empty moments in which a lone traveler is confronted with himself, his past and his future.

A trip to the Kalahari desert definitely has a lot of quiet times, be it the 14h bus ride from Cape Town to Upington, the 300Km from Upington to the entrance gate, the many Km you game drive looking for animals or and foremost the sunsets and the nights under the most beautiful star dotted sky you can imagine. Wonderful occasions to spend time with yourself and try to understand what is going on. Definitely something I’ll try to do more often hen I’ll be back in our beautiful alps.

But now lets tell a bit about the actual trip…

The Kalahari desert, is a large semi-arid sandy savannah. To myself, it is an amazing place. Wild, cold, hot, windy, beautiful, harsh, fascinating and with some really really cool animals.
Guided by Maureen and Thys a wonderful couple married since 30 years that still ties each-other’s shoelaces and feels like has been married since 30 minutes, I stayed 3 days in the Kgalagadi transfrontiernational park, a 3.6 millions hectares National park in Botswana and South Africa. We slept both night in an unfenced campsite on the Botswana side of the park called Rooiputs. In the park there are any number of accommodations ranging from where I was to super nice lodges. Most of them are fenced, but staying in an unfenced camp was much more interesting I think.
Before going to bed in my tent, I would sit on top of the little wooden sun shade and dream. Then a lion roar would wake e up and I would shine my torch around to see if it maybe was visible. Then I would stay there a bit more just to make sure he wouldn’t be too close to walk to my tent :) I might be braveish at times but only when I’m in control of the situation :)

During the days we would drive around to spot animals and to witness the wonderful scenery around us but for this I’ll let the pictures talk…

As a final note, if you’d like to visit the park, I would suggest to stay at least 4 nights so you get to go further north. As for doing it without guide, it is no problem, you just need to book your camps in advance, and absolutely get a 4wd, not because the road is bad (beside the 4×4 roads only) but because the road is low and you’ll just see grass. As well having a guide will allow you to enjoy the scenery much more since you don’t have to drive. I can highly suggest to hire Maureen and Thys directly without going through a company that will just charge you more and pay them less for the same service since they own all their gear. You can find them at:
KalahariTau on facebook or per email at debelta __AT__ vodamail.co.za

Augrabies National park

marco — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:12:28 +0000

When I booked my Kalahari trip, the only company I found that was running something that could fit my dates had a days tour including on day at the Augrabies national park. I first tough, mmm I’d like more Kalahari but then I read about the park, mostly known for its waterfall, and I saw that giraffes can be spotted there, I was sold, ad here I am, in my tent typing my first vacation post.
After packing everything in the Land-rover we left for the park, but on the way, Thys, the guide had the great idea to go for a wine tasting… at 9.30 :)
After the 9 glasses that I tasted very professionally by spitting, we move to the park and have a stroll to the fall, very nice, but the cool part has still to come…
My first safari, or how it is called here, a game drive. Before lunch we spot nothing, but at lunchtime things change. At first we spot 3 beautiful fish eagles, then driving a Zebra, some kllippspringer, 3 Kudus and when we are almost back at the camp,we see 5 giraffes… suuuuper cool :) all stoked I go back camp, pinch the tent, make a fire and braai (bbq).
what a cool day :) and tomorrow it’s Kalahari time :)

The great white

marco — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 19:28:11 +0000

You probably all know Jaws, maybe even Dark tide and probably many other similarly stupid movies that depict the great white sharks as the perfect human assassin. Pity, really, because if we where as scared of car accidents as we are of great whites, nobody would drive anymore.
And also pity because they are magnificent, powerful and elegant at the same time.

Anyhow South Africa is supposed to be an amazing place for diving with stunning natural phenomena such as the sardine run and the great whites breaching happening annually. Today I had the privilege to assist at the latter.

but lets go with order, 2.50 the alarm clock goes off, first reflex, WTF… second reflex, yayyyy!!! 3.10 Werner is here and we leave for Simons town in Falsebaai. 6.00 we’re at a sleeping wharf in a, looks like, beautiful little town. must be here, we meet some guys loading frozen sardines on a boat, we ask and indeed we are correct.
after a random couple asking us: “are we at the right place?” we know we should shave or maybe shower :)

our guides Stephen an Morne from sharkexplorers.com show up and after the usual signing your life away we are ready to rock… and roll, and two of our three other trip companions will not like the rolling part :) must suck to be seasick foremost when you are anchored downwind of a seal colony :D

but, first things first, breakfast time, not for us, for the great whites. The winter (June – August) months at seal island are the favourite place for great whites to live out their hunting nature.

The seal pups born around January have been finally cut off their milk feeding in the last weeks and have to start swimming to fish their own food.
“young and carefree” they head out in the deeper water looking for fish, and guess who knows it?
taking advantage of the relatively bad visibility, the sharks hide themselves deep enough to be invisible to the seals but still being able to see the siluette against the brighter sky. The shatk has then more or less a single chance to catch a seal by swimming upwards very fast, snapping the seal and breaching the water surface due to its inertia. If the shark misses, the seal is at advantage due to its superior agility and will tail the shark knowing it will not be able to bite behind the tail.

Sunrise is the time of the day when the great whites feed, and as Morne says, it sucks to be a seal at that time. And that is why we stood up at 3. Even before we get a briefing predations start, no breaches yet but happy gulls and gannets scavenge on pieces of seals left back by successful attacks. Lots of excitement, we all look here and there waiting for the big jump, and then bam bam, two big, beautiful breaching within 30 seconds. amazing :) we drive around a bit more looking for more breaching, but the action is slowing down, the sun is higher and the bellies fuller. Time for Frank to make its glorious entrance. Frank is the decoy seal of sharkexplorers.com, a pup like looking plastic seal that gets towed behind the boat to allow seeing a breaching at a foreknown location. We move around slowly until we get another big fat breach, amazing.

Time for the cage, anchored on the downwind side of Seal Island, we start chumming the water to attract some big one to the boat. The chumm is what most people would see as a disgusting soup, saltwater and mashed old sardines. This odd looking broth gets thrown in the ocean to create a “yummy trail” for the sharks without actually putting a bait in the water. No real food is available. I imagine it as a smell only restaurant :)
Almost an hour later, the chummer is still mashing sardines with his feet, the Canadian lady is sicker and sicker and I sleep… got to love not being seasick. We move. The plan to stay downwind of the island to avoid the choppy water didn’t work. It’s gonna get bumpy but we try, and what a good decision by Morne and Stephen, 10 minutes later, we get a big feisty male to start looking around, cage down, wetsuit up and lets get wet…
The cage is for 3 persons, I enter first, then Werner and then the Swiss girl. Cage closed, standby cage and dooownnn… loud and clear are the commands coming from the boat that will lead me to my first phenomenal encounter with a great white shark, the king of the ocean, the perfect predator or simply the most impressive view I ever had underwater. Power and grace bundled in a 3.5m streamlined body. Awe inspiring…
The lady, gets out of the cage, another guy comes in, the guy exits and Werner and I have the spectacle all for ourselves, standby cage, and dooownnn. hold your breadth, sink underwater and admire, again and again, for about 45 minutes. fantastic.

Back to land, big grin on, awe overloaded we go for a quick visit of the nearby penguin colony at the boulders. Started by 2 penguins in 1985, almost wiped away in 2000 when an oil tanker had a major spilling in the area, it now counts over 3000 breading animals thanks to the effort of almost 20000 volunteers that helped recover, wash, feed and tag the oiled penguins. The penguins where then moved to Port Elisabeth 800km further up the coast and released. Two weeks later, they were back to the by then cleaned up colony.

what a day, we leave all happy knowing that in two days we’ll go dive again :)

Looking for whales at De Hoop nature Reserve

marco — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 06:47:01 +0000

Whales, magnificent huge animals one could say, but one could also say ocean, magnificent immense pond… This is roughly how I felt last weekend.
Friday after work, Werner and I left in Tim’s bakkie towards the De Hoop nature Reserve for a “welcome to the whales weekend”. The reserve has organised some leading whale researchert to come and give presentations and talks about various aspects of cetacean research and combined the whole thing into a nice weekend with wine tastings… cool!
The weather forecast is literally crap, but who cares, we camp… Tim has borrowed us his HUGE tent. All set up we go for the informal dinner with the experts and wine matching. A success, the food is super nice and the whine matching terrific, well, rather on the bigger side of filling a glass :), by the end of the dinner, we’ve met couple of cool people, some QGIS users :) and we have an infinity of empty glasses between us.
The night is calm, and after some picture experiment we go to rest, many whales are waiting for us the next day… or not…

The Saturday morning is a mix of eating, going back to bed because it is raining, read, wait and finally out… it stopped rain we go to the beach, an amazing place, I love oceans. We walk up and down the coast for couple of hours looking at the most stunning landscape and some cool animals, but unfortunately no southern right whale in sight. After our solitaire trip, we join with the park rangers and 20 other people for a guided walk about the ecosystem of De Hoop and the Southern right whale.

In the evening we have a dinner and presentation where between each course there is a speech. The first is a very interesting presentations on cetacean research in general, and the second (given by Ryan – the QGIS user) an amazing view on Killer-whales on Marios Islands.

Couple of glasses of wine make us forget the storm outside, and when we get to the tent we’ve some sidious work to do :) but hey, it was still there… eventully we decide that we won’t be able to fix the ten any better than we did and as long as we are inside it wont fly away. and so it was, two broken poles and many attach points ripped, but the next morning we’re still almost dry :) and ready for some more exploring of De Hoop.

Again no whales (well it must be said that the season has just started and its apex should be in august, where whales are just about everywhere in the bay), but many other very cool sights, definetly a very very nice place.