South Africa tour Aug-Sep 2009

A 3-week multi-purpose holiday around South Africa. Our aim was to do some sightseeing, see lots of birds, see flowers in Namaqualand and introduce Nicola to my parents. We started off by driving to Potchefstroom and birding the OPM Prozesky bird sanctuary in town. Then we moved onto some back roads towards Klerksdorp and visited Faan Meintjies Nature Reserve. In Kimberley we visited Kamfers dam and the Big Hole before going to Barkley West and Spitskop Dam Nature Reserve. Our next stop was in Augrabies National Park before driving down to Springbok and catching our first proper flower fields in Namaqua National Park. In Lambert's Bay we visited Bird Island and then also got excellent flowers in West Coast National Park and Postberg. We joined my parents on my Dad's birthday present trip - a day out to Robben Island where we did the standard prison tour but also got to drive around the island with a local contact I had, picking up the Chukar partridges occurring only here. While In Cape Town we also visited Helderberg Nature Reserve and the Paarl Sewerage Works.

We moved onto Oudtshoorn along Route 62 and visited an ostrich farm and the Cango caves. In Knysna we stayed over before enjoying a morning at Monkeyland and Birds of Eden outside Plettenberg Bay. Towards Port Elizabeth the weather turned windy and the next few days didn't deliver very pleasant birding. Even so we birded the Swartkops and Sunday's River estuaries and then also the Nahoon estuary at East London. A long and arduous drive got us to Coffee Bay and miserable weather and we stayed just long enough to pay a quick visit to the Hole-in-the-Wall. It was wet and misty all the way to Port St Johns but when we got to Vernon Crookes Nature Reserve the weather was back to pleasant again. Past Durban we went to Umtunzini and then Richards Bay before entering Swaziland and spending a night at Hlane National Park. Then it was onto Kruger National Park and we stayed over in Pretoriuskop, Skukuza, Satara, Letaba and Shingwedzi before finally making our way back home. In total, we drove over 7700kms and identified 361 bird species.

Idwala hiking trail Jul 2009

Nicola and I left from her place shortly after she returned from work on Friday afternoon. The drive was uneventful except for the pitifully poor road leading into basecamp. We arrived shortly after 4pm with a member of another group not long after us. We picked the hut closest to the kitchen and ablutions and settled in. The others arrived around sunset and by then I had already started the fire. After a braai we all hit the bed.

Day 1 (25 Jul): We got up early despite a cold and windy morning. With breakfast behind us we left down the 4x4 track to Hannes’s dam, crossed the dam wall and climbed out the other side. The path was not terribly well maintained but very well marked and we had no problems following it over rolling hills until we reached the escarpment edge looking down towards Loskop dam. We rested a little before carrying on towards the Shotgun loop climbing down into a pretty but dark kloof and walking right up to the dry waterfall at its end. Unfortunately it seemed the path stopped here and doesn’t continue to a chain ladder as promised on a map. We returned the same way and then walked a while longer on the escarpment edge before stopping for lunch. With lunch past we carried on – Nicola and I fell behind a little and walked our own pace. As soon as we saw the road leading back up to the hut, the path descended down into a kloof again, and then angled upstream out of the kloof. We walked slowly here and saw Black-headed oriole, Jameson’s firefinch and White-crested helmetshrikes. I got ahead of Nicola about two thirds through the kloof, walked up to the dam wall and waited for her there – I saw Madelein and Elize leaving the campsite and walk up the road. When Nicola didn’t show up after I sat for about 10 minutes I got worried and walked back down to look for her – I found her on the wrong side of the river, not too far away. She missed one of the footprints where it crossed the stream and subsequently lost the track for a while. By now it was quite warm and we were tired. We tackled the last section up the road and arrived just after 3pm back in camp. After some rest we had a good shower and braai that night. I also showed my Chile video to the group before we hit the bed.

Day 2 (26 Jul): We decided to do our own thing this day. Soon after the rest of the group left, Nicola and I went down the road again to Hannes’s dam and picked up the path from there going up the kloof east of base camp. It was quite interesting but still chilly so early in the morning. Nothing worth mentioning happened and before long we climbed out the top end of the kloof. We skirted the top edge back to camp, packed up and left for Middelburg.

Not a bad hike but the path can do with some clearing and maintenance in places.

Blyde river canyon May 2009

Nicola and I drove out to the Mpumalanga escarpment for the long weekend. We hiked around the Blyde river canyon a bit, visited Bourke's Luck and a number of the waterfalls in the area and also found the Taita falcon in its eyrie above the JG Strydom tunnel. At the Aventure resort at Blyde river we stayed over a night and walked out into the veld under the starry sky. Sitting on a bench with just the fresh night air and calling nightjars for company, I slipped the token ring I bought into Nicola's ring finger and asked her to marry me. She said yes!