South Africa 2011

In 2011 I headed to the World Veterinary Congress in Cape Town South Africa. I was asked to stop in Zambia and help out a fellow veterinarian by a friend of a friend, so I did. I flew into Livingstone and met with Ernest Ndalama and his wife, both veterinarians. They owned the K n K veterinary clinic in Livingstone. They had the only small animal clinic in town and Ernest was also the government veterinarian. His wife just graduated from vet school. She wet to school while pregnant and raising two other children. Since school was a days travel away, she was away during the week and home only on weekends. Ernest took care the children and worked for the government and started up his own animal clinic as well. He was requesting some reference books so I and my two travel companions brought him books. Lots of books. He was so pleased, so proud of all the books on his sparse book shelf. They gave us the tour of the clinic, the agri business store and their home. Such beautiful people, so kind and caring. He said God had sent us to him, an answer to prayer.

Their clinic was small, just the one room shown below. There was also the government side of the clinic, the agrovet services and there he sold many things for animals and crops. Ernest really appreciated all the things we brought for them.

A tour of Livingston took us to some markets, Vic falls, Livingstone's monument and lots of guys wanting to sell me things.

Victoria Falls

(Lozi: Mosi-oa-Tunya, "The Smoke That Thunders"; Tonga: Shungu Namutitima, "Boiling Water")

This waterfall is on the Zambezi River located on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe and is considered to be one of the world's largest waterfall due to its width of 1,708 metres .

During this dry period when we visited, it wasn't as impressive as usual.

Mr Livingstone I presume?

Words from Henry Morton Stanley on 10 November 1871 gave rise to this popular quotation.

David Livingstone was a Scottish physician, a congregationalist, and pioneer Christian missionary, an explorer in Africa, and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century. This bronze statue of him faces Vic Falls on the Zambian side.

The countries visited: South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana

Cape Town

The premise of the trip was to go to the Cape Town World Veterinary Congress which we did. Cape town was nice but it was just like home, very modern. We visited the coast to see the Indian and Atlantic Oceans collide, see the Jack ass penguins, climb Table Mountain......then off to the north to where the wildlife live.

Jim and Marie Hardy travelled with me to the World Veterinary Conference and tagged along to Zambia and we all went with many of the vets from the Congress to Kruger Park and Safaried every day, so many times.

View from the top of Table Mountain of Cape Town.

Cape Town docks, Port of Cape Town

One of the worlds busiest trade routes, it is the busiest port in South Africa. The locals call it Table Bay. It is notorious for violent winter storms and overlooks Table Mountain.

Jack Ass Penguins or Cape Penguins are found only in Southern African Waters. They bellow a sound like a donkey's bray, thus the name. This is at Boulder Beach. We were driven there by a maniac of a driver we nick named Mario Andretti. I used up all my gravol on that trip.

Two oceans

Cape of Good Hope. I always believed that the Cape was the southern most part of South Africa and that it was where the two oceans met, The Atlantic and Indian Oceans. We bared our feet in the windy, chilly weather to put one foot in each ocean. I was to find out later that the southernmost point is at Cape Agulhas, 150 km to the south east and that is where the currents of the two oceans meet.

Table Mountain

Jim, Marie and I climbed to the top of Table mountain overlooking the City of Cape Town. Elevation of 1086 meters in the mountain range of Cape Fold Belt. It is flanked by Devils Peak and Lions Head.

wishing we had helmets and life jackets.

We flew to Johannesburg, a city of 3 million. SOWETO , the black part of town also has 3 million. They say metropolitan Johannesburg is 8 million and it would include Jo-burg, SOWETO and the burbs. Gold was found by Johannes by accident in his friends field. That is what the locals say, wikipedia and other internet sites have different stories. I would relate the local story here but I may just be telling local legends. There are 156 golf courses in Jo-burg, the National tree is Yellow wood and the National bird is the lilac breasted Roller. A beauty.

Afrikaan words: Thank you: Dankie; Thank you very much: Baie Dankie;

Good morning: Goeie More; Good evening: Goeie Naand

How are you: Hoe gaan dit; Good bye: Tot Siens or slang : Goed gaan (go well)

Johannesburg (Jo-Burg)

We stayed at the SunRock BnB in Hepton Park, Johannesburg with stone walls all around and electric wire above the stone wall. There was a beautiful outdoor pool that they cooled down so it was refreshing. Weaver bird nests were everywhere and many in the tree above the pool. They kept the pool very clean even with all the birds swooping about.

All the workers were black and treated poorly. The owners were white, superior in their own minds and liked to party as their kids were minded by the help. They were very short with all the staff. It made me feel very uncomfortable. Then money went missing from my room and from Marie and Jim's room. The owners were informed and just shrugged their shoulders.

A driver was hired to take us to SOWETO (South Western township) to eat and visit the homes where Nelson Mandela grew up and Desmond Tutu lived. This is the only street in the world where two Nobel Laureats lived. Mandelas house is now a museum and we walked through the 2 room shack. The Mandela museum in Jo-burg called the Apartheid Museum was really interesting as you can choose to walk through as a white or a black person as it was segregated. Our driver Herman was very prejudiced against black people and didn't care who was around or heard him voice his opinions. It was embarrassing really. Eating in SOWETO was an experience. Tripe and maize, rice and beans and things I could not recognize. I left the chicken feet for someone else to eat.

Dr. Vic Leibman is a veterinarian in Johannesburg at the Corlett City Vet Hospital on Louis Botha Ave. He travelled to my clinic in Minden 3 years prior and I returned the visit when in Jo-Burg.

Kruger Park, South Africa

We arrived with a large group of veterinarians, many from the area and experts in some wildlife or parasites or something animal related. We were amongst people that knew a great deal about the animals we were about to see. Lucky us. It was like a living lecture every safari.

We wanted to see the BIG 5: Elephant, Lion, Rhino, Leopard, and Cape Buffalo. We saw all five on our first Safari. We were extremely lucky we were told. We did 2 or three safaris daily for the whole week. Twice we saw all 5 on the same safari.

The Ugly 5: Rhino, Hippo, Wart hog, Baboon, and marabo stork.

Then the little 5: Elephant shrew, Lion ant, Rhino Beatle, leopard tortoise, buffalo weaver.

South African Safaris were unbelievable, beautiful, exciting and no pictures could show how fun, magestic and surreal it was. I will try to show you with some of the pictures I took but not too many as I took hundreds.

Kudo Antelope

This is the signature beast of South Africa, it is on the logo for Kruger National Park. This is a male, with wide , spiralling horns. They live in small herds and are everywhere in Kruger Park.

Blue Wildebeest or Brindled Gnu.

The gnu live in herds up to several hundred in number and both sexes have horns. They can live up to 20 years as they adapt to new environments well. Herds are seen moving all over Africa.

Baby Hyena.

The cubs are so cute and yet they grow up to be so ugly. They live in large groups called cackles. They hunt together taking down large prey like Zebra and young Wildebeest. They also scavenge and steal kills from other hunters.

Trees communicate when giraffe are near.

Trees communicate through the air, using pheromones and other scent signals. They also communicate via the wood-wide-web, an underground fungal network. Here in africa, the wide-crowned umbrella thorn acacia trees talk to each other in the wind, warning that giraffe are coming. When a giraffe starts chewing acacia leaves, the tree notices the injury and emits a distress signal in the form of ethylene gas. Upon detecting this gas via the wind, neighboring acacias start pumping tannins into their leaves. These tannins make the leaves taste bad to the giraffe and in large enough quantities can sicken the herbivores by causing villi to not absorb the nutrients.

Giraffes seem to know that the trees are talking to one another and this is why they browse into the wind, so the warning gas doesn’t reach the trees ahead of them. With no wind, a giraffe typically walks 90 meters— farther than ethylene gas can travel in still air—before feeding on the next acacia. So who is smarter, the tree or the giraffe?

I went on a very early morning walking safari to see giraffe. I was walking along with them, such a wonderful a feeling striding along with these towering giants. They are so graceful. A group of giraffe are called a tower when standing still and a journey when on the move. The fellas that took the group on the walking safari had huge guns. We had to all walk without talking, no slowing down and stay in single file. At one point I bent down to tie my shoelace and the two guys ran up to me with their guns up looking around. I guess I wasn't suppose to do that. No bending over, you look like prey. They asked me to listen carefully to the grunting in the distance, it was a lion.

Giraffe have only 7 vertebrae in their necks, the same as us. Hard to imagine as they are so very tall. Some vertebrae are 30 cm long. Their heart weighs about 22 kg as it needs to be big to pump the blood up so high.

Elephants in Kruger Park

People count the number of Elephants in the park every year. 13,000 was the last count I saw. What a job and how on earth do you tell them apart. No tattoos, clothing, GPS or chips of any kind. Can you really get to know 13,000 of the big beasts?

Although beautiful to look at and so majestic, elephants really do a lot of damage just walking through a bush besides how much they eat. A stampede just destroys everything in its way. Elephants love the acacia trees and they are abundant in Kruger park. They also like the Zambesi Teak trees. Again, the trees are smart and give off a chemical warning to the plants down wind so they start to produce tannins that make them bitter when eaten. Tannins can coat the villi of the small intestine and reduces absorption of nutrients and the animals get skinny. I think of it as chemical warfare between plants and animals. Some plants, however, prefer that the elephants eat them so they drop the tannin levels. Elephants only digest about 60% of their food so they spread the seeds better than most herbivores.

Last year Kruger donated some of their elephants to Mozambique because they had an abundance.

Elephants have a long gestation but it is different for baby boys than baby girls. Girls take 22 months gestation, boys 23 months. That is a very long time to be pregnant. I hope they get a long maternity leave!

Burchell's Zebra

There are two species of Zebra in Southern Africa, the Plains or Burchell's Zebra and the Mountain Zebra. As the names suggest they occur in vastly differing habitats. In Kruger, they are the Burchell's Zebra. They live in large herds, often together among the giraffes and wildebeest.

A dazzle of Zebras.

You can tell the males from the females by how close the stripes are. The male stripes are closer together.

Vervet Monkey's

These are wild vervets and so fun to watch them play. Vervets are often bred for behavioral research as they serve as non-human primate models to understand genetics and social behaviors of humans. I actually owned one as a teenager. They have been noted for having human-like characteristics such as hypertension, anxiety and social and dependent alcohol use. They should know that alcohol is not the solution. Chemically speaking, it is a solution just not THE solution. Vervets live in social groups here called troops ranging from 10-50 individuals.

A Lion with a tooth ache. See 304 broken at the gum line. He was the lone Lion off by himself and not able to eat at the kill site. He would be weaker due to pain of dental disease. Too bad we didn't have a lion dentist with us.

A group of Lions is a Pride

We saw Lions just Lion around soaking up the sun. They were not afraid of much and didn't care if we watched them do nothing but swat at flies.

On one safari we came upon a kill. the male doesn't partake, all the females run down the prey and kill it, then present it to the male who eats first. Then the 10 cubs we saw ate next, then the lionesses. Not much was left for the hunters!

It is estimated that there are currently 1,600 lions in the Kruger National Park

Leopard is another of the "Big 5"

Leopards are usually the least social, and elusive of the African big cats. They are beautiful. They usually keep to themselves, lurking in dense riverine bush or around rocky koppies, emerging to hunt late in the afternoon or at night. We were lucking in this sighting a couple of times later.

This Leopard was rolling around and playing just like my cat does. She didn't seem to care that we sat there for a long time watching her play in the sun.

Above is a Bush Buck

Cape Buffalo also known as Black Death.

Another of the "Big 5", the most dangerous of all the animals except the Hippo. It has been said that they have killed more big game hunters than any other animal. They look like our calm cows with horns, but calm they are not. They do not mock charge and they give no warning. You cannot outrun one so if you are being charged, climb a tree. They often have a hundred or so friends there ready to help them too.

Wart Hogs

Warthogs are not the best-looking animal in the Park, but they are mighty fun to watch. Warthogs have a sturdy build like their relative, our farm pigs, but have large flat heads that appear to have warts on it and four sharp tasks. They have such short necks they need to kneel on their front knees while feeding and they spend most of their time feeding.

A group of warthogs is a sounder.

Warthogs shelter in burrows at night, which they enter tail first. Socially, three main groups of hogs which are, solitary boars, bachelor groups and matriarchal groups.

Matriarchal groups are the adult sows with their young and yearlings. Boars play no part in rearing piglets and seldom associate with sows outside the mating process.

There are many predators of the warthog but they are not low in numbers. in Kruger Park. Perhaps they produce lots of young? The young may be taken by Eagles and Jackal with Lion, Hyaena, Cheetah, Leopard and Crocodile being the main enemies of the adults.

Chobe Park in Botswana

Chobe is known for its' elephants.

It is estimated that there are 120,000 elephants in the park, the highest concentration in Africa and the largest continuous surviving elephant population on Earth. We saw elephants everywhere we looked, on the roads, fields, in the water, all over.

An adult male elephant drinks 200 L of water and eats 250 kg of grass in a day. That takes up just about the whole day, eating and drinking.

Elephant herd walking in a parade.

Most of my photos of Elephants come from Chobe in Botswana but this photo is from South Africa. They are such massive beasts and so destructive. Kruger park has about 12,000 elephants. They are one of the "Big 5". Herds can be of variable number but the young males at puberty leave the herd to form small bachelor groups. We saw some bachelors playing in the water and having a grand ole time.

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