This is Africa – Part 2 – South Africa Adventure

Hello again! As promised, here is part 2 of my African adventures. I’m just going to pick up where we left off and jump right in.

Now that we’ve gotten through the volunteer weeks in part 1, let’s talk about the adventure tour, shall we?  I won’t give you every detail on account of the fact that this post would take about 6 weeks to read if I did. But, I promise to give you the highlights.

The first few nights of the adventure tour we stayed at a place called Glen Afric, just about 40 minutes away from Johannesburg. Glen Afric is a lodge that is also home to a lot of awesome animals. They have a few different housing options, but I and a friend were in one of the “tents”. Now, I use the term “tent” very lightly because they were ridiculously fancy tents. I mean, we had a bath tub and a toilet. But the coolest thing about the tent was that there were zebras and giraffes roaming around outside of our tent. Oh, and monkeys too – though I only ever heard them and never actually saw them. I was so excited when I woke up the first morning and walked outside to see a giraffe standing just a few meters away. Heaven for Delaney.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. The first activity of our adventure tour was an “elephant encounter” at our accommodation. While some of the more harmless animals, such as the giraffes and zebras, got to wander around freely, others were kept in a nearby area but slightly farther away from guests to give everyone peace of mind. The elephants were one of these animals. Now, don’t think that they were in a tiny zoo enclosure though – I promise that they still had lots of room to roam around. They had 3 elephants that had been transported to Glen Afric because of rehabilitation reasons. I’m not sure of the exact stories for why they were there, but I know that for one reason or another they couldn’t take care of themselves in the wild so they are now happily living their lives in Glen Afric. There are a few workers that are a bit like zoo keepers that take care of them, and occasionally they let people come in to see the elephants. While we were there the workers stayed close so that they could tell us if we needed to back away for any reason, so it was very safe. We got to pet the elephants and even feed them and it was so amazing! In case you were wondering, the skin on the back side of the ear of an elephant is super soft and feels really cool. One of my favorite moments was when I was holding out a branch to one of the elephants for it to eat the leaves and it wrapped its trunk all the way around my leg before reaching up for the food. There was one adult elephant named Three and two babies named Hannah and Marty. Don’t be fooled by the term “baby” though, they’re still huge even when they are three years old. The elephant encounter gave me a newfound love for elephants and I’m now even more obsessed with them. Below you will find a picture of me kissing one of the babies, one of my personal favorite pictures of the whole trip.

Our next stop on the adventure tour was Kruger National Park. We went on two drives around the park – a morning/afternoon drive and a night drive. The very first animal we saw was a cheetah, which was super exciting because they are the second rarest animal to see in the park! Between the two trips we also got to see all of the Big 5, which was totally awesome. They were all pretty amazing, and we were all especially excited to see rhinos since they are becoming more and more scarce with poaching issues. However, I would be failing as a blogger if I didn’t tell you specifically about the leopard we saw. When we went out for our night drive we were all really hoping to see a leopard because it was the only one of the Big 5 that we hadn’t yet seen, little did we know just how lucky we were going to be! About 20 minutes into our drive we thought we spotted a leopard so we stopped the vehicle to see if we could sneak another look. A few minutes later we saw not a leopard, but a hyena, pop out from a patch of tall grass. He wasn’t quite as exciting as a leopard, but we stuck around to watch him for a bit anyway because he was still pretty cool. As we watched, we realized that he was following something… a leopard! The leopard emerged from the tall grass where we could see him and climbed up a tree, where he had previously hung a warthog carcass. He sat down in the tree next to his kill and quickly went to sleep, while the hyena sat at the bottom of the tree and longingly looked up at the carcass, waiting and hoping for it to fall. The leopard had quite literally stuffed his stomach, check out his belly in the pictures I got! You can also see a bit of the carcass hanging above him. We were so lucky to see this, it was a truly remarkable sighting.

The next stop on our trip was the Blyde River Canyon. However, we took the long drive there so that we could make a few stops and see some sights. Our first stop was at a place called the “potholes”. We stayed here for about an hour and I spent about half of my time wandering around and exploring the beautiful area, and the other half enjoying the sound of the rushing water as I journaled. We were basically surrounded by little miniature waterfalls and some super pretty scenery. It was a very peaceful place, the type of place that you would go just to sit down and read a book. In this first picture you can see me exploring the potholes, and the second one shows all of the ISV participants relaxing among the beauty of it all.

Our other quick stop on the way to Blyde River Canyon was at a place called Honeymoon Rock. This is apparently the third largest canyon in the world, but the first largest canyon WITH vegetation. It’s called Honeymoon Rock because there was a couple that honeymooned there and got thrown off the rock by the wind… so as you can see, there are now fences around it to keep history from repeating itself. The view was stunning and the scenery was equally as beautiful as the potholes!

After our Honeymoon Rock stop, we then made our way to Blyde River Canyon! One of my favorite activities of this part of the trip, much to my surprise, was cliff jumping! Well, technically we went kloofing and cliff jumping was only a portion of the activity. “Kloofing” basically consists of hiking around on a mountain and occasionally jumping off cliffs into water. There were 4 jumps overall and each one was higher than the last, the largest being 11 meters, which is about 36 feet. This activity definitely challenged me to face my fears, but once I got myself to jump I was so glad I did!  I even chose to do the 11 meter jump multiple times! The water was ridiculously cold, but luckily the first jump was just 1 or 2 meters tall so it was mostly a warmup jump to get us used to the water. Not only was the jumping fun, but the view was absolutely stunning as well.  While we hiked around on the mountain we overlooked a huge valley and it was absolutely beautiful. It was postcard-picture worthy.  In the below picture you can spot me braving the freezing cold water of the waterfall during one of our quick breaks on our way up the mountain.

The other activity in the Blyde River Canyon that I just can’t stop myself from talking about was our visit to the Moholoholo Rehabilitation Center. We were given a tour of the center and we learned a lot about the various animals. The center takes in injured animals or animals that simply can’t take care of themselves in the wild for one reason or another. The hope is that they can rehabilitate the animals and eventually release them back into the wild, but some of their animals are there permanently because they simply won’t ever be able to survive on their own. That concept is a bit sad, but it also makes me happy that places like Moholoholo exist so that the animals can at least live a happy life within the center. Most of the animals in the center were there for one of two reasons. One of these reasons is that they had been injured by snare traps. The other is that humans had taken in a wild animal and tried to keep it as a pet, realized it wasn’t going to work, and took it to the rehabilitation center because the animal was no longer able to take care of itself in the wild since it had become dependent on people.

There was one specific bird at Moholoholo that had a particularly interesting story. This guy is a Southern Ground Hornbill. In the hornbill world, a male will pick up a rock or a leaf or something of that nature in its beak, present it to a female, and if she takes it they are immediately mates for life. However, this particular hornbill was a pet to humans for the majority of its childhood and imprinted on humans. Because he never had any contact with other birds for the first part of his life, the center has to keep him in his own enclosure because he literally tried to kill the other hornbills that they originally housed him with. As a result of his human-dependent life, he presents a rock to almost every female human that walks by. Poor little guy just wants someone to love him.

At the rehabilitation center I also had the pleasure of petting a cheetah and an eagle, and feeding a leopard-faced vulture. Petting the cheetah was basically like petting a giant cat because, well, that’s exactly what it is. Except that while petting it, it was almost like I could feel its strength. I know that sounds really strange, but I could see how incredibly developed its leg muscles were. I can definitely see why they’re the fastest land animals.

While the cheetah’s fur felt about how I expected it to, the eagle was very different than I thought it would be. The feathers on the back of it’s neck were actually SUPER soft. And he seemed so much bigger than I ever expected him to once I was standing right next to him!

Now onto the vulture! You wouldn’t believe how heavy this guy was, you can tell from the picture that the tour leader literally had to help me hold my arm up because I couldn’t support him all by myself! As you can see, when his wings were fully expanded they went way over my head due to their huge size. Due to my vegetarian ways I kind of had to block the fact that I was holding raw meat in my hand out of my mind. But hey, another fear conquered, right?

Well, I’ll tell you all about Swaziland and Mozambique in part 3 soon! Thanks for listening bugs, stay tuned! 🙂

Love,

Laney-Bug ❤

This is Africa – Part 1 – Volunteering

Why, hello there! Long time, no see! I know that I’ve fallen behind on my regular blogging schedule, but I have a pretty good excuse… I was just in Africa with no wifi for a month. Though I also failed to blog the month prior to this grand adventure, so I guess I’m technically still at fault. But now I am going to provide you with part 1 of my 3-part story all about my amazing African adventures, so that makes up for it.

I went to Africa with a group called International Student Volunteers, or ISV. I heard about the program from an ISV representative that spoke briefly in one of my lecture classes back in September and immediately knew I wanted to participate. They do trips to a bunch of different places, but Africa was the one that really captured my attention. The basic idea of their trips is that you work on a volunteer project for 2 weeks, and then you get to go on an “adventure tour” and do a bunch of really awesome things for another 2 weeks after that.

So before I get to the tourist-y adventure tour part of my trip, you get to hear all about my volunteer project. For my first two weeks I was in South Africa in the Waterberg Mountain area, staying in a little village called Telekishi. Just down the road from the village was Masebe Nature Reserve. Masebe used to be open for tourism but unfortunately closed to the public in 2005 due to money issues and poaching problems in the area. However, there is a company called WEI, Wildlife and Ecological Investments, that is now doing research to find out if they can eventually reopen the reserve to the public. In order to do this, they need volunteers to help them gather data on the area – that’s where I come in.

What I did for the majority of the first two weeks is the kind of thing that some people find really cool and interesting, and other people think sounds totally boring and lame. If you are of the second variety of people, then you should still be excited while hearing about this because you can just remind yourself how lucky you are that there are funny people out there in the world, such as myself, that enjoy it so that you don’t have to get stuck doing it instead. We had two primary tasks as volunteers – habitat assessments and bird point counts. Habitat assessments basically consisted of walking out into a specific area of the bush and identifying trees, measuring the height and the density of the grass, determining if animals have grazed in the area, and a few other assorted things of that nature. We split into groups of 7 to conquer our habitat assesments and each one of us within the group had our own unique job – I was given the exciting task of measuring the height and density of the grass. It took us about an hour to do one habitat assessment, however some took longer than others, depending on the area we were in. Some areas had lots of scary demon bushes that were full of thorns so they took longer to get through because we had to avoid being stabbed to death. Others had grass that was taller than me so I took longer to measure it because I needed to call for assistance from someone of a taller variety than me. And others had a ridiculous amount of trees and it simply took forever to identify and measure all of them. Here is a picture of my habitat assessment group on our last day of volunteer work. I’m on the left in the rockin’ pink sun hat. The giant orange stick I’m holding is called a Disk Pasture Meter and was used to measure the density of the grass.

On top of these habitat assessments, we also conducted bird point counts. In order to do a bird point count, we basically had to stand still, and quietly, for 10 minutes while writing down information about any birds that we heard or saw in that time frame. I personally liked the bird point counts because by the end of the two weeks I could actually identify about 12 different african birds by their calls. My favorite bird was the yellow billed hornbill, which is what Zazu is for any Lion King fans out there. For your enjoyment, I have included a picture of the yellow billed hornbill. This picture wasn’t actually taken on the reserve, I got it while at Kruger National Park during my adventure tour – but you’ll hear all about that part of my adventure later. As you can see from the picture, Disney lied to us when they made Zazu blue. But it’s Disney, so I guess I’ll forgive them.

As most of you are probably aware, I’m a little obsessed with giraffes. Okay, maybe more than a little. Which is why I was more than excited on days that we finished our bird point counts and habitat assessments early and also got to go on giraffe ID drives – which basically means we drove around the reserve hoping to see giraffes, and when we did see one we stopped and took pictures of it to identify it based on its spots. The point of this was to see what areas of the reserve the giraffes typically spent time in, and to check if there were any giraffes in the reserve that the people running the reserve didn’t already know about. Masebe has 14 giraffes in total and we saw 5 of them – they were super cool with knobs. Here is one of the giraffes that we saw on the reserve.

Every day for the first two weeks we were up at 6 AM and would leave Telekishi by 7. We would go out and do 3 bird point counts and a habitat assessment, followed by a giraffe ID drive on some days. We would come back to the village for lunch and then we would participate in some sort of discussion, usually with a topic along the lines of sustainability or conservation. Then we would go back out to do one more habitat assessment, come back for dinner, and just chill around the fire for the rest of the night. There were definitely a few aspects of life in Telekishi that took some getting used to, such as the tap water that was safe to drink but came out red and tasting like iron, having to keep an eye out for black mambas on our hiking trails, never knowing if we would get hot water or water pressure in our showers, and getting used to living in huts made out of dried out cow poo. But overall our experience staying at Telekishi was totally worth the rusty water and cow poo huts. But before I get ahead of myself, first thing’s first. I think it’s time to show you a picture of my cute little cow poo hut.

Now that that is out of the way, I can continue telling you how awesome the experience was. We were able to experience the culture of the surrounding area, and we learned so much about the animals on the reserve and about conservation through the discussions we had with our leaders and the WEI field guides that we worked with. For your entertainment, I have gone through the trouble of writing up a list of my favorite animal facts that I learned on my trip. Here they are, you are welcome.

• 1 – a group of giraffes is called a tower or a journey
• 2 – a group of zebras is called a dazzle
• 3 – a group of rhinos is called a crash
• 4 – female warthogs have one set of tusks while males have two. That’s right folks, Pumba is a girl. You can thank me later for crushing your childhood.
• 5 – male giraffes fight each other by slamming their necks and heads into each other. As a result, you can tell if a giraffe is a male by looking to see if it has funny shaped knobs all over its head.
• 6 – There is a creature called a spring hare that is possibly the funniest animal I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s the size of a bunny but has a giant paddle tail and hops around like a kangaroo with his front feet off the ground. If you have never seen one you really need to go online and find a picture. We saw one on a night drive through the reserve and it literally just hopped around in circles in front of the truck – they aren’t the brightest of creatures.
• 7 – The chinspot batis (a south african bird) has a call that sounds exactly like the “Three Blind Mice” song.
• 8 – Baboons usually travel in groups called troops, however occasionally two males will fight for a position as the alpha, and as a result the losing baboon is kicked out of the troop. There is one specific baboon that we named Bobby that was kicked out of his troop by another male and now hangs out around Telekishi. He has been hanging out in the area for years and has never been a problem, but recently he has gotten a bit too close for comfort. We had to go to another building to use the bathroom and we were under strict orders to look out our windows and check for Bobby before going outside at night so that we could avoid being mauled to death by a monkey.
• 9 – The “Big 5” (rhinos, elephants, buffalo, lions, and leopards) are considered the 5 most dangerous animals to hunt. However, hippos are kind of the “honorary Big 6” because hippos alone kill more humans a year than all of the big 5 put together. I always knew they were scary.
• 10 – There is an animal called a hyrax that is nicknamed the rock rabbit. It looks like a large rodent and is brown and fluffy, but it is actually more closely related to elephants than rodents. Who knew that elephants had small fuzzy cousins that spend their time sun bathing on rocks?

The discussions that we had during our volunteer project kind of put me on an emotional roller coaster. I loved learning about how we can be conservative and sustainable to help the earth, but it’s also sad to realize how messed up the earth really is due to human impact. We watched a video called “The Story of Stuff” during one of our discussions that really got me thinking. If you haven’t seen it before, I highly recommend it – typing the title into google brings it up right away. The basic idea of the video is that as humans, we have established a linear process in which we take resources from the earth, turn them into “stuff”, sell the stuff, buy the stuff, and then throw the stuff away. However, having a linear system is not the best plan because we only have a finite amount of resources. It’s sad to think about the fact that this is happening, but the video also talks about how humans are the ones who created the system, so we also have the power to change it. In a way it’s uplifting to think about the fact that we can change it. We just need to have enough people who make small changes in order to eventually make a big change. If everyone says “the actions of one person won’t make a difference”, then we never will. But if everyone believes that it’s possible, I think it would be.

Anyway, another big topic for discussion at Telekishi was conservation of animals. We talked a lot about the poaching of rhinos, which is a very sad reality. They are basically being poached for their horns because some cultures believe that the horns have healing powers. However, I knew about the rhino poaching before my trip. What I didn’t know is that there is also an elephant problem right now, except it’s the exact opposite of the rhino problem. Years ago elephants were starting to die out, and humans worked to save them. However, the efforts worked a little too well. Now there are more elephants in the wild than there ever have been before. Kruger National Park is meant to hold about 7000 elephants and there are currently around 15000. This can be a problem because elephants are obviously pretty huge and have a tendency to knock down trees and be destructive. People have tried to come up with solutions for this but there is no one clear answer. One possibility is culling the elephants, though this is a highly debated issue because it can be seen as inhumane. Another option is transporting some of them from areas with too many elephants to areas that aren’t as populated by elephants, but this can be expensive. Another option is to perform a contraceptive surgery on the elephants so they can’t reproduce in later years, but this can also be costly. It makes me sad to think about the fact that the rhinos are dying out while the elephants are becoming so populated that people are considering culling them. Sometimes life just doesn’t seem fair. But, since humans are a big reason of why these issues are happening in the first place, I like to think that we have the ability to fix it too. I know that this part of my post may seem a bit depressing, but the least I can do for the cause is to let other people know about it. So here I am, sharing my knowledge with you so that you can tell everyone you know and maybe just maybe someone will find a solution to save both the rhinos and the elephants.

Well, there’s my first two weeks in a nutshell. I loved working in the bush and catching glimpses of animals, I loved learning about the animals and about conservation, and I loved being able to spend the two weeks with like-minded people who not only didn’t mind rusty water and cow poo huts, but who embraced it with me. And, I even made it through the whole 2 weeks without being mauled by Bobby the baboon, so I would call that a success. Maybe I’ll be back again some day in the future to see Masebe Nature Reserve as a tourist rather than as a volunteer. I would love for it to reopen some day so that more people can see how awesome it is!

Well, stay tuned for part 2 of my trip, bugs! There’s a lot more to tell you about!

Love,

Laney-Bug ❤