Beauty in the details

I always use travel to recharge creative juices very often depleted by getting through the daily grind. It helps that as a family we err towards travel to the wild and beautiful places that inspire me. The past 6 weeks have delivered on every front and in quite different ways.

What strikes me the most is the contrast between a wintery Western Cape in South Africa, followed by the dry landscape of Botswana.  

Winter sun in South Africa left colours saturated and recent rain had brought a lushness and deep greens to landscapes that are dusty and dry in the summer months. Aloes in full bloom lined the roads of the garden route and brilliant yellow Lucerne fields cut swaths through green farmland. Rainwater tanks, earthen dams, windmills and simple farmhouses - all long standing areas of exploration in my work, lined the roads as we drove up and down the coast.

 Favorite themes revisited.

                  

Then we switched gears, flew and drove north into a landscape where annual evaporation exceeds annual rainfall and the rain that does fall, comes in the summer months. It is a bone dry landscape in the winter with deeply rutted tracks bearing witness to summer mud now rock hard and devoid of water. 

The beauty here? Some of it lay simply in the stark, vastness of the landscape but most of it lay in the details and contrasts. Beauty lies in the lines of a road cutting through an empty landscape, the brilliant yellow of grasses against a deep blue sky, a brilliant orange seed pod, the paper-thin layers of a fallen Baobab tree, the tenacity of a thorn tree growing in a place with little to no rainfall, it's branches designed to bring maximum shade to animals seeking shelter from the relentless sun.

               

Beauty in the bush lies in the small patches of black just above an impala's hoof, the delicate polka dots on a Chobe bushbuck's belly, the crazy stripes on a zebra that continue up the his/ her mane, a warthog's Mohawk, the gingery tear drop above a lion's eye and the light dots on their massive paws, a giraffe's long neck and eyelashes, the iridescent hues of the lilac breasted roller, the brilliant sheen and elegant curved horns of the sable antelope. All this attention to detail reminds me of couture on a catwalk, except that this is everyday dress for the animal kingdom. 

Rain, dry, lush, barren, empty, full, blue against gold, red against grey, immense trees reduced to paper thin reminders of centuries of growth. So many contrasts, so much beauty.

             

           

           

           

Full circle Full hearts

The past few days have been the completion of a loop of sorts, taking us to the far side of the ancient pans of our first days and then traversing them on a track marked by GPS points rather than road paint or signs. Once again, it was only us and a vast and empty landscape in every direction. Ancient silt, now a chalky powder covered our clothes and bodies and added a new layer of dust to every surface, bag, camera and book.

We found our way to what was once an island in the middle of a long-gone lake. Even though the water dried up 1000s of years ago, the ancient shore line was rimmed with the round rocks and pebbles, as if at any moment a gentle wave might roll in and lap the shore. Like many a high place in a flat landscape, this island holds mystical importance to local people both ancient and current. Prayers for rain are still made here and 100s of cairns speak of initiation rituals long past. Baobab trees, with bark that seems to fall somewhere between skin and polished granite cover the island. Their roots snake in and out of the ground, their branches reaching out like the arms of a benevolent giant.

After hours of island magic, came the hard work of completing our journey, closing the circle and getting ourselves many hundreds of kilometers across 2 countries and to an airport in time for a series of international flights.

We took in our last African sunsets, found the southern cross in the night sky one last time and burned a last Mopane fire with full but heavy hearts. We watched a final bushveld sunrise this morning as we crossed the fabled Limpopo River. In crossing the Limpopo, we left Botswana and returned to South Africa, completing the circle our travels had created.

Shortly, we will unpack ourselves from and say goodbye to the Landrover which has been our transport and home for 3 weeks. I now know why these vehicles inspire such passion in their owners, it has seen us churning through thick sand, water logged marshes and impossible looking roads. Now we fly down a 4 lane highway with only the dust covering us to tell of the adventure we left behind.

Full circle, full hearts. We will be back for more.

No lights

The latest leg of our adventure has taken us through vast landscapes with few signs of human impact and few people, even travelers such as ourselves are very few. We have driven for hours without passing another human being and had close encounters with lion - with only us and them and all of us a similar shade of dusty-grey, from head to toe.

Campsites are few, spread apart, without water and very hard to get to. There is no one to call for help if needed, but there is also no one to disturb the sounds of the African night as it descends. We are deep in the Central Kalahari, a vast and relatively inhospitable place where annual evaporation exceeds annual rainfall. We are very far from powerlines, cell towers or paved roads. I found myself looking at the sky last night and picturing night-time satellite images of Earth, where continents and cities are mapped out by lines and clusters of light on an otherwise dark planet.

I realized the the various places I have called home, have always been identified up by a cacophony of lights.  This time I would find my location by seeking out a vast area of darkness in the middle of Africa. No lights, just a deep dark night sky above us and the African night enveloping us.

 If you look on a map, there we are, right in the middle, looking up at the Milky Way.

Chobe-Savute-Maun

We are in Maun, regrouping after an amazing, exhausting, exhilarating run down the Chobe River and through Savute. We have spent our days watching extraordinary animals living out their days in the unspoilt wilds, where they always have lived. What amazes me is the improbability of their bodies (giraffe, hippos, elephants), the delicate beauty of their markings (zebra, Chobe bushbuck and even the ubiquitous impala) and the ever watchfulness of those who are on the dinner menu of larger creatures.

We drove down impossible seeming roads, got incredibly filthy with dust forming drifts inside our vehicle as we drove. We pulled ourselves out of bed before dawn each morning to get on the road to see game and search for elusive cats. (We were rewarded both by a pride of 7  young lion playing in the first rays of sunlight, as well a very close encounter a lioness and her 3 cubs.) By the end, we were dust colored from head to toe and needed a breather as much as a shower.

The Island Safari Lodge in Maun is just the kind of place for breathers. Our laundry is now done, our bodies are clean, our groceries restocked and our water and diesel tanks filled back up again.

We had a slow day today, with time for dragonfly catching and a breakfast involving all sorts of things not served on our safari (blame the tour operator - oh yes, that would be me!). The 8 year old's tooth that fell out somewhere in Savute, but it wasn't left out for the tooth mouse/fairy for fear it would get lost in the endless fine sand that was our home. He is currently awaiting a visit from whomever does the job in Botswana. (We have decided it might be a tooth spring hare due to their ridiculous cuteness.) 

We are readying ourselves for our most remote and extreme camping of this adventure, we left it for last in the hopes that our greater experience would keep us safe and happy in a place not highly recommended for solo travel. We will be very remote, with no water for 4 days, few people and minimal roads, we leave at dawn tomorrow. I can't wait to get out of my comfy(ish) bed and back in to the Landrover, it is starting to feel like home.

In the company of elephants.

When game viewing, one is generally safe from animals when inside a vehicle. Strangely enough a lion will not see a human as a source off food when sitting inside an open-roofed Landrover, but stick a limb out of it our step out to take a photo, he/she is likely to eat you for breakfast. The only creature who poses a danger to those inside our vehicles is an elephant - a true giant of a creature who if disgruntled can tip or peel open a Landrover as if it were a can of tuna.

Being a mother brings out protective instincts like none other and as a result the elephants to be treated with the most caution are the mothers. 

On our first day of driving on the bush, we found ourselves having to pass through numerous breeding herds of elephant, with mammas and babies all around and the need to navigate them with great caution. While waiting for one particular herd to cross the road another vehicle approached too fast from the other side, disrupting the otherwise docile (but watchful) giants. A ripple of irritation ran through the herd and a large cow raised her heads and walked 40 feet straight towards us, with a purpose to her gait. She walked right up to our Landrover and stopping alongside my passenger window, she turned to face us, staring us down for a terrifying five minutes (or maybe it was two, but it felt like ten!). She was mere feet from myself and our 8 year old son and one flick of her tusks would have tipped us. The pounding of my heart was deafening. Having put us in our place, she turned to the shrub alongside her to eat some some choice leaves. She had put us in our place in no uncertain term.

Over the next week we encountered many more elephants, encountering many more breeding herds along the banks of the Chobe River. In contrast, we also encountered the lone bulls that are characteristic to Salute National Park. These males are docile (no babies to protect) and spend their days alone, unusual for such sociable creatures and leading them to seemingly seek out the company of humans from time to time.

On our last morning in Savute, we stopped to eat breakfast on a dry pan with a clear view all around us. it was a chance to stretch our legs and bask in the morning sun, before a long drive down to Maun. We noticed a tree moving and shaking on the far edges of the pan and after a few minutes an elephant made his way out of the bushes, seeming to move towards us. He got unnervingly close and as Mom of our particular herd, I decided we needed a little more space between. We moved our apple eating (an elephant favorite) family a little further away. Once again he moved towards us. This time, possibly sensing our need for distance he stopped a little further off and then simply kept us company, joining us for breakfast.

When it was time to go, there was an almost wistful goodbye as he raised his head and watched us leave. We called and waved from our windows and he raised his trunk in goodbye.

(The iPhone photo makes him look much further away than he was, but I like the feeling of the vastly empty place where we met up with him.)

Contrasts

The subject of my work is very often one of contrasts - water in a dry place, torrential rain and a bowl waiting to be filled, a small house in a vast landscape. It is the dynamic relationship between these opposites that I love - both the place where they meet and also the place where the scales which measure them find balance. 

The dry-season landscape of Botswana is one of extreme contrasts with Eden-like idylls of lush green and intermingling animals along a rivers edge which quickly drops off to dry sandy earth with hardy shrubs and then a little further away, the landscape becomes one of barren, parched earth where no water has been seen for months and no animals are found.

Water holes are now cracked-earth reminders of what was and what will be once again when the rain returns. For now they are silent and waiting.

Grass that was tall and green is now golden and stretches like a sea to the horizon. Where vast herds flock in the rains, one now sees only the odd giraffe or elephant. This seen whilst driving a road usually impassably muddy in the wet months, now caked and bumpy with rock hard potholes.

Amidst the vast dryness of Savute we found a small bit of wonder - a channel that seems to open and close due to tectonic shifts and who knows what else - which meant that a marshland which had been dry for months had started to fill again. This return of water magically appearing at at the height of the dry season.

 Driving across the surface of the still mostly dry marsh bed, we found rivulets and streams flowing in and dispersing - seeping in to the parched earth, filing it with water until the soil could hold no more and pools formed. Well away from the pools were green shoots coming up beneath the dry grasses, as if the grasses could sense the water coming or maybe they were tapping into minuscule seepage below the still dry surface. 

Minutes away from this returning life were  bone dry pans that would have to wait for the rains to see a return of life. 

Fine white dust with an almost impossible dryness.

(Small boy making the most of a sign posted on the tree designating this as a "stretching point".)