Kievits Kroon

Yesterday, I hosted an Information Strategy Symposium at Kievits Kroon Estate, which is an old dutch farm on the outskirts of Pretoria.  We left Johannesburg at 7am and it took 2 hours with traffic to make it to this remote area, which was rather wild looking.  But the farm is now a guest house and conference center and it was lovely.

A Kievits is a small bird with bright red legs.  They nest on the ground and both mother and father guard their nest fiercely.  They chirp at you as you come near and will attack your eyes if you threaten their eggs. 

 The event itself was excellent, though very tiring for me as I was "on" for the entire day and didn't make it back to my hotel until 10pm. Just packing up now to leave for the airport and will blog again from Namibia.

Voortrekker Monument

Voortrekker means "first trekker."  We would say pioneer in English, and the Voortrekker Monument celebrates the accomplishments of Dutch settlers who migrated inland from the South African Coast in 30 covered wagons to escape British colonial rule.  Prior to their journey, only the coastal regions of South Africa had been settled and the inland territories were unexplored and hostile, full of wild animals and many tribes of warring nations. 

The monument sits on a large hill overlooking Pretoria.  A friend recommended I see it and it was on the way back from my meetings.  My driver had never been there either (in fact, blacks weren't even allowed to visit it during Apartheid) so it seemed we had to see it.  I approached it with some trepidation as I saw it as a museum glorifying white colonization of African lands, but the museum turned out to be far more objective and historically accurate.  We both enjoyed it quite a bit. 

I met an Australian in the parking lot who told me the monument was built with granite rock by Irish masons as there were no skilled masons with that capability in South Africa at the time. 

The monument looks like a mausoleum on the outside and there is in fact a ceremonial tomb to the fallen Dutch settlers on the inside.  We took an elevator to the roof and I shot this panorama of Pretoria and the surrounding countryside.

It is quite detailed if you zoom in.  This is what the monument looks like from the roof where I shot the panorama. 

 This is a sample of the bass relief that runs across the inside.  It details both the journey the Voortrekkers took as well as the massacre of their leaders by the Zulu warriors after the battle of Blood River in 1839.

 This is what it looks like from the outside. 

And finally, this is my driver, Nathaniel.  He really enjoyed the museum.  It was the first time he had ever seen a covered wagon in person.  He said he had only seen them on TV in American cowboys and indian movies and never in the historical context of his own country.

Don't Sleep Next to the Edge of the Tent

"Your trip will be awesome," Ocea said to me as we sat down for dinner at The Grill in Sandton.  "I have great inspiration," I replied as I put the napkin on my lap.  Ocea Garriock is my IBM colleague and good friend who first introduced me to South Africa four years ago when she met me at Tambo and escorted me around Sandton to various customers.  Over three subsequent trips, we became great friends, touring the Cape winelands, Drakensberg, and Victoria Falls together.  When I took my wife Helle and sons Ben and David with me on a trip in August of 2010, we shared a house in Dullstroom with Ocea and her daughters, spending a wonderful weekend walking over waterfalls and having fantastic dinners full of laughter and stories.

This evening we were waiting for Simon to arrive.  The Grill is a nice steakhouse in a modern shopping mall in Sandton, off Rivonia Road.  The steaks in South Africa are beyond compare.  The beef is often grass fed, no hormones please, and the cows are much older than in the USA when they are slaughtered.  Often the beef is aged for many days before serving and the resulting steaks are flavorful and tender.  Filets here are pronounced with a hard "T," no french Filays please, and I was ready to order one.

But Simon was a bit late so we had an appeltizer, which is a carbonated apple juice, and a starter of Springbok Carpacio, and talked about our African adventures.  Since my last trip two years ago, Ocea has been going on long off-road camping adventures in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique.  And it is those experiences, plus my own boredom with western hotels and ubiquitous Starbucks in every capital, that have inspired my adventure in Namibia.

Even though South Africa is in Africa, it has not really been very common for South Africans to vacation in neighbouring countries.  Years of Apartheid before 1990 made travel in Africa unwelcome for many white South Africans, who more often vacationed in Europe or Australia rather than next door.  You are still more likely to meet Americans in any of the neighbouring nations than South Africans, even though the travel trends are changing as Africa tourism increases.

Last year, Ocea and Simon took a brave adventure driving North across Zimbabwe to The Mana Pools, where they met friends who smartly had flown to Lusaka in Zambia and driven rented 4x4's South to meet meet them at The Pools.  The drive up involved predation of a human kind as Zim police had roadblocks ever 10 or so miles where they would profer AIDS brochures to travellers with outstretched hands looking for small bribes in US Dollars for the right to move on.  It was a never ending series of corrupt waypoints that transformed the trip up into a massive irritation.

The Mana Pools themselves are a completely wild part of Zimbabwe, on the boarder with Zambia.  Here, the Zambezi River widens in a delta to form many pools and lakes.  There are no tourist lodges, or fenced camps, and for two weeks Ocea, Simon, and friends camped 3 meters from the river's edge, where hippos and crocodiles ruled the slow current.  In the camp, they organized their cars in a circle like covered wagons on the prairie, with tents inside the circle angled inward facing one Range Rover in the center that was a security zone in case lions overwhelmed the camp.  If you are also friends with Ocea, you can see some of her wonderful photos of The Mana Pools here on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150799276993037.401884.524003036&type=3

On the first night, their experienced friend Adrian warned them not to sleep with their heads next to the canvass of the tent as Hyenas may with one bite crush their heads in their jaws and pull them out of the tent to eat them whole!

While cooking their Brai (BBQ), there was a pride of lions just 10 meters off watching the foreigners cook the meat, drawn in by the smell yet still wary given the flames of the campfire.  That changed as the sun set and the lions, perhaps 8 of them in all, took down an Impala just on the edge of the camp and noisily consumed it just minutes after the sun set.  The travelers were huddled around their campfire as the beasts chewed on bones and fought over pieces of the carcass.

At one point, Ocea stood up to fetch some tea from a picnic table near one of the cars and stopped just a few feet from the fire circle.  There was a hyena who had jumped on the picnic table and was devouring the trash they had hung in a bag from a tree branch over the table.  The beast was about 10 meters from the camp and the sight of one so close froze her in her tracks.  She back away and returned to the campfire.

Surrounded as they were by a pride of lions and groups of hyena in the bush, crocodiles and hippos in the river, they went to bed that night sleeping on the ground in their tents, heads far from the canvass, terrified at the barking sounds they heard all night (which they later learned were Springbok in heat).  Waking the next morning, they discovered their campfire overrun with hyena tracks throughout the camp - with one print in their frying pan.  However, nothing had disturbed their tents and they gained a new sense of security that the carnivores were not interested in humans sleeping in tents.

However, just after lunch a massive bull elephant strode into camp and started pulling down branches from the tree where they had hung their garbage bag.  And later that day, they rented canoes and paddled down the Zambezi past massive crocs, pods of hippos, and elephants along the banks.

These stories fill me with awe and they have of course inspired me to take my own adventure across Namibia starting on Friday.  I assure my friends that I will not sleep on the ground and nor will I put my head next to the canvas.  Ocea tells me that lions and hyenas do not climb on cars and seek out humans sleeping in tents, but I won't take any chances just the same.

JoMonday

I am not sure I slept last night, but I don't remember not sleeping.  I must have dozed off at about 1am and awoke at 7.  So six hours was OK.  Had a boring breakfast in the hotel - flat French Toast with artificial maple syrup - and went to work.

The morning was overcast and cool.  By about 4pm, the sun came out and I migrated my office to the pool, where I caught the last hour of blue skies and warm sun.  It was not too hot today, perhaps 80F, and there was a breeze.  Sadly the pool is next to a busy road and trucks pass by all day.  Of course, there is a wall with electric wires surrounding the property and the wall keeps some of the noise out.  And it was restful enough to have a snooze in the sun.

At the end, I saw the sun get low and that slanted light creates great contrast amidst the flowers and tropical plants lining the pool.  I put on my Macro and snapped a couple of decent shots.

Flying over Africa

I've been to South Africa five times now, but this was the first time I've flown via Amsterdam on KLM.  In the past, I've flown Delta from JFK via Dakar, which is a 9 hour trip to Dakar over the South Atlantic, then another 9 hours onward to Johannesburg or Cape Town.  Another route I've flown is Delta via Atlanta, which involves a three hour flight from JFK to Atlanta, and then onward with a 17 hour flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg. The flight yesterday with KLM was very pleasant.  It involved 7 hours JFK to Schipol, with a 3 hour layover to sit in the business lounge, and then an 11 hour flight north to south over Africa.

Sadly, I sat on the aisle in economy class and there was a lot of cloud cover most of the way down, except from Algeria to Niger.  And by the time we got over Angola, the sun was setting and the trip was dark.  I captured a few shots of the endless Sahara dessert over Algeria.  The shapes of the dunes and the shadows they cast were the only contrast in a sea of red sand that stretched for a thousand miles.  It was a breathtaking sight.

Joburg feels the same except that I chose the wrong hotel.  In past visits I stayed at the Sandton Hilton, which is a large and comfortable hotel conveniently located in Sandton.  This time, just to mix it up, I opted to stay at the Sandton Sun on Katherine Street, which is smaller and feels more like a South African guest house.  It lacks the attentive staff, excessive breakfast buffet, and excellent pool and lovely garden the Hilton has.  I guess the boring breakfast here will be good for my waistline, and the rooms are quiet and comfortable.  But the housekeeping staff comes to clean the rooms at 8am!
Its only a few days, I suppose.

Schipol

I'm in the klm lounge this morning after a nice and uneventful flight from jkf. I have a couple of hours layover here before boarding my next flight to johannesburg. Didn't sleep yet and hope to get some rest on the next 12 hour leg but it's not sure since the economy seats aren't too comfy. I arrive in joburg at 10. There us snow on the ground here in Amsterdam but it's 90F in south Africa. What a contrast!

Winter Flowers

This is a photo I took some weeks ago and just worked on in Darktable this evening, adding some lowpass guassian soft lighting to give the image a dreamy look.

Namibia

On March 1, I begin a three week self-driving adventure across Namibia.  This is a journey I have dreamed about for many years.  I'm going alone, and have only booked two nights out of the 20 I will sleep across some 3000km of driving.  I rented a 4x4 with a tent on top, refrigerator in the back, and plan to camp out in desert campsites most evenings.  I have a route planned that takes me from Winhoek north to The Waterberg Plateau, then on to Etosha National Park, through Damaraland to the Skeleton Coast, then through Sossuvlei and ending in The Namib Rand. 

I am traveling during the off season, at the end of the Namibian summer during what had been the rainy season.  However, there hasn't been much rain in Namibia this year and I don't expect much arid interruption during my stay.  It will be hot during the day, with temperatures in the 90's, and cool at night, getting down to 60F.  I will be driving vast distances in a large pickup truck with a cab on the back and a tent on the roof.  And I will mostly be alone except for the animals and people I meet on the way. 

Over the past 20 years, I have visited 44 countries.  But in all that time, I have never taken a three week holiday anywhere on my own.  I've had a few days tacked on here and there, or taken the family with me.  But I have not had an adventure on my own for a long period of time since 1992.  And I have never been in a place so vast (twice the size of California) with so few human beings (1.2 million). 

Namibia is one of the last true empty and untouched wildernesses in the world and I look forward to sharing with you what I see, through the lens of my camera, what I experience via the words on these pages, and sometimes (bandwidth permitting), what I see and hear via video. 

I promise to keep a daily diary and to only post the best photos and videos from each day.  I hope you will tune in often and leave me with feedback and comments.  I look forward to hearing from you!

Stevenzo

When I was a kid growing up in Port Washington, NY my sisters had a knick name for me - Stevenzo.  I haven't used it in years, but I wanted this blog to be a personal account of my travels, photographs, and experiences and not at all work related.