Storm Clouds over Pafuri

November 29, 2025November 29, 2025 / stidyatkusane / 12 Comments

*The Luvuvhu River, with an approaching storm.*

Our entry into the Kruger National Park, via the northern-most Pafuri Gate, had all the drama of a big-budget movie. A powerful weather wind had blown in from Mozambique, bringing with it much-needed rain. Soaring thunderclouds were gathering in the east. The sky, on the one side of us, was enshrined in an unholy light. Puffs of wet wind were tossing black leaves across the road.

Three African Hawk-Eagles glided low over the car, viewing us with suspicious eagle eyes. In the growing gloom cast by the storm’s shadow, two spooky-looking White-backed Vulture sat hunched up, curved necks slung low, on the twisted branches of a dead tree. The distant thunder provided the obligatory drum roll…

By the time we reached the Luvuvhu, the storm was almost upon us. The special effects didn’t ease up. We stopped on the bridge for a quick scan along the river. A regal African Fish Eagle sat perched, close by, its washing powder-white feathers thrown into sharp relief by the dark skies behind. I waited for the telling coup de gras – it’s haunting, oh-so-evocative-of-Africa call. Alas, someone had neglected to give it the script. It remained stubbornly silent.

Feeling a vague sense of anti-climax, we continued on. My lingering sense of disappointment quickly disappeared when, beyond Baobab Hill, we encountered a massive herd of buffalo crossing the road. We stopped so I could take photos of some of the Yellow-billed Oxpeckers that were hitching a ride on them.

The sight of the familiar hills of Punda Maria cheered me up still further. I was back home in my favourite part of Kruger.

We like to stay at Punda because, being far from any major centre, it doesn’t attract the usual tourist hordes, flocking to Kruger to find the Big Five. We were a little put out, then, to discover the usually quiet campsite had been taken over by a massive gathering of folk attending a conference

They had also grabbed all the best spots. Weaving our way through the parked cars and smouldering braais, we wondered what had brought them so far up here, a line of imaginative guesswork that resulted in a sudden premonitory flash – maybe they were members of some secret Doomsday Cult?

I was keen to enlist straight away because I thought it might involve some interesting late-night rituals. Ken, displaying commendable good sense, talked me out of it. We had no time for frivolous distractions. It would disrupt our tight birding schedule. Besides Punda Maria, we still had Shingwedzi and Satara to explore. Ken is a man who gets his priorities straight.

And so we decided to have a few beers instead. We had deliberately chosen the most remote corner of the campsite to pitch our tents to get away from the crowd. It also brought us closer to the bush. It paid off. Not far outside the fence perimeter, we heard the low rumbling of elephantine guts, probably one of the deepest and most sonorous sounds made by any animal on earth. It is an elemental sound, evocative of some ancient life force, now in danger of getting snuffed out in our increasingly technology-mad age.

The next morning, we set out to do the 27km Mahonie Loop, which circles the hill on which Punda Maria Camp is built. Punda Maria is positioned on the eastern-most extreme of the Soutspanberg, and because of its elevated altitude, receives the highest rainfall in Kruger, although the surrounding plains are, outside the wet season, usually very dry. Because of this, it contains a wide variety of trees and vegetation types that are scarce elsewhere in the park. Huge Pod Mahoganies (after which the loop is named) abound, there are thick groves of Ironwood, as well as Large-fruited Bushwillows, Apple Leaf, Jackal Berry, Marula, Leadwood, Sausage and Nyala trees. The varied vegetation, in turn, brings in a wide variety of habitat-specific birds.

It was a gloomy day, however, and we didn’t get as many birds as we usually do.

We had better luck in the afternoon when we decided to head up to the View Point on the southern side of Thulamila Hill. We passed two Wahlberg’s Eagle nests, along the way, both currently occupied – the one by the pale morph form of the bird. Seemingly unconcerned by the latter’s near proximity, several Red-headed Weavers had built their scruffy twig nests directly below it.

Captain J.J.Coetzer, who was appointed the first ranger at Punda Maria in 1919, after serving in the East African military campaign, originally sighted his camp on the north side of the hill. It was situated under a large tree, which still stands, near a spring. It is now marked by a cairn. Because of the water, it is a good place to stop to look for both animals and birds.

We stopped there. A pair of giraffe browsed on the leaves of a nearby tree, a troop of baboons strode across the bare earth with their gaunt gate and slow, purposeful strides. The younger ones cavorted in the dust. A fork-tailed Drongo suddenly erupted from a nearby bush, in hot pursuit of another, larger bird. It proved to be a Greater-spotted Cuckoo, a bird that likes to lay its eggs in other birds ‘nests– thus escaping the burden of chick-rearing. This parasitic Cuckoo is not uncommon, but, for some reason, I have seen very few, so I was excited to have such a good sighting.

It was getting late when we got to the viewpoint. We were the only ones there. Below us, the mighty landscape spread away in a haze of sand, grass, mopane trees, meandering rivers and sun rays. There was no evidence of habitation, nor any sign of man, only away in the far distance and out of sight because of the thick cloud of acrid smoke from bush fires, the Lebombo Mountains in the east, and the Northern Drakensberg to the west. And the animals, of course, great herds of moving, unhurried, mostly unseen animals, totally at home in this elemental landscape. Their footpaths trellised the countryside.

It is the sort of scene, especially in this late afternoon half-light, I don’t think I could ever tire of, even if I lived to be a hundred. It is what keeps bringing me back to these parts, again and again.

The next day, we decided to try our luck on the scenic Klopperfontein Loop, a meandering road which takes you past scattered granite kopjes and an assortment of vegetation types. The Ivory hunter Dick Klopper used to make camp here, near the dam, which is named after him.

At the dam, a small group of elephant were standing in the parking area, As a precaution, we stopped some way back on the road – elephants are notoriously unpredictable – and waited for them to finish drinking (a precaution, which didn’t stop one over-confident fool in a minivan, packed with children, from overtaking us and parking right next to them. One elephant got very twitchy, but luckily didn’t upend the vehicle.)

Having quenched their thirst, the elephant ambled off, fording a deep gully before vanishing into the trees. We proceeded down to the water’s edge. It was a classic Out of Africa scene.

*Elephants drinking upstream from the dam*.

A Terrapin sunbathed on the back of a snoozing, half-submerged hippo. An enormous, grey-green, slit-eyed, crocodile lay stretched out on the cement wall, grinning evilly, as if relishing the prospect of making a meal of us, evoking an instant, primaeval fear in me. Far less sinister, a solitary Knob-billed Duck paddled past (along with the earnest, endearing White-faced Whistling Duck, they are my favourite wild duck). Upstream, ears alert, a herd of zebra waited their turn to drink. A buffalo snuffled, snorted and swished its tail, as if looking for something to vent its frustration on.

I searched with hopeful eyes for a lion. On a previous visit, we encountered two magnificent males and a female. This time, they eluded us.

Glancing out of my side window, I noticed a Blacksmith Plover had made its nest on a bare, stony patch of ground, where it was now patiently sitting on its eggs under a blazing sun. It seemed a very exposed and idiotic place to lay your eggs, directly on the path the elephants take to the water. The plover appeared unfazed about the possibility she might get squashed flat, regularly turning her eggs over and fussing over the best way to sit on them. Maybe she had confidence that the elephants, who can tread with surprisingly delicate steps for such huge creatures, would see her and do a polite detour.

I still thought she was gambling with her life…

We headed back to Punda Maria. Near the skeleton of an old, rusting windmill, Ken suddenly brought the car to a juddering halt. Two Roan Antelope were standing there. Ken stared at them in real surprise (so did I). There are reputedly only 90 of these shy animals left in Kruger, so this was a rare sighting. Excited, Ken immediately jotted it down on a scruffy sheet of paper to write it up in his extensive note-taking that night.

Saving the best for last, we rose early on Sunday and took the tar road north to Pafuri, which we had passed on our way down. Two major rivers meet here, the Luvuvhu (which almost always has water) and the larger Limpopo (which, in the dry season, often doesn’t). The banks of the Luvuvhu, along which we drove, are dominated by a thin strip of massive Nyala, Jackal berry, Apple Leaf and Ana trees. They crowd together, pressing out over the water to catch the direct and reflected sunlight. Sadly, the intermediate zone of tall acacia woodland and fever trees between them and the mopane veld has been mostly destroyed by flooding and the tree-killing habits of the elephants, which, in many places, has completely altered the character of the bush.

The elephant problem – here, as elsewhere in southern Africa – remains unresolved. Many differing solutions have been proposed, but it seems that reaching a consensus opinion is challenging, even among experts.

As a result of the elephant’s impact on the riverine forest, the prolific birdlife, for which Pafuri is justly famous, is no longer as abundant as it was when I first started visiting the area. The striking but secretive Gorgeous Bush Shrike, for example, whose distinctive “kong-kon-kooit” was such a familiar sound of the dense undergrowth, is now seldom seen or heard.

If you look, though, there is still good stuff to find. The elusive African Finfoot occurs here, as well as the Tropical Boubou and Eastern Nicator. White-crowned Plovers are common. Both Bohms and Mottled Spinetails roost in the numerous baobab trees (for many tribes in Africa, the baobab, being infested with all sorts of nocturnal creatures, such as owls and bats, is a house of spirits. Sadly, the baobabs, too, have been hammered by the elephants).

The beautiful picnic site, on the banks of the Luvuvhu, is an excellent spot for picking up White-browed Robin-Chat, White-throated Robin-Chat, Black-throated Wattled Eye, Retz’s Helmetshrike and various other riverine ‘specials’. While we were cooking brunch in the skottle, we happened to glance up and discovered another, slightly more sinister, denizen of these dense trees – a massive, deadly, Black Mamba, slithering through the lower branches above our heads.

Having its beady eyes fixed on me made it difficult to enjoy my coffee…

On my last visit to Pafuri, I had picked up the solitary Collared Palm Thrush, a rare vagrant from the North, that had taken up temporary residence at Crooks Corner. It was still rumoured to be there, but we couldn’t find it. I have also recorded Green-capped Eremomela in the tall Ana trees growing here.

Crooks Corner, where the two rivers join forces and the borders of three countries (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique) meet, is always a good spot to get out and examine the river for signs of birdlife. On this visit, the sharp-eyed, ever-alert Ken (except for the early mornings when he takes some time to fix his bearings) noticed a small flock of Pratincoles resting on a distant sandbank. Judging by the darkness of their wings, when they flew off, we thought they might be the extremely rare Black-winged Pratincole, which would have yielded me the first lifer of the trip. After further research, we later changed our minds and settled for Collared Pratincole. It is still a good bird to get.

Besides producing arguably the best birding in Kruger, Pafuri houses, next to Mapungubwe, one of South Africa’s most important archaeological sites – Thulamela. Despite its close proximity to the tar road, these ruins were only rediscovered by a trails ranger in the 1980s. As with Mapungubwe, the royal palace was situated on a hill, high above and secluded from the common folk who lived in their thatched dwellings below. Like Mapungubwe, too, it was situated close to the Limpopo, which then served as an important trading route, linking the hinterland to the Indian Ocean coastline. The Nyala Drive actually ends up at the foot of the hill, but you can only climb it with a guide.

Baobab on Nyala Drive. Oil on Canvas by the author.

On my last visit, I had met Dr Tim Forssman, an archaeologist currently re-excavating the site, who, on discovering my interest in the subject, offered to take me up Thulamela Hill. Unfortunately, it clashed with our travel schedule, so I had to decline. I still hope to visit it one day, preferably with him because of his expert knowledge and convivial company.

The next day, we headed south towards our penultimate camp, Shingwedzi. We stopped for a cooked breakfast and to stretch our legs at the Babalala Picnic Site. It is the perfect spot for a leisurely meal, situated under a monumental fig tree which attracts all sorts of fruit-eating birds, including parrots. Ken, a sociable chap, immediately made a friend – a Red-billed Hornbill. I suspected it had ulterior motives. Ken’s fried eggs, mushrooms and bacon.

On the large, grassy vlei that runs past the site, you are more or less guaranteed to see an elephant. This time it harboured yet another surprise – a lone male Roan Antelope, making our total three in three days. Another 87 to go… and two and a half days to find them in. I didn’t fancy the odds enough to bet on it.

There was something distinctly odd about this Roan. At first, I thought it had some sort of weird skin condition because its sides and neck were covered in dark brown blotches. Examining it more closely, through my binoculars, I realised it was a fling (I believe that is the collective noun?) of Oxpeckers. I have never seen so many on a single beast.

Babalala also marks the start (or end) of one of the best drives in the whole of Kruger – the S56 Mphongolo Route. It is, however, one of those drives where you can either see an awful lot of game or nothing at all. On my last trip down it, I had been lucky. It had been a veritable Garden of Eden. Now, our timing was off. The long dry season meant that there was virtually no surface water available to drink, so the animals were few and far between. Likewise, the birds.

By way of compensation, we did have an excellent, close-up sighting of a magisterial Martial Eagle, but the light wasn’t good, so my photos of it were a bit sub-standard.

I took it philosophically. Regular visitors to Kruger soon learn to take the rough with the smooth, the good days with the bad. I was content just to sit back and admire the scenery.

Many dusty hours later, Shingwedzi hove into view.

(to be continued)

GALLERY:

PAINTINGS

Here are a few baobab paintings I did after a previous Pafuri Trip. Sadly, the first one appears to have died in the interim (elephants?):

A Tale of Two Rivers. Part Two – The Limpopo

May 18, 2019 / stidyatkusane / 2 Comments

My love affair with the Limpopo began relatively late in life.

Although it forms the southern boundary of the country I grew up in, until I moved to South Africa in 1984, my sole acquaintance with the river had been crossing over it at the Beit Bridge border post.

In the back of my mind, though, I always had this strange feeling that it was waiting for me, beckoning me, and that I was duty bound to answer its call.

And so I did.

All rivers have their own personalities and the Limpopo is no exception. In his “Just So” stories, Rudyard Kipling famously characterised it as the “great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees”.

It is an apt description. There is something rather wild and romantic about the Limpopo; it is both a purveyor of adventure and a river which seems to have its origins in the realms of legend and folk lore.

Even the name sounds made up.

Approximately 1600 kilometres long, it flows in a huge arc after leaving its headwaters in the Krokodil (Crocodile) River in the Witwatersrand. Skirting the edges of the Kalahari it passes through some of the driest, least populated areas in South Africa before making a dog leg in to Mozambique and then disgorging itself in to the ocean near the port town of Xai Xai.

In its own way, it is the embodiment of both the sheer size and the mystery of Africa. The sky above it is huge, the horizon stretches out forever. Travelling towards that horizon you are always conscious of the distance between it and you.

Despite being the second largest river in Africa – next to the Zambezi – that flows in to the Indian Ocean, for a substantial part of the year it contains very little actual water. In dry years its upper reaches flow for 40 days or less.

This can change very rapidly. The one time I visited, a heavy rain storm somewhere up near its source had seduced the river in to breaking loose. Standing on the bank the raging torrent whooshed past us, the colour of caramel, swirling around rocks and eddying over tree roots.

It was a brute demonstration that the Limpopo was not to be messed with when aroused. The next day it had dwindled back to almost nothing…

For my first foray up to the drier western section of the river, I arranged to stay at Ratho, a large agricultural estate, just upstream from the Pontdrift Border Post with Botswana, which has camping facilities on its banks.

To get there you travel north from Jo’burg on the N1, branching off at Polokwane and heading towards Vivo. Beyond this tiny settlement, the road runs through open, rather lonely country. About 100 kilometres further on you reach the oddly named Alldays, a straggling, dusty town only a few streets deep from front to back.

Here you veer left.

As the horribly pot-holed road drops down to the border post at Pontdrift, a change suddenly takes place: at this point of its long journey to the sea, the Limpopo opens in to an immense valley hemmed in by sandstone cliffs, mesas and buttes that glow as if they were red hot. In places they have been honeycombed by erosion and blackened by fires. Out of the sides of the cliffs and the rocky outcrops grow fig trees with long, trailing, ghost-white roots. These are Large-leaved Rock Figs or Ficus abutilifolia.

There is something both wonderful and tantalising about this strange, eroded scenery.

There was no water flowing in the river when we arrived at Ratho although, on our walk the next day, we did find a long, rather greasy-looking pool further upstream, concealed in a grove of tall, thorn trees. There was something a little scarifying about this shadowy section of the river.

I found myself wondering what dangers lurked beneath its placid surface. It looked like the sort of place where an elephant could have easily got his trunk, courtesy of an enormous crocodile.

There was plenty of evidence of elephant being about as well, which also made me a bit nervous…

Back in camp, dangerously untroubled by doubts, my birding colleague decided to take advantage of this absence of a liquid barrier in front of us and sallied forth across the dry river bed, disappearing in to foreign territory. More circumspect by nature, I declined to join him.

In the end I was rather glad he didn’t get trampled on by an elephant or eaten by a lion or carted off in irons because if he hadn’t made it back safely he would not have been able to find me the elusive Pel’s Fishing Owl, that evening. We heard it before we saw it, a strange, pig-like grunt which was then followed by a deep, booming ‘hoo-huuuum‘. Grabbing his binoculars and powerful spotlight my birding colleague eventually located it sitting in a tall thorn tree.

It was a bird I had long wanted to tick off my “Lifer” list. What made it all the more exciting was that we hadn’t needed a guide to find it for us which is usually the case with this bird, which Roberts describes as: “Vulnerable… largely confined to to protected areas, threatened by disturbance…” We were also lucky to find it because we were on the western-most extreme of its range.

From Ratho, we returned to the main tar road and then struck eastwards towards one of South Africa’s most important Stone Age archaeological sites – Mapungubwe.

I have a tenuous family link with this area. Somewhere between Pontdrift and Mapugubwe a bunch of my ancestors forded the Limpopo on the 1892 Moodie Trek to Gazaland. In the diary she kept of the journey, my great-grandmother, Sarah Susannah Nesbitt, describes the river as being “very rough and stormy” and says they crossed at a point called “Selika’s Wegdraii” (this could possibly be the old crossing which is today known as “Rhodes’ Drift”).

Every night they heard lion, sometimes close by, sometimes further off across the river. The sound sent chills through my great-grandmother because she had her two infant daughters (who included my grandmother, Josephine) with her and was worried for their safety as they lay there in their wagon.

This was not their only concern. Having crossed the river the trek-party found themselves faced with another problem when they got delayed at Macloutsie, in Bechuanand (now Botswana), by an outbreak of foot and mouth disease with many of their animals becoming so weak they fell easy prey to hyena.

Travel was a lot more difficult in those days.

Mapungubwe is one of those places I find myself drawn to like a pin to a magnet. Once a thriving city and important trade centre with links as far afield as China, India and Egypt, it was abandoned in the 14^th Century for reasons largely unknown.

There is still a rather eerie feel to it. This is a place of secrets and questions…

Mapungubwe. A strangely puckered landscape…

Driving through its strangely puckered landscape, I found myself wondering why its original inhabitants had chosen to settle here. It seemed to me this wasn’t a country to live in at all with the heat and the desolation but – who know? – maybe the climate was different back then?

It is good country for birds, however, including yet more varieties of owl. At night you can regularly hear Wood Owl, Pearl-spotted Owl and African Scops Owl. Pel’s occurs here too although I haven’t seen it.

On the one occasion, driving out from camp, just before dark, we hadn’t got very far when we spotted a Giant Eagle Owl squatting on the ground, next to an old termite mound. It was so close I felt I could lean out and touch it. Perhaps suspecting I might actually attempt something so impertinent the huge bird suddenly rose in the air and flapped off to a nearby tree.

In the half light of the forest it sat and regarded us from this perch. Relaxed, enormous, extraordinary with formidable talons, curved black beak, deep, luminous, saucer- like eyes and finely barred grey overalls it seemed quite unconcerned by our presence.

Every now and again it would blink at us, like a camera shutter going off, and tilt its head sideways as if trying to get a better angle to observe us from. Or maybe it was just sizing up my birding colleague as a potential meal.

It was difficult to tell.

Watching it, I could not help but reflect on what a marvellously well adapted creature it was. Shaped by millions of years of evolution everything about it is tuned to hunt and kill at night. In the dark it can see with precision things which for you and I are just a generalised blur.

Perhaps because it is such harsh and difficult country, the park is always a scene of restless, unremitting activity devoted to the purpose of staying alive. There is always something to see.

The Maroutswa Pan in the Western section of the Park is usually well worth a visit as there are invariably herds of animals and flocks of birds coming down to drink, especially in the dry season.

One of my special memories of the pan, is returning at dusk as the sun was touching the leaves of the tall Lala palms in the rectangular-shaped clearing nearby and golden sheets of silken light came pouring down. It was an extraordinarily beautiful scene.

Lala Palms. Western section, Mapungubwe.

The Eastern section is more broken country but is also full of scurrying, browsing and fluttering life. From a raised walkway that leads through the canopy you can view the river in both directions. There are usually elephant here. It is also a good place to get Meyer’s Parrot and Broad-billed Roller too.

A kilometre or so downstream from here there is hill top view point which once served as an old SANDF army base during Apartheid day because of the immense view it gave over the surrounding bush.

It has become a place of pilgrimage for me. It is here, at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, that the borders of the three countries – Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa – that have played such a pivotal role in shaping my life converge.

Confluence of Shashe and Limpopo rivers.

It is difficult to exaggerate the wild, romantic beauty of this spot with its great baobabs and fig trees growing out of a chaos of rocks. Standing on the edge of the cliff face I sometimes feel like I have been magicked into some parallel world. This is the ancient Africa of myth which the old writers and cartographers had heard about but weren’t too certain how to depict in their books and their maps.

From Mapungubwe the Limpopo continues its long, leisurely loop along the border with Zimbabwe before crossing in to Mozambique at Pafuri. When I do this route I normally stop off at the town Musina to stock up with provisions.

The quickest way to get from Musina to Pafuri is probably to take the tar road that goes via the hot springs at Tschipise – but by using this route you miss out on seeing the Limpopo so we usually go on the old SANDF dirt road that runs alongside where the old minefield once was. In the past we have seen taxis parked here, picking up the Zimbabwean refugees fleeing across the river.

The Limpopo, east of Musina. View from old SANDF dirt road.

The road is in fairly good condition although, on the one trip, my birding colleague did manage to crack his car’s sump. Somehow we managed to get back to the tar and then limp all the to Tschipise without the engine seizing. At the local garage we gummed up the leak with soap and topped up the oil. That got us back to Musina where we were obliged to stay over while it got repaired.

Musina is an armpit of a place and not somewhere I would normally choose to stop for a night’s sleep on account of its perspiring proximity to the Limpopo river. It is definitely not the sort of town you want to get stuck in for any length of time especially in summer.

Apparently not everyone agrees with me. The copper mine which provided it with its reason for being might have closed but it is still a bustling, clamorous hub full of all the usual transients who ebb and flow around border towns – in this case mostly Zimbabweans come down to shop or escape that country’s collapsing economy and hoping to find employment in South Africa (the bush mechanic who fixed our car was one such refugee).

We checked in to a hotel on the main road. Towering cumulonimbus clouds were massing all around us and it looked like we were about to be inundated as fractious gusts of rain kept splattering against the windows of my room. The storm surge held back, however, as if it had had a sudden rethink, and then veered off to the West.

It had been a long day. Neither the sweltering heat, the music from the nearby bar nor the constant rumbling of trucks along the Great North Road, could disturb me. I fell instantly asleep.

Next morning, the car repaired, we resumed our journey along the Limpopo to Kruger.

Covering a huge swathe of the country Kruger is undoubtedly South Africa’s best known and most visited game park. Although most people are attracted by its animals – which includes the Big Five – it is also a Mecca for birders with over 500 recoded species.

One of the most popular of its birding spots, Pafuri, benefits from its proximity to the Mocambique coast and the Limpopo river that acts as a migration corridor to birds normally found further east and north. It was here, that I obtained my first sighting of the elusive Bohm’s Spinetail, a localised and uncommon species that favours riparian forest and is usually linked to baobab trees which this area has in abundance.

It is also where I saw my first Ayres Hawk Eagle, perched in a massive Jackalberry tree alongside the Luvuvhu River.

To get to Crooks Corner, another place I get a little sentimental about because it demarcates the meeting point of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, you drive along the muddy Luvuvhu River, a tributary of the Limpopo. In the foreground the riverbank rises two to three metres and is capped by a flat plain whose edges are packed dense with tall Nyala, Jackalberry, Ana and Fever trees. Behind them, stretching away forever lies a sea of Mopani trees.

Luvuvhu river from bridge. Elephant below

I like to stop for lunch at the picnic site on the Luvuvhu where the sunlight is subdued and dappled by the trees, and the place is alive with birds.

Crook’s Corner – which is where the Luvuvhu (strangely enough I have never seen this river without water) and Limpopo meet – is another spot where it would be quite easy to slip across the border by just strolling over the often dry, river. In fact, this is how it actually got its odd moniker – because in the early days fugitives from the law used to do just that.

Crooks’ Corner, looking upstream. Dry season.
Crooks’ Corner, looking upstream. After rain.
Crooks’ Corner. Looking downstream. Normal flow.
Crooks’ Corner, looking downstream. After rain.

Here is another odd fact about it: in July 1950 a Zambezi Shark (Carcharinus lucas) was caught at the confluence of the Luvuvhu and Limpopo, hundreds of miles from the sea. Why it had decided to swim so far inland is a mystery.

Maybe, like me, it just responded to the river’s call…

More Paintings of Baobabs

March 30, 2019 / stidyatkusane / 14 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed I have a thing about baobabs.

Here are a few reasons why: I am awed by their size and the way they dominate the surrounding countryside and tower above all the other trees. I love the drama – all those tentacle-like branches spreading out laterally, as if they want to pluck passing birds from the sky.

I admire their tenacity, the fact that they thrive in the most harsh and arid of conditions. I am impressed by the huge age they can reach.

There is something very ancient and wise and holy about them. They seem to speak of the Old Way. They stir the spirit and the eye.

Baobabs are also very much part of my inheritance. Although some people might be surprised to hear this– the ones who associate Nyanga with mountains and bracing cool weather and therefore no baobabs – our old family farm, Nyangui, in Nyanga North, was littered with them.

Baobab with Nyangui mountain in backgound. Picture courtesy of Patrick Stidolph.

You passed by a whole grove when you drove through the farm gate. There were baobabs on the top of koppies and among the ancient ruins and there were baobabs growing in the middle of the old lands. My brother, Paul, sited his house next to one.

There was a baobab, across the river, which my brother, Pete, and I carved our initials in to when we were still schoolboys – hoping that, in centuries to come, some explorer would stumble upon them and wonder who we were? It was a wasted stab at immortality. When I went back to the old farm, many years later, the baobab had collapsed and died.

Since then, baobabs have continued to act as signposts in my life. One of my favourite stopping places in Zimbabwe is the lay-by you come to as you descend the Zambezi escarpment from Makuti to Chirundu (and Mana Pools). It has become a little ritual of mine – alas, not one I have done for years – to always pull over here and have a beer.

From this perfect vantage point you have a magnificent view over the valley floor, stretching in to the blueness of distance with the hills of Zambia simmering in the heat haze on the horizon. In the mid-ground you can glimpse the glittering blue waters of the great river, snaking its way eastwards towards the Indian Ocean.

And no matter in which direction you gaze you will see baobabs poking up above the sunken contours of the far-reaching landscape.

As you continue driving down the escarpment, the heat comes up to meet you. You can smell it as well as feel it: a dry, punching, smell of dust and jessie bush and mopani leaves and elephant dung. And baobabs.

Makuti to Chirundu road with Zambezi escarpment in background.

Even now, thousands of kilometres away, sitting on top of my hill in the Karkloof, I still get misty-eyed when I recall that view.

Moving to South Africa I was able to renew my love affair with baobabs when I started going on my birding trips to the Limpopo valley.

North Kruger was where I first rekindled the romance. As you drive down from Punda Maria towards Pafuri, the terrain begins to break up in to a series of steep sided ridges which a have a tumbled, frenzied look, as if somebody had stirred them up in a giant pot and then left the contents to dry out under the baking sun. And dotted all over them are baobabs.

Undoubtedly, the most famous of these is the one that sits on top of Baobab Hill. This iconic tree served as a landmark on the early trade routes going through the area. Pioneer hunters used it as part of the famous “Ivory Trail” (some of them leaving their names carved on the tree). Between 1919 and 1927 it became the first overnight stopover for black workers recruited from Mozambique to work on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand.

Mapungubwe, another preferred haunt of mine, has its fair share of baobabs too. Like old, petrified giants, they seems to anchor an immense sea of plain and bush and broken red koppies that falls away to the Limpopo river.

It is almost like a homecoming to be driving among them.

My paintings, then, are my way of attempting to pay tribute to and glorify these most monumental of trees. I want them to be a celebration of the baobabs heroic scale.

Obviously I take certain artistic liberties. I often tweak them a bit, highlighting and simplifying features. Sometimes I move the baobabs position in the landscape, bringing them closer to, say, a hill I fancy to create a better sense of balance. I lob off odd branches so my canvas doesn’t look too cluttered or become mired in detail. I play around with light and colour in the hope of capturing a particular moment or mood.

I try and encapsulate the loneliness, the wildness and the spirit of the primeval world in which they have existed since time began, a world in which man is still very much the intruder.

In doing this, I know I can never pay full justice to these magnificent trees although I hope I do manage to convey something of my admiration and my awe.

Disdainful in their own majesty, serene in the mellow certainty that comes to the very old they are the very symbol and essence of a remote, half-mythical strangeness.

Mana Pools Road, Zimbabwe.
Baobabs, Mapungubwe.
Baobabs, Pafuri.
Baobab, Pafuri.
Baobabs, Pafuri.
Baobab, Pafuri.
Road to Crook’s Corner.
Baobab, Shimuwini.

The Trouble With Elephants

January 20, 2019 / stidyatkusane / 4 Comments

I am not a man who deliberately courts disaster or intentionally goes looking for bad experiences. By the same token, I am not such a fool as to think the odd mishap won’t occasionally befall me. And when you go travelling with my birding partner, Ken, rotten luck does have a habit of following you around.

For example: on a recent trip to Marakele National Park we found ourselves being chased down a narrow, twisting mountain pass by a very angry elephant who clearly resented our presence in his private domain. Luckily – I have a feeling some benevolent deity saw fit to intervene – we survived that harrowing encounter. What I did not realise was that more trouble with elephants lay ahead…

From Marakele we had followed a circuitous route that took us to Blouberg Nature Reserve and then cut east along the base of the Soutpansberg range to Punda Maria in North Kruger. We planned to camp the night here and then press on to Pafuri the next day, where we hoped to get in some good birding.

Up until now the weather had been kindly – more spring than summer and I had even found myself wearing a jacket in the evenings and early mornings. In Kruger, however, the hot weather we had been expecting all along, finally caught up with us, with the temperature soaring up to 39 degrees. The air around us was heavy and listless and steamy, almost tropical, perhaps hardly surprising since we had crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn some days before.

Eager to be off I was up early the next day although I had to first wait for Ken to complete his complicated early-morning-ablution rituals. Once he was done with that, we set off northwards through the familiar vastness of flat grassland and mopane trees. On the way we stopped to allow the biggest herd of elephants I have ever seen cross the road. Shortly afterwards we were forced to repeat this exercise for an even bigger herd of buffalo.

The common bird in this neck of the woods – or at least the most vocal – is the Rattling Cisticola. There seemed to be one trilling its silly head off on top of virtually every second tree we passed.

Rattling Cisticola – listening for elephant?

As you you draw close to Pafuri, the terrain starts to break up and rearrange itself and you are suddenly confronted by the arresting sight of Baobab Hill with its commanding views over the Limpopo Valley. In the early days this iconic hill served as both a landmark and sleepover point for the ox-wagons travelling up from Mozambique.

By the time we got to Pafuri the sun was high and blazing. There had obviously been no rain here this season and the grass was pale and dry although the trees had mostly come out in leaf.

At the crossroads we turned left down the Nyala Drive which takes you in to some wonderfully hilly country before taking a lazy loop back to the main road. Ken likes this less-used drive because, he says, it often throws up unexpected surprises.

There wasn’t much on offing this time around besides the usual suspects – Meves’s Starlings, Arrow-marked Babblers, White-fronted Bee-eaters and Emerald-spotted Wood- Dove. We passed a solitary elephant but he paid us no mind.

On the top of the small, baobab-clad hillock, directly above where the road swings back is the Thulamela archaeological site, a restored Zimbabwe-type ruin. Unfortunately you can only go up with a guide and because of our tight schedule we did not have time for that.

From the Nyala Drive we crossed back over the main tar road and followed the dirt track that takes you to Crooks Corner, where the brown waters of the Luvuvhu collide with the blue of the Limpopo. The combination of water, sun and rich alluvial soils has led to a proliferation of vegetation along the rivers’ banks so that you drive through a glittering tunnel of Sycamore Figs, Nyala trees, Jackal Berry, Ana and Fever trees.

Crooks’ Corner, where you can get out of your cars, marks the border between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In the early 1900s this, remotest of places, gained its moniker and dodgy reputation with gun-runners, fugitives and others on the run from the law using it as a safe haven because it was easy to hop across the border whenever the police from one country approached.

Distinctly there was a sense of a frontier on that lazy meandering river although I don’t think the solitary Saddle-bill Stork, fishing in its waters gave a fig where the international boundary lay or as to who held sovereignty over the country he was standing in.

Normally, it feels like you can’t get much further away from civilization than here but we had chosen a busy weekend to visit so it was like a major thoroughfare with a steady stream of traffic passing through. Many of the visitors didn’t even bother to wind down their windows or get out of their luxury 4 X 4s because it would mean switching off their air-conditioners. They just drove in, stopped, glanced around and drove out again, leaving me to wonder why they had bothered to come all this way…

Needless to say Ken – who, contrarily, makes it a rule to ALWAYS switch off his air-conditioner when he enters a park because he likes to experience Africa in all its extremes – and I did get out.

Rich plant life invariably means rich animal and bird life and Pafuri is no exception. In the past the storied riverine forest has provided both of us with some good sightings. It was here I saw my first Gorgeous Bush Shrike, Bohm’s Spinetail and Ayre’s Hawk Eagle. I have also recorded Lesser Jacana, Green-capped Eremomela, Hooded Vulture, Tropical Boubou and the palm-dwelling Lemon-breasted Canary. This time, we could hear both the Gorgeous Bush Shrike and a melodious White-browed Robin-Chat calling from the depth of a nearby thicket but could not entice either of them out. Instead we had to make do with a bunch of waders and a noisy party of Trumpeter Hornbills.

It was now well past lunch time so we doubled back to the Pafuri picnic site on the edge of the Luvuvhu. Feeling somewhat dehydrated, I was desperate for an ice-cold coke but had to wait patiently in queue behind an American who was explaining to the bemused coke seller-cum bird guide – who, I suspect, knew the answer but was too polite to say so – what a turkey is (“It’s a big black bird with a red head”).

At this juncture of its journey the Luvuvhu is always a ruddy brown colour such as might be achieved by mixing cans of tomato soup with cans of chicken soup. There was an enormous crocodile lying directly opposite us not, as one would expect, by the waters edge but high up on the bank under some trees. I had a feeling some unsuspecting animal was in for a nasty surprise.

On the way back to Punda Maria, we took the short-cut via Klopperfontein dam, another place which can throw up some unexpected treats even though the area around the dam has been grazed as smooth as a billiard board. Sure enough, we were rewarded with a wonderful sighting of a Painted Snipe snooping around in the shallows of the nearby stream.

It was getting on for late afternoon by now. Ken consulted Emily, his prissy, admonishing, Satnav, and worked out how far we had to go and what time we had to do it in. What neither factored in to their calculations was our old nemesis, the elephant.

The first one, which we encountered just after Klopperfontein, kept us waiting for ages, while it feasted on the side of the road, before moving off in to the surrounding bush. A little later we passed him siphoning water by the trunk load out of the top of a reservoir.

Siphonining water near Klopperfontein Dam.

We ran in to the second one on the home stretch with the hills around Punda Maria in plain sight. Although this bull appeared much more amiable then the one who had chased us down the mountain in Marakele he had obviously decided he held all the rights to this road.

The whole thing quickly degenerated in to a stage farce. We kept reversing and reversing and he kept trundling on towards us. I suspect he was headed for his evening sundowner at the same reservoir where the other elephant was sloshing water around.

One of us had to blink and we did so first. Muttering angrily to ourselves about the beast’s poor road etiquette, we turned around and headed back to the tar and took the much longer route home to Punda Maria.

In Kruger, as in other parks, you are not supposed to arrive in camp after dark, which we now did, finding the gate locked on us. Fortunately, the guard was still at his post but Ken had to use all his silky skills as a sports writer and commentator to try to convince him it wasn’t really our fault. I am not sure he bought our explanation but he let us through without imposing a fine.

So we drove in to camp feeling like a pair of naughty schoolboys who had just been caught bunking. But we were not done yet. We arrived to a scene of utter devastation – in our absence a troop of baboons had ransacked the place, flattening my tent, breaking its poles and ripping gaping holes in the fly-sheet (even though there was nothing inside but my bedding and clothes), as well as scattering our possessions far and wide

To tell you the truth I was getting seriously tired of this. I had just bought the tent to replace the one that got ripped by monkeys in Mapungubwe on my last trip which, in turn, I had bought to replace the one that had suffered a similar fate when I attended a wedding in De Hoop Nature Reserve in the Western Cape. At the rate I was getting through tents it would have been cheaper to have just booked in to a luxury lodge!

I am not sure what one does about this menace. The problem is both monkeys and baboons have become habituated to both human beings and human beings’ food.

We did discover afterwards that there was supposed to be a guard on duty to stop these opportunistic raids but, even though the camp site was virtually booked out, he had decided to take the Sunday off…

I was still sulking about my poor tent the next morning when we drove out of the gate, destination Mapungubwe. There to wish us on our way was the scruffiest Ground Hornbill I have ever seen. It flew up in to a tree from where it regarded us quizzically through its girlishly-long eyelashes.

The scruffiest looking Ground Hornbill I ever saw…

For some reason the sight of that lugubrious bird, peering around its branch cheered me up no end. It made me realise that on the Richter Scale of Travel Disasters we had got off relatively lightly compared to what other great explorers, like David Livingstone or Scott’s Antarctic expedition, had been forced to endure…

Stidy's Eye

The artwork and writings of award-winning cartoonist, Anthony Stidolph

Pafuri

Storm Clouds over Pafuri

A Tale of Two Rivers. Part Two – The Limpopo

More Paintings of Baobabs

The Trouble With Elephants