MW Mobile Blog

For friends, family and the random search engine visitor. This blog started as an experiment in mobile blogging from my Palm TREO 600, 700, Prē, HTC Evo, Samsung 5, Pixel 3, Pixel 6 Pro. Now it serves as a simple repository of favorite activities. Expect bad golf, good fishing, great sailing, eating, drinking, adventure travel, occasional politics and anything else I find interesting along the way including, but not limited to, any of the labels listed here...

Thursday, September 28, 1995

Africa Journal - Tracking with Petros


Thursday, September 28, 1995


Tracking with Petros
I am awakened during the night by the sounds of the hippos. At night they come ashore to feed. When one bellows, others answer in chorus. They sound like they are directly outside the door of the houseboat. I am losing sleep, but can’t stop smiling.


At 5:30 AM we are off on a game walk with Petros. He is a professional guide, certified the same year as Iona. On the trail of a breeding herd of elephants, ws have another close encounter. Despite the massive amount of water represented by Lake Kariba, the drought is still very much in evidence. We walk through a bone dry valley that was the original site of Water Wilderness. There is a wood structure in a tree that used to be an observation deck in the middle of a bay. I don’t think you can even see the lake from it now.We hear that if the lake drops another two meters, the hydroelectric power plant will be forced to shut down.

A Photo from the book "Spirit of the Zambezi" showing the original Water Wilderness, and the same site today.

After breakfast we bid adieu to Peter and Jane, who are heading home. For a few hours we have the resort to ourselves as Petros heads out to get more guests and supplies. We wile away the mid-day hours by paddling in the canoe and watching wildlife from the deck. On the deck, I smoke a Montecristo #4, and watch two plovers try to drive off a Fish Eagle perched in the highest branch of a nearby tree. I want to fish, but Petros could produce no bait.


Petros returns with Adrian and Cecily, newlyweds from the UK. They look exhausted but are game for combination boat drive and walk. Back in the speedboat, we find more hippos, and hike up a hill where we find leopard tracks, but no leopard.


The hill overlooks the valley we walked through that morning. It is filled with game, mostly antelope and waterbucks. Sigrid then launches into the definitive photographic study of a Lake Kariba sunset.


Two rolls of film and two gin and tonics later, it is almost completely dark. Daniel somehow makes his way back through the maze of drowned trees to the houseboat in the dark.
=================

NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: This is a back-post / cross-post from my first on-line journal/blogging effort - a journal of our Southern Africa Tour in 1995. Originally posted to an abandoned domain (NetSnake.com), the term "blog" had not yet entered the parlance. I am migrating the original posts to this blog. Links to the original journal Date Index or Africa Tour Home Page will likely eventually disappear. The images from the original post were graphics and screen caps from video which I am leaving in it's low-rez glory for historical integrity. My intent is to also add some of Sigrid's higher quality scanned photos to these blog back-posts.  The difference in images should be obvious.

No comments: