Author: Hoffman

  You can listen to the voice recording, or rear through the text below. Enjoy!   Lion sign! The spoor from their soft pads was difficult to spot in the grass and litter, but the droppings told the story. This mere trace, more than a day old, grabbed our attention. Somewhere here, perhaps close, was the absolute predator of the African bush. We were in the presence of brutal strength that is singularly focused on its own survival – without question or compassion. The mere possibility of confronting lions in the wild when you are on foot and exposed,...

You can listen to the voice recording, or read through the text below. Enjoy!   I was not expecting them in such dense bush, but there they were – a small herd of zebra in a grassy clearing. They were unaware of me and completely at ease. Some were leisurely grazing, others stood dreaming with cocked hind leg, one or two were lying down. None jerked up a head to nervously scout around, or paused to test the breeze with wide nostrils. It made sense. I had not spotted any lion sign in the area nor heard any roaring...

I felt I could not do justice to the richness of this piece in a narrative, so I would ask that you rather read through it. Enjoy! The sun is setting and the fire is happily murmuring to itself. Jan-Martin, my companion on this expedition, is fiddling together something for dinner. I should write up my diary.  Soon it will be dark and the evening will take its own course, which I won’t want to interfere with.  Now is the best time to record the day. But I just sit and gaze out over the darkening valley below and...

You can read through the text below, or listen to the recording.   The late morning sun had a sting to it. A break is what I needed. I turned off the game path to a splash of shade around the trunk of a camel thorn.  I had been following the path for about two hours. It was well-trodden, but there were very few tracks, or any fresh sign of life on it. Game paths are a good source of bush information, but I was beginning to lose faith in this one. More accurately, I was beginning to lose...

You can listen to the voice recording, or read through the narrative below Most of us walk past trees so regularly that we hardly notice them. Out in the African savannah, they are so abundant that it can easily blunt the senses and the spirit of even the most ardent arborist. But, if we care to pay attention, trees, in life or in death, invariably make all but the most callous among us, want to gush “beautiful, pleasing, charming, soothing, elegant, impressive, sad, quaint,” and the like. In their natural environment trees are truly magnificent. On the African savannah...

You can either listen to the voice recording, or read the text below. Enjoy! Finding a camping spot and preparing a camp to overnight in reasonable comfort and safety is a daily challenge in the wilderness. It starts with finding a suitable spot to make camp – towards late afternoon; not too early, so that it shortens the day by too much, yet in time to have the essential things done before dark. Juggling these two is every afternoon’s bit of stress. Sometimes, one gets lucky, like this time. I had been driving through an unfriendly landscape with growth-stunted...

You can listen to the voice recording, or read through the texgt below:     I stopped the vehicle just behind the crest of the ancient dune’s gentle rise and climbed onto the roof with my binoculars. I was still some three hundred metres from the pan. It stretched away to a heat-blurred trace of trees on its far end, about two kilometres away. There was something liberating in gazing out over such a vast stretch of space after three days of breaking through dense Kalahari scrubland, where the view was restricted to between a few meters and some...

Here is a voice recording, or you can read through the text below. Our civilisation-programmed minds seem to feel most comfortable with some regularity, or at least a reasonably predictable pattern to our day. But, when one is totally exposed to the wilderness, like on an extended foot excursion, it is mostly circumstances, sometimes led by mere curiosity, sometimes by brutal dictate, that determine the course of a day. Fixed routine is usually an illusion. I have learnt to be flexible, to abandon any plans that may have been contemplated, to a change in situation. I do tend to...

You can listen to the voice recording, or read the text below.   We had been noticing fresh hartebeest, gemsbok and wildebeest sign since early morning, but we were in quite dense blackthorn and hookthorn country, and not expecting to actually see something. There were lion and leopard spoor too, and African ungulates, especially where they have to contend with predators (including the human kind), are extremely alert, and their senses are far more acute than ours. But then, there he was. He had already seen us when I spotted him through the blackthorn tangle – we had been...

You can listen to the voice recording, or read the text below: Sometimes things go wrong. In the wilderness, a lot can. Sometimes it merely means some inconvenience, or a bit of strain, but it could be life-threatening. I have often been aware of having survived a near miss – on more than one occasion, I am sure,  been blissfully unaware of one. Yes, the wilderness can be generous and forgiving… and then, it can be merciless. Often things that go wrong, or could have, are the consequence of one’s own omissions, oversights, bad planning, negligence and the like...