“I knew you were there all the time…”

A zebra blew through its nostrils. It was faint, and not an alarm sound, just a casual snort. But I instinctively froze and checked the wind. There was a slight breeze, in my favour. I could not see anything, only make out muted snapping and rustling of foliage, and hoof stomping as they tried to rid themselves of the biting flies. It had to be quite a herd. They were moving through the thickets towards me, grazing as they went. They were getting close. I could hear the swishing of their bushy tails and the ripping as they plucked...

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The Morning Walk

The morning walk is a spontaneous thing. It has no set time of beginning or end, no specific place or direction. It carries no obligation, no demand, only impulse. It is an exploration and it happens at a pace that allows for observation and wondering (and wonderment). The time and the place for the morning walk comes with arrival in the bush. But arrival is not (only) the event of finally finding myself physically located in the bush. It is much more. Arrival is a slow process of changing awareness – actually, “process” leaves the wrong impression. The latter...

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The Rhythm of the Nomads

As we journeyed northwards, the bare salt flats of the pans gradually became patched with ever bigger islands of stiff salt grass, until they merged into continuous grass plains. On the horizon, palm trees quivered in the mirage, like fine fur in the breeze. And here, there were zebra and wildebeest, some in little clusters, some in quite sizeable herds. They were restless, these last stragglers of the migrations from the Chobe area to the north, and the Okavango to the west.  The salt grass of the flats, for which they had come here months ago was now cropped...

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The Sorcery of Desolation

For the whole day, Gaia remained withdrawn into endless flats of marbled white that hazed into pale blue, then soared overhead in azure to merge, again, into marbled white.  It was such a vast and unchanging space that it made me feel like a single grain of the salty dust, forever trapped in one place, save for the whims of the winds. The endless nothingness made space and time lose all meaning. Disorientation began to gnaw at my mind. There were no vehicle tracks, no sign of any life, nothing by which to trace progress. Just, emptiness. Was I...

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The Outer Edge of the Civilised Universe

At its outer edges, civilisation thins out to an eclectic mix of almost coincidental encounters. A winding trail, half overgrown by weeds, with a single bicycle track along one rut. It breaks out into an unexpected opening where a lone man nurses a pump that coughs water into a shallow trough. A few cattle approach through the trees to come and drink. They are small and hardy and half feral, and they stop when they see me and stand warily on the edge of the clearing. I am able to communicate with the attendant; a mixture of Zulu and...

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Extraordinary Ordinary

The day was blustery and hued in smudged greys and charcoals and muttered greens. A brief hint of yellow flickered through the screen of trees to my left. I stopped and half crouched behind a young apple leaf tree. It was a lone young female giraffe. I kept dead still, but the moment she rounded the tree, she spotted me. Perhaps it was the tiny sound of the mobile camera. She froze and stood, staring at me intently, neck craned, ears intensely pricked. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing. I was downwind from her so she couldn’t smell...

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Clogged Grass Screens and Elephant Paths

Just a kilometre or so back that I had to stop to clean it. Now, again. But I had no choice. Overheating the engine would quite simply be fatal. The midday savannah was flaming hot – probably over 40 oC – and the hard work of breaking through the bush in the loose sand quickly sent the temperature dial to the dreaded red area as the grass screens got clogged. My irritation slowly built up. The double screens – one of about 2mm size at the front grille, and another, of about 1mm behind it – were doing their...

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Waiting for the Storm

Towards afternoon the sky marbled with clouds, ripped by titanic winds from a sullen mass on the northern horizon. Around me, gusts tugged angrily at shrubs and trees. It looked like rain; serious rain, sometime during the coming dark hours. It was lion country and I should have a fire, and I did gather a pile of wood, but lighting it seemed pointless. So I stretched the tarpaulin and secured it as best I could, and readied another to pull over the load bin. Come bed time, I would sling the hammock lengthwise, close to the apex, and hopefully...

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Musings on a boisterous teenager

The sun had slipped behind the treetops. There was about an hour or so of light left to prepare for the night. Four bull elephants lumbered past, heading back along the game path from the water hole just over the rise. They were a hundred or so paces away and they seemed quite clear on where they were going and paying no attention to me and my camp fiddling; me, intent on my preparations, gave their nodding silhouettes no more than the occasional interested glance – that is, until a youngster of about fifteen or so broke away and...

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Overnighting in the Middle World

Reaching the wild hinterlands from the South African heartland is an undertaking of anything between two to five days. The first day or so is usually like the average citizen of the civilised world would expect a road trip to be. But then, as one penetrates deeper into the Middle World the journey takes on a special character. The driving itself is the same, although navigating the roads and tracks requires submission to torture by vehicle (and of course to the vehicle), resilience and often quite some skill. The facilities and services however, such as finding petrol, or overnight...

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