A storm at Mandavu

On Saturday as we were approaching Mandavu Dam from Masuma even the most inept weather prophet could see that rain was inevitable…

    By the time we reached Mandavu, rain was visible in the distance and the wind was starting to blow strongly……

Within minutes the rain started……

And our view was quickly obscured……

But within half an hour the rain had stopped and we drove to the top end of the dam to see if the Mandavu River was flowing. The dry dam-bed had changed from desert to swamp in a matter of minutes…..

  And the rivers were bringing new water into the dam….

    We had a similar experience the following day when rainfall upstream brought the Sinamatella River down in flood.

    Suddenly water and green leaves are everywhere and the harsh sights of the dry season are replaced by the soft colours of the wet….

The road towards our house at Sinamatella

And of course, with clouds in the sky there is more scope for Sue to add to our huge collection of sunrise and sunset photos!

Sunrise at Sinamatella.

Some recent trips

Our trips away from Sinamatella in recent weeks have spanned (we hope) the start of the rainy season. Just before the rain we took some of the children from Sinamatella School into the Park to see the animals close up. Living at Sinamatella they are surrounded by animals but rarely get to see them except from the top of the hill where the camp is situated. They were a bit shy at first – no big smiles for the camera!

Grade 7 2012, Sinamatella School.

We headed out to Masuma and were lucky to see lions just after we left the camp, then later a big herd of buffalo. At Masuma we found a scene of devastation. The ‘scooping’ of the dam had come to a temporary halt with heaps of drying mud still piled up around the edges. In the dam, just in front of the viewing point, an elephant lay dying in the shallows, large numbers of thirsty elephants were jostling noisily for water at the trough. A dead buffalo lay behind them, swelling horribly in the sun and at the back of the dam another elephant had collapsed and was barely alive.

An elephant dies in the water at Masuma

At the trough.

    The smallest elephant in the second photo above had a large wound on the side of its trunk through which water leaked whenever it tried to drink. It was forced to take many small sips but the bigger elephants allowed it to stay at the trough for a long time without bullying it. The wound was pink and clean and will probably heal.

    With two dying elephants and a dead buffalo close to the viewing point we arranged to return the next day to “clear up”. The buffalo was easy and we soon towed him away to what is becoming a large graveyard well beyond the dam.

    One of the elephants was dead and also soon towed away but the other was still just alive and had to be finished off first – not at all a pleasant way to spend the morning.

    Much better was a trip out to Inyantue from which we have just returned. The Inyantue area has had at least two quite good rain showers so far and is, to our eyes anyway, luxuriantly green. The river hasn’t flowed yet…….

Inyantue River

   In the Mopane woodlands we found the flowers of the ‘fire lily’ Scadoxus multiflorus……

    And grass seeds sprouting between the dead Mopane leaves…..

  Unfortunately we didn’t find what we were looking for – rhino. None has been seen in this area for several years but we had hoped that maybe one or two were there, unknown. It seems not.

    The main Bulawayo to Victoria Falls railway runs close to where we camped. Long ago the lines took a different route and Sue was struck by the contrast in the monumental style of a bridge for the old line…..

Remains of the old bridge at the Makwara River

And the functional crossing of the new line a few hundred meters down stream.

  In the past the Inyantue area has been the scene of a great deal of activity both for the railway and for mining. Out in the hills while we were walking, we found numerous prospecting trenches and a few old claim markers, the oldest still legible dating back to 1966. Presumably whatever the miners were looking for wasn’t there in sufficient quantities as there are no active mines and everything is back to being wild, overgrown and used only by the animals …..

    If only the rhino population could bounce back as easily as the bush does.

First rain, first power failure

     For most parts of Zimbabwe, especially urban areas, power cuts are a daily occurrence. Here at Sinamatella we are lucky that our electricity is connected via the town of Hwange which supplies a great deal of Zimbabwe’s home-produced power so we don’t often get cut off. In the rainy season however, things change. The power lines out to Sinamatella run on an old-fashioned series of wooden poles, often located on high ground and very vulnerable to lightning strike. When that happens we can be without electricity for several days while we wait for the fault to be located along the approximately 40km of cables. We had our first big thunder storm of the season on Saturday morning and, within minutes of the first clap of thunder waking us just before dawn, the electricity went down and stayed that way until now, three and a half days later.

     We saw the first distant lightning way out past Shumba towards the South on Friday night and Sue’s reflexes proved to be up to the task of pressing the camera shutter quick enough to get a photo.

    All ‘our’ elephants had left us to feed wherever it was that some rain fell a few weeks ago but had returned, presumably when the pools of water they were relying on there dried up. By Friday evening there were around fifty elephants at the Sinamatella River but they must have seen the distant lighning as well as we had, and were gone again by the morning. We haven’t seen a single one since.

    The storm took the whole night to reach us and wasn’t especially violent when it arrived. There were a few minutes of heavy rain followed by a couple of hours of steadier fall. Unfortunately the rain coincided with changeover day for anti-poaching patrols and the outgoing patrols had to set off from Sinamatella in dismal weather. My first drop-off points were in the northern sector as usual. Sue stayed at home to avoid taking up space inside the car where one of  the Rangers could otherwise keep dry so the “official photographer’ wasn’t there to record our mud-splattered journey or the slightly unnerving (but very slow) ninety degree skid that left us up to the axles in mud and temporarily broadside across the road near Chawato.

    Back from the northern sector in late afternoon I set off for distant Gubombiri, away to the South-west. I remembered to take the camera but not far from Sinamatella in that direction we found there had been no rain and there were no dramatic “stuck in the mud” photos to be taken. We met a small group of lions that had killed a buffalo close to the road so I did make some use of the camera.

 

   These are part of the pride whose dominant males are known as Jose, Patron and (to us at least) The Third Man. The young male in the photo will presumably soon be chased away by the ruling coalition to live a nomadic life until he can get a territory of his own.

    Returning from Gubombiri I heard a radio call from the driver of the Parks Land Cruiser that he was stuck in mud on the road to Bumboosie South so next I headed out that way. It is a bad road just after rain and I made it worse by missing a ‘detour’ in the dark and heading up a deep, muddy gully that had once been part of the road. We got through, as much by luck as skill, towed the Parks Cruiser to safety, delivered the rangers for their patrol at Bumboosie South and finally reached home close to midnight. With no electricity we sat on the veranda to eat a belated dinner by the light of our old-fashioned but bright paraffin lamp. The light attracted a mass of beetles and newly hatched ‘flying ants’ and Sue made good use of the camera again with these fascinating photos of them….

 

Sharing the veranda with all these insects is interesting for a while but eventually we get fed up with beetles down our necks, moths between the pages of whatever we try to read and seemingly every winged insect in Sinamatella trying to get into our food so we have to reluctantly turn out the light and go in the house.