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.