Tracks and vehicles

It’s raining gently as I write this but up to today we’ve had a dry spell of several weeks which has allowed us to reach some of the places that have been inaccessible by road for several months.

Last week we went to Bumboosie South to check on the solar pump. The road is terrible when it is wet so nobody has been out there for a while and we found the pump not working (but easily fixed we hope). Most of the journey was bumpy but otherwise not too bad, except at the Bumboosie River where the road had been carried away completely and we had to find an alternative route.  Two other recent journeys have been similar – bumpy but passable except at the rivers. Going out to Tshakabika Hot Spring the Lukosi River was a challenge and near Kwizizi the Kanyoni River has completely destroyed the road.

             

The Lukosi – passable but not good for                    The Kanyoni - not passable however good

 the nerves                                                                  your nerves

  Most of the roads that haven’t been used for a while have fallen trees across them in places. Sometimes only a nuisance and easy to move…….

But sometimes a bit more difficult…….

Many places are damaged by rain…..

And many are overgrown……

   Our Toyota Land Cruiser is old but it’s a great workhorse and with the superb South African off-road tyres we fitted at the start of the rains it goes almost anywhere. If we were to have a problem we always have radio contact with Sinamatella to call for help. Each year however we find intrepid tourists, who have none of these advantages, far off the tourist roads following tracks that they have downloaded onto their GPS from the internet. Often they have ignored both “road closed’ signs and plain common sense and tackled awkward river crossings, rocky slopes and barely visible tracks to get a bit of an adventure. That’s great if they get back to camp safely but not so great if they get two punctures but only have one spare wheel or damage their suspension on a rock or get stuck in a sandy river bed or……..the possibilities are endless and all finish up with Parks having to make expensive, time consuming and annoying search and rescue missions. All GPS units should come with a warning along the lines of “Using a GPS does not allow you to stop using your brain!”

    And now, while I’m writing about roads and vehicles, and having praised our Toyota, here’s another vehicle worthy of praise……

    This is our own car, a 1961, short wheel-base, left-hand drive Land Rover. We’ve owned it for over 30 years and it no doubt has an interesting history prior to us buying it in Bulawayo as it came here from what was then Zaire, now DRC. It has died and been brought back to life so many times we call it Lazarus but the letters in the registration plate say it all. ABV stands for Africa’s Best Vehicle

Tracks and vehicles

It’s raining gently as I write this but up to today we’ve had a dry spell of several weeks which has allowed us to reach some of the places that have been inaccessible by road for several months.

Last week we went to Bumboosie South to check on the solar pump. The road is terrible when it is wet so nobody has been out there for a while and we found the pump not working (but easily fixed we hope). Most of the journey was bumpy but otherwise not too bad, except at the Bumboosie River where the road had been carried away completely and we had to find an alternative route.  Two other recent journeys have been similar – bumpy but passable except at the rivers. Going out to Tshakabika Hot Spring the Lukosi River was a challenge and near Kwizizi the Kanyoni River has completely destroyed the road.

             

The Lukosi – passable but not good for                    The Kanyoni - not passable however good

 the nerves                                                                  your nerves

  Most of the roads that haven’t been used for a while have fallen trees across them in places. Sometimes only a nuisance and easy to move…….

But sometimes a bit more difficult…….

Many places are damaged by rain…..

And many are overgrown……

   Our Toyota Land Cruiser is old but it’s a great workhorse and with the superb South African off-road tyres we fitted at the start of the rains it goes almost anywhere. If we were to have a problem we always have radio contact with Sinamatella to call for help. Each year however we find intrepid tourists, who have none of these advantages, far off the tourist roads following tracks that they have downloaded onto their GPS from the internet. Often they have ignored both “road closed’ signs and plain common sense and tackled awkward river crossings, rocky slopes and barely visible tracks to get a bit of an adventure. That’s great if they get back to camp safely but not so great if they get two punctures but only have one spare wheel or damage their suspension on a rock or get stuck in a sandy river bed or……..the possibilities are endless and all finish up with Parks having to make expensive, time consuming and annoying search and rescue missions. All GPS units should come with a warning along the lines of “Using a GPS does not allow you to stop using your brain!”

    And now, while I’m writing about roads and vehicles, and having praised our Toyota, here’s another vehicle worthy of praise……

    This is our own car, a 1961, short wheel-base, left-hand drive Land Rover. We’ve owned it for over 30 years and it no doubt has an interesting history prior to us buying it in Bulawayo as it came here from what was then Zaire, now DRC. It has died and been brought back to life so many times we call it Lazarus but the letters in the registration plate say it all. ABV stands for Africa’s Best Vehicle

Upgrading Masuma

   I often mention Masuma on this blog. It is a small dam, about 40km from Sinamatella on the road to Main Camp and during the dry season water is pumped into the dam from a borehole in the Kapula Vlei. There is no natural water nearby in a normal year so in spite of the fact that the water in Masuma often becomes an unappetizing, stinking soup of mud and dung and the surrounding area becomes a dustbowl, it attracts enormous numbers of animals and must amongst the best game viewing venues in the region. In the rainy season it is very different. There are few visitors - human or animal - the water is comparatively clean and the dam is surrounded by grass.

    This year, the Parks Authority has been taking advantage of the off-season to upgrade the facilities at Masuma. Makomo Resources, who mine coal just outside the Deka Safari Area, has taken a special interest in Masuma and arranged for the viewing platform to be re-thatched…..

And they are also building new picnic shelters…….

Sue noticed Masked Weavers making their own shelters in the tree just above where the human thatcher was working……..

 During the  last dry season Makomo deepened the dam by excavating tons of mud. The hippo are grateful……

Unfortunately the passage of heavy excavators across the dam wall led to some damage and we were afraid at one stage that the wall might be breached. To hold back the water until the dry season comes and it is possible to get machinery in place again, we shored up the wall with sand-bags and earth. Mr Mafa and I carefully studied the problem…….

But we very sensibly let some of the younger people do the heavy work…….

   We soon realised that the job was a lot bigger than we had expected and I don’t think our repair work would hold up to very heavy pressure but the rainy season is almost over and we hope it will be good enough for now.

    Sue and I have a new camera and while we were working on the dam wall, Sue practised her photography. Some scenery…….

    Some close-ups such as this startling caterpillar (its head is to the right)……

Some birds………

       

Cattle Egret  

    Tawny-flanked Prinia enjoying the long grass in front of the hide.

And of course some of those things that I don’t even notice until Sue points a lens at them…..

Fissures and lichens on Mopane bark.

We left Masuma before the sun went down, spoiling Sue’s chance of testing the new camera’s ability with sunsets and of adding to our bulging file of sunset and sunrise photos. No matter, we woke next morning to a beautiful sunrise at Sinamatella, with mist gathered along the river and the camera was duly tested – with great success I think………

 

Bhejane Trust

    Back in 2008 when we started trying to set up the project here at Sinamatella, we were working under the name DART – Dete Animal Rescue Trust. We did this with the full support of the originator of DART, Paul de Montille, who had emigrated to Australia and was no longer able to run the organisation himself.  In 2012 Paul returned from Australia for the dry season and took the running of the organisation back into his own hands, working out of Umtshibi, close to Main Camp. In October Paul asked Planete-Urgence, the French agency whose volunteers we have worked with since 2009, to stop sending volunteers to us at Sinamatella and confine their operations to Umtshibi. The Planete-Urgence volunteers have played a major part in the success of the Sinamatella Parks assistance project and we were sorry to lose them. 

     When our link with DART was broken, we set up a new Trust and began new negotiations with Planete-Urgence to run volunteer ‘missions’ for them at Sinamatella and at the Zambezi National Park close to Victoria Falls. After months of painstaking planning, it now seems that Planete-Urgence will once again be working with us in 2013, ‘us’ in this case being our new organisation, the Bhejane Trust. Bhejane is the Ndebele word for Black Rhino. The Trust is legally registered in Zimbabwe and has three trustees – myself, Trevor Lane from Victoria Falls and well-known safari operator David Carson whose camp “Camp Hwange” opened successfully at Shumba in Hwange National Park last year.

     Sue and I will continue to live and work at Sinamatella so long as the Parks Authority finds our presence useful and Trevor will continue to work with the Authority at Zambezi.

Visitors

We still don’t have completely reliable internet access. According to our service provider…. “The satellite has a major power problem, which needs a service visit in orbit – and that mission is not planned till end of year” It must be an interesting job being a satellite technician! For now we are able to do more or less everything we need with the connection as it is and we will apparently be moved to a new satellite in the near future.

   Back at ground level, recent weeks have seen a few visitors reaching us here at Sinamatella. First were Nicholas Duncan and Nia Carras of the SAVE African Rhino Foundation. It would be no exaggeration to say that without SAVE we wouldn’t be here and Sinamatella would be a very different place. Amongst other things, two of the station’s vehicles were donated by SAVE who also pay the driver of one of them and when rangers go out on patrol many of the packs, GPS, radios and even clothes they use were donated by SAVE. We are very grateful for their support.

Nicholas Duncan

     As you might expect, not all of our visitors are human. A pair of squirrels has taken to coming into the house to search for food. After losing oranges, bread, breakfast cereal and jam to them we have quickly become used to not leaving anything edible lying around. Squirrels are very cute and, at first when they started coming in and just exploring we had equally cute names for them. Not so any longer I’m afraid.

 

Cyril the squirrel, a.k.a. @!!*?>*@!

   We don’t often get animals (apart from insects) coming into the house by night. In the past we’ve been visited occasionally by snakes, regularly by frogs and sometimes by bats, one of which came in last week. Having come in through the open door to the verandah it couldn’t find a way back out and spent a long time hanging in the corner of the room until Sue eventually chased it away. I am very far from being a bat expert but I think this is an Egyptian Slit-faced Bat (Nycteris thebaica)

  

     Many of the houses at Sinamatella, ours included, have bats living in the roof and at dusk streams of them fly out and head off across the edge of the hill to feed. We have only once seen a bat hawk here taking advantage of this food source. Presumably the few houses in the camp don’t support enough bats to keep a pair of bat hawks in food throughout the year and the ones we saw were just passing through

    There are very few tourists at this time of year so the hyenas and honey badgers that regularly wake us as they tip over the dustbin in the tourist season have got out of that habit. They haven’t gone completely though and Sue photographed this neat hyena footprint near the house last week………

    Returning to human visitors for a moment, Thor Thorsson, an experienced traveller and conservationist recently spent a week with us. He was also here two years ago and it was nice to see him back again.

    It seems there are not many parts of Africa, and indeed of the World, that Thor hasn’t visited at one time or another so he has a wealth of experience to pass on.  From here he travels to Zambia for a while then he will return to Sweden for the summer. We wish him a pleasant journey.