SA Diversity Tour (24-26/03/2014) Day 68-70 Augrabies National Park

This park is situated in the northern region, close to the border of Namibia. The camp is on the plateau high above the falls themselves with reception, restaurant and shop in the main building with wonderful viewing platforms over the falls.

 

Seeing the 56m waterfall in full flood was an exceptional experience. No wonder the Khoi people called it ‘Aukoerebis’, or place of Great Noise.

This is part of the Orange River and the gorge through which it flows is 18kn in length.

 The landscape is very rocky and arid but if you love walking/hiking, there are three wonderful trails to take, each a different length. Then again, as there are no animals in the park which can harm you, strike out on your own just don’t get lost!

The region seems barren except for the eye catching sentinels which are Quiver Trees

but on closer inspection, there is a whole host of wonderful flowering plants and shrub with thousands of beautiful butterflies and insects.

At the Falls themselves, you find the Augrabies Flat Lizard which is endemic there.

On a drive, many animals are to be seen such as Klipspringer, Hyrax, Giraffe, Tortoise and a host of buck species.

 Some of the highlights along the way are: Moon Rock, Swart Rante, Echo Corner, Oranjekom and Ararat viewpoints.

Along the way, you are sure to see various species of lizards which all survive in this harsh climate.

Vegetation may be scarce but you are sure to see many species of Euphorbia’s and the Shepherd’s Tree which has many uses and medicinal properties.

Hole-in-the-Wall - Eastern Cape

This is one of the most stunning places I have been to and lies in an almost spoilt region in the northern part of the Eastern Cape at the mouth of the Mpako River. If you are looking for tranquillity, great hikes and lazing in the sun on the beach, this is the place to go.

Asking a local tour guide, a young man of about 20, what the old people say formed the Hole-in-the-wall he said “They say there was something like a tsunami in the river and a lot of things were brought down by this and made the mountain disappear so it could get to the sea.” :)

 Another legend says it refers to a young maiden who fell in love with one of the mythical ‘sea people’. Such was the love of this sea person for the maiden that he and his people rammed a hole in the side of a lagoon wall with the help of a huge fish so they could reach her; she was never heard from again.

The whole region is one of high hills with forests in the ravines with the Umdoni tree forming a large part of the vegetation. This tree has very edible berries and the local people love to eat them.

You can spend the whole day (or three) walking along the fantastic coastline. Everywhere you turn, the vista is spectacular.

The Hole-in-the-Wall is an archway carved out of the sandstone by wave action. The tour guide tells me that you can walk almost up to the cave during low tide and at high tide on clam days, people swim out and climb to the top of the rocks and jump into the sea – an activity NOT recommended as people have lost their lives doing this.

In one area a deep cliff has been cut into the rocks and with the waves hitting the walls, make a spectacular scene for photography.

The beaches are safe for swimming so bring lots of suntan lotion if visiting in summer. The weather in the region is fairly mild in winter so can be visited then too.

 Having extolled the beauty of the place, I must add that this is not an easy place to get to for anyone, let alone overseas tourists

Going south about 40km from Umtata, there is a turnoff to Coffee Bay. Although the first 70km is tarred, it takes at least 2 hours to get there as the road is very twisty and your average speed is slow. Besides this, there are no fences in that area so the roads are filled with goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, horses and donkeys which you have to watch out for. The last 10km to Coffee Bay is gravel and besides some road works going on there, not bad. From the Bay, it is another 9km to the Hole-in-the-wall and this is a very bad stretch. An ordinary car will struggle with the uphills on this unpaved road as there are at times large rocks and fissures which is impossible to get through unless you have a 4x4. Once there though, one’s jaw drops at the sheer beauty of it all.

There are a few places to stay at: 2 backpackers, a small resort with hotel and a B&B, some places catered and others accommodation only so they cater for all budgets. Prices are reasonable at all of these. The hotel has a small shop where one can buy the odd refreshment and a shop of sort selling necessary items such as coffee, sugar, bread etc but one must take your own food if not being catered for at your accommodation.

Cradle of Humankind SA - Part 4

We humans are relatively recent arrivals on Earth. But our ancestors have been here for millions of years.

Our ancestors are called “hominids”. The oldest hominid discovered so far is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, from Chad, which is about 7-million years old. This fossil has been nicknamed “Toumai” in the local Goran language. There are also several very old species that have been discovered in Kenya and Ethiopia.
While the exact shape of the human family tree is something scientists are still debating, the one thing that they mostly agree on is that humankind was born here in Africa.

In the Cradle of Humankind, about 1,000 hominid fossils have been discovered, spanning several million years.

The oldest hominid fossils from the Cradle are more than 3-million years old and belong to the genus Australopithecus. There were many species or types of Australopithecus, which lived in Eastern and Southern Africa.

“Mrs Ples”, the famous fossil of a skull of an Australopithecus africanus, was discovered at the Sterkfontein Caves by palaeontologists Dr Robert Broom and John Robinson in 1947. “Mrs Ples” is about 2.1-million years old. In 1997, palaeontologist Professor Ron Clarke and his assistants Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe, discovered the full skeleton of an Australopithecus inside the Sterkfontein Caves, encased in breccia, a type of rock. This skeleton, called “Little Foot”, is still being excavated.

Note: There is a big controversy going on concerning Mrs. Ples. They now believe that it should actually be Mr. Ples as the hip and eyebrow structure give indications of this.

After Australopithecus came the genus Homo, to which we humans, Homo sapiens, belong. The earliest named Homo species is Homo habilis or “handy man”, which researchers believe made the first stone tools. Homo habilis emerged about 2-million years ago. After Homo habilis came, among others, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis and Homo Sapiens – us.

These species lived in different parts of the world. Not all Homo species were direct ancestors of humans.

The human family tree has many branches, several of which broke off as species became extinct.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged only about 200,000 years ago. While older species of Homo, such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, lived in Asia and Europe mostly, scientists believe that modern humans, like our most distant ancestors such as Toumai and the australopithecines, evolved here in Africa.

The oldest fossil evidence for modern humans discovered so far comes from Ethiopia and South Africa.

I do apologize for the quality of these photographs again as everything is behind glass and extremely difficult to photograph.

SA Diversity Tour (18-21/03/2014) Day 62-65

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park

We were very excited about going to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and left Upington very early to make the 3 hour drive there. I had not been there for about 20 years and remembered it as a terrific place to be. At the time of making the booking, we could only get camping at Twee Rivieren but when we arrived, we were told there is place at Mata Mata and we gladly changed some of our first days for it. 

 

 

What a huge disappointment!! According to their website, most of the roads are said to be accessible to vehicles like mine but they were so bad that we had to drive not more than 20km/ph and so bumpy, it took us hours to get there. About the only thing we saw along the way was a lion laying hidden by some bushes, a few Gemsbok and some Wildebeest.

 Mata Mata itself is totally run down although it looks like they are building a new ablution block. They had some rain there a week before we arrived and when we went to ask, were told their grader was not working and they did not know when they would fix the roads again. Typical darn government owned place!!

We once again changed our bookings for Twee Rivieren as the roads there had not been as bad as further north. SO the next morning, back down we went!! After three very bad days where we were basically restricted to going only to the first watering hole about 5kms away, we went to ask them if they could change our booking to some other camp such as Augrabies, Addo or Mountain Zebra as it did not us much good not being able to go anywhere. We were not very politely told that they could not and that if we wanted to leave, we would lose the money we had paid for the other 4 days we were going to stay!! When I questioned the conditions of the roads and mentioned that it said vehicles like mine could go on them, I was told that their website now said 4x4 vehicles only!! Even the people there WITH 4x4’s were complaining!! So my advice is: DO NOT GO TO KGALAGADI!!

The only thing worth seeing at Mata Mata was the Yellow Mongoose digging for food in the camping area. The rest of the area was a total waste of time!

 

SA Diversity Tour (16-17/03/2014) Day 60-61

 Prieska - Uppington

Leaving Mountain Zebra and going to Upington on our way to Khalagadi Transfrontier Park, we passed through the small town of Prieska and found this beautiful miniature prickly pear along the road. As beautiful as it looks, it is unfortunately and invasive species.

We stayed for two days at the caravan park in Upington trying to catch up on our computer work and the first night had a very dramatic sunset.

It was nice to just laze around for a while and got to do the shopping for food we needed to take with us to Kgalagadi where there are no nearby shops.

Cradle of Humankind SA - Part 3

These were behind glass and I had to use the camera's flash - please excuse the glare of it in the photographs.
Our world was born in a ball of burning gas 4.6-billion years ago, in a universe that is about 14-billion years old. Over time it cooled, the early atmosphere formed, and the first land masses appeared.

The first life forms, which were like the black algae you sometimes see in swimming pools today, emerged about 3.8-billion years ago.

The history of life on Earth has been rocked by five major extinctions. The last great extinction was 65-million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out, probably after a giant meteor slammed into the Earth off the coast of Mexico, and set off volcanic eruptions all over the world, changing the global climate. Today, some scientists say we are in the midst of the sixth major extinction – and its cause is us.

We know about species which have populated our Earth before us by studying fossils. Fossils are the remains of plants or animals which have been turned into stone over a long period of time in a process known as “mineralisation”.

Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, was one of the first people to express a theory of evolution – the idea that species change over time, as they adapt to changing environments.