Day 13, August 6: Mana Pools National Park

Day 26, August 19: Cape Town

 A much better day. Sue at the Grovesvenor hotel cooked us a delicious breakfast, and then we walked across the Simon's Town cemetery to the Boulders Beach penguin reserve. And penguins there were a plenty. One was waddling around the entrance booth. Others were walking around the reserve, making huge amounts of noise, and posing photogenically. 

They were completely comfortable with humans, and even with my 75 -300 mm lens I could take really close shots.

They showed very convincingly why they were once called jackass penguins.

Some were actually in the water, fishing.

Delightful little birds. Other lifers: Kelp Gulls...

...a Karoo Privia...

and, not new, but a nice shot of a Helmeted Guineafowl, in the front garden of a house adjacent to the cemetery. .

Day 24, August 17: Victoria Falls

 We woke at 5 a.m., only to discover the power was out. We struggled with flashlights and eventually I went downstairs to see if I could get outside. All the exterior doors were locked; we were imprisoned. I tried the key they'd given us, but it didn't open the doors. 

At around 5:30 a.m., the owners turned up. They struggled for about 10 minutes with the front door, eventually managed to get the lock to cooperate, and then turned on the generator, much too late  to provide hot water for a shower, but at least making coffee possible. I told Her Highness that locking people into a building was a feature of a prison, not a lodge. She argued she had shown me how to unlock the front door (she hadn't, and in any case the key didn't turn when I tried it). I told her I adamantly refused to be locked in for another night, and would sleep out on the deck if necessary. She said go ahead', but I noticed after we returned from our safari drive all the locks had been freshly oiled, and turned smoothly, and there was a key in one of the doors. The squeaky wheel quite literally got the oil this time.  

The real problem, of course, was the antiquated locks, which had no option to lock the outside while allowing exit from the inside. I am sure these violate all sorts of safety regulations -- locking people into a building has a long and terrible history -- but who knows in the corrupt state of Zimbabwe?

The madame of the house insisted that power outages are rare in Victoria Falls. Apparently the corruptocrats spare VF because it's a tourist Mecca. However, this is the weekend of the international SADC summit, and local theory is they choked off the power to VF to keep it on in Harare and con the local dictators of neighboring countries into thinking that Zimbabwe has a functioning electric grid. 

Anyway, the safari drive was surprisingly good, probably because we changed plans on the fly and drove down a long grassy valley and not through the miambo. Some critters, photos taken with my 75 - 300 mm lens because I broke the UV filter on my 200-800 mm and can't get it off in a lodge room...

Spotted hyena

Southern yellow billed hyena

Blue waxbill

Natal spurfowl.

Dinner, at Dusty Roads, was OK. They were pushing native township cuisine, which features spiced meat stews and rather crunchy, tart green kale-like stuff -- not bad at all. Oh, and caterpillars, which I refused. Talked to the maitresse-d, who extolled the virtues of the previous white hegemony and the ineptitude and corruption of black rule. Honestly can't say she's wrong about the latter, though I suspect Ian Smith's crowd were not quite as beneficent as she claims. But Zimbabwe can't go on like this, with an exploding population, massive unemployment and crumbling infrastructure. Harare probably has a population of 2.5 million, but no one knows. Newcomers won't admit they live there, because they needed permission from the gummint to migrate in from rural provinces and didn't have it. 

A country with incessant sunshine should be able to manage solar power. 

Day 19, August 12: Aberfoyle Lodge, Honde Valley

 A day from Hell. It started OK; we checked out of Seldomseen Lodge, only slightly singed by the charge for wine, and birded the Mambo for a couple of hours...A black-headed oriole...

A crowned hornbill

....and the ever popular Retz's helmetshrike.

...fortified afterward by some bacon-and-egg sandwiches ken and Sue had obligingly made.Then we headed north for Mutarazi falls, which Frank had visited 10 years previously. They are supposedly the second-highest in Africa. Beyond Mutes, the road through the pine plantations was heavily rutted dirt, and it took over an hour-an-a-half to get to the entrance...

Where we discover the entire place had changed. In 2019 they built a zipline and a skywalk (rope-bridge) over the falls. The gummint wanted $50 to cross the skywalk (special high price for international visitors!). We asked to walk out the 500 m to the view point, but all we could see was a small stream coursing over boulders and disappearing over the edge of the mountain. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, since I expected very little, and had already characterized this is Frank's lamest idea yet. Frank eagerly encouraged us to try the second viewpoint, a mere 800 m hike away. I resoundingly refused.  So Marjorie and I chugged down some vodka and soda concoction, Zimbabwe priced at $2 each, and then clambered back into the bus, The drivers discovered the real entrance, used by the Zimbabwean hordes. Just as rutted, but significantly shorter. 

It was nearly dark when we drove through the tea-plantations to Aberfoyle Lodge, a rather beautiful hotel founded, it turns out, by an Irishman, Bill Igoe. Bill had to sell out in the 1970s and then part of the property was a grabbed by Mugabe's goons. But the hotel, now under the management of a British company, survived, and is being managed by Ken and Sue's daughter and her English husband.

Day 11, August 4: Harare

We decided we'd exhausted the possibilities of South Luangwa National Park, so we lazed around the lodge on a birding free morning, desultorily viewing the local geckos.

We drove to the airport about 10 a.m., and then flew to Harare, changed planes and continued via Emirates to Harare. Zimbabwean immigration, despite looking like a Chinese fire drill, moved us through in only a little over an hour, and we boarded a bus to take us to York Lodge, a walled enclave in an affluent suburban neighborhood in Harare. 

The bus driver was scathing about Zimbabwe's political leadership, and pointed out that all the roads between the airport and various hotels had been redone in preparation for the summit of the Southern African Development Council, in a week's time; but the rest of the roads are potholed crap. His biggest beef, though, was that the government had sold all sorts of mining and development rights to China, in return for a spanking new parliament building, which does nothing for the average Zimbabwean. And the average Zimbabwean is pretty darn poor. All the power was out, and that includes traffic lights. Apparently Zimbabwe has two power sources: Kariba dam, which is at low capacity because of the drought, and an ancient decrepit coal-burning power station. Too bad they didn't ask the Chinese for a power station rather than a parliament building. 

The lodge itself was quite delightful, and is self-sufficient via solar power.  The gardens...

Day 7, July 31: Lusaka

Today we're supposed to drive back to Lusaka, except one (privileged) member of our party had a fit because we hadn't seen a roan antelope. Marjorie and I were damned if we were going off on a wild antelope chase, and we were tired anyway, so we hung around the lodge, where I got nice pictures of a collared sunbird and arrow-marked babblers. 

When they returned, roan antelope still unobserved, amazingly, we still weren't ready to drive back to Lusaka. Instead, we drove back across the Kafue river, in the wrong direction, still looking for the roan antelope, which we (of course) didn't find. Did Her Highness ask if the rest of us wanted to do this? Did she ask if any of us cared any more than slightly about the roan antelope? Of course not. We were only her paying clients.

I did get a picture of warthogs, a cute picture, though I say so myself.

And spur-winged geese.

And a brown snake eagle.

And a wattled crane on her nest.

But still, it was after noon before we finally set off. The road was hazy from woodsmoke, which had me coughing like a consumptive. We stopped at the usual gas-station, hung around desultorily and aimlessly eating potato chips, and then back on the road. 

By the time we hit the outskirts of Lusaka, about 5 pm, the traffic was heavy, but not impassable. How unexpected! So our genius guide, who apparently hates city traffic, decided to route around it. Way around it. He turned a 45 minute direct route into a 3 hour by-pass, not avoiding traffic at all, of course, just making sure we endured a lot more of it, on crappier roads, in the dark. Since I had the GPS open, I gave our van a somewhat incredulous running commentary on this folly. One of the nastier members of the group, I'll call here Anna Bolix,  said I was 'mansplaining'. She was very attached to our guide. I pointed out that the driver is a man, the guide is a man, so it's hardly mansplaining. Just geography-splaining. 

Got into Wild-Dogs Camp after dark, at 8 pm. What a wasted day!

Day 6, July 30: Kafue National Park

Up before sunrise, so it was the usual minimal birder breakfast. Then we board the boat, crossed the Kafue River, and mounted a Land Rover for another journey into the park interior (green track marks the first leg).

A little brisk (11 C); whoever thought Africa was hot?  Still, once the sun was up, the birds were pretty good. 

Crested Barbet: the Birds of Southern Africa verdict seems a little harsh.

[O]ne cannot help thinking a large measure of humour went into the making of this bird.

Also, an African Green Pigeon...

And a very sleepy Bateleur, obscured.

...and a Racket Tailed Roller...

just to confirm this really is a racket tailed roller, here's his weird tail.

The cute chinspot batis

A sulphur-treated bushshrike, taking off.

And the lizard buzzard.

A brown-crowned tchagra

Red-necked spur fowl.

An emerald-spotted wood-dove

A pair of brown-hooded kingfishers

The African fish-eagle, as magnificent as the American bald-eagle, and with equally disreputable lifestyle.

Some grey go-away birds, which are exciting on first observation, and pretty soon ho-hum.

A rattling cisticola.

Marabou storks.

The African wattled lapwing.

Egyptian geese.

The beautiful, and uncommon, Böhm's bee-eater.

By now, we had hit the river. A striated heron, fishing.

A pied kingfisher, also fishing...

Overhead, a white backed vulture.

On the ground, a southern puku.

Oh yeah, there are elephants. Elephants everywhere.

The beautiful African barred owlet

An African pipit, not as pretty, unless you're a pipit. 

Yellow-billed oxpeckers, taking a break from eating ticks off buffalo backs.

Lichtenstein's hartebeest.

We hit the Shishamba river, and so water birds appear. The somewhat ridiculous-looking saddlebill stork.

A capped wheatear, curiously ubiquitous. We saw them in both Lusaka and Harare airports.

And wattled cranes, who were unaware they were being stalked by a leopard.

The leopard we noticed mainly because a troop of baboons nearby was going ape-shit (heh heh). He was being very surreptitious, moving down an arroyo towards the river, staying out of sight. He'd apparently set his sights on the cranes, which were in the river proper.

I think we eventually startled the cranes, and so the leopard went hungry.

After our feline excitement, we stopped at a baobab tree, ending the first leg of our drive across the park.

The second leg mostly followed the Shishamba, towards Treetop Camp.

An ashy flycatcher.

The irresistibly ugly marabou stork.

A hamerkop!

...and near them, a variable mud turtle.

An Egyptian goose.

The magnificent martial eagle.

And a greater kudu.

Eventually we made it to Treetops camp, a small but very beautiful camp right on the river. We lunched by the river, watching a Goliath heron and various other waterbirds, and checked out the camp, which hs sleeping quarters on a raised platform overlooking a stretch of Savanah.