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 Prinia...

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 16, August 9: Seldomseen Lodge

We birded York Lodge at 7 a.m. and saw pied crows, miombo and variable sunbirds, turacos, African green dove and red-eyed dove, palm swift. Others saw white barbet, but I didn't.

pied crows

African green pigeon

arrow-marked babbler

We left for the Highlands about 9 a.m. The Highlands really aren't highlands at all; they're where the Zimbabwe plateau descends towards the Mozambique lowlands, in a series of valleys and small mountain ranges.

 It was a long, boring slow drive along the R5. At about 100 km, we stopped at something called the Halfway House, and saw house sparrows, Southern black tits, and weavers. There were also some very old and interesting steam tractors, built some time after 1914, and shipped laboriously via ship to Cape Town, and then on land up to what was then Southern Rhodesia. 

spectacled weaver

southern black tit

Also, eastern miombo sunbird

We lunched about 2 p.m. just north of the town of Mutare. By this time I was thoroughly sick of York Lodge's sandwiches -- they had made about four times too many. However, wandering around the tiny park,  I saw a Southern hyliota, which made up for the sandwiches and the stray dogs roaming the picnic location.

Mutare itself was a busy little town. We were delayed about 30 minutes because FunGuy, our navigator, had to stop and pick up Pepsi and food, something he could have done earlier. Then he directed the driver to take a wrong turn, and so we didn't get into Seldomseen Lodge until 3:30 pm. Our lodging, in a little detached cottage called Twinsprings, had a bit of a climb up to the main lodge, but in compensation we had a lot of privacy. The cottage itself was spartan, cold, with no dried coffee. But I cured the cold by lighting a fire.

An evening bird walk near the lodge, and through Ken (our host's) shrub nursery. We heard Roberts' warbler and the orange ground thrush, a highland specialty.

Also, variable sunbird

flat-tailed drongo

white-eared barbet

Day 15, August 8: Harare

We did a little birding on the way to the airstrip.

Common sandpiper

Black-threated wattle-eye, in the branches. Really!

A great egret and saddlebill  stork

Blacksmith plover

Rufous-bellied heron

Egyptian geese

African yellow white-eyes

Red-billed fire finch

Common slender mongoose

Wire-tailed swallow

Double-banded sandgrouse

three-banded plover

cape buffaloes

red-billed oxpeckers

And a nyala, quite a specialty of Mana Pools

A double-bandad sandgrouse and one of its two chicks

yellow-billed stork

After we got back to York Lodge in Harare...

A red-eyed dove

and one of my favorite birds of the whole trip, a purple-crested turaco. They come down to the bird-bath in York Lodge to drink.

Day 14, August 7: Mana Pools National Park

An early morning, of course, and a long drive, further afield in the park, to see the crested francolin.

First, the usual waterfowl. A goliath heron

Its smaller cousin, the black-headed heron

And the small squacco heron

An elegant male eland

a southern grey-headed sparrow

A partially obscured trumpeter hornbill

More common elands, male and female

White-crested helmetshrikes, with those weird eyes.

Our old pal, the southern red-billed hornbill

A black-backed puffback

Wire-tailed swallow. You can just about see the tail.

A beautiful lilac-breasted roller

A savannah hare.

We saw a flock of crested francolins, by the road south of the airstrip, in heavy brush, but they were never out in the open. But we did see a common dwarf mongoose, which lives in a hollow log.

A chinspot batis, annoyingly refusing to look at the camera.

A redheaded weaver, not in breeding plumage, and therefore without the red head

A swallow-tailed bee-eater.

Overhead, a bateleur

Blacksmith lapwings are common in this park

Our old friend the glossy ibis

An Egyptian goose

And a menagerie of hippo, cattle egrets, and chacma baboons

A pied kingfisher

After lunch, we went for a (rather dangerous) walk with a herd of 5 male elephants.

Everything went well, until one 40 year old male split away from the herd, and decided the best way to rejoin them was through our group. At the instruction of Stretch, we all sat down; the theory being an elephant will recognize a seated human as being in his or her own space, and will not invade it. This elephant, however, kicked one of our guids,a nd ran his trunk down Marjorie's back; I think he liked the smell of her laundry detergent. Cool, but terrifying. Look at the tusks on this guy!

Here is a more peaceful scene, with an elephant stretching his trunk up to eat tree leaves.

And here's a bateleur, perched in a tree watching, and hoping there would be carnage and carrion to eat.

Other birds seen: Spur-winged Goose, Helmeted Guineafowl, Mourning Collared-Dove, Red-eyed Dove, Ring-necked Dove, Laughing Dove, Emerald-spotted Wood-Dove, Gray Go-away-bird, Water Thick-knee, Black-winged Stilt, Blacksmith Lapwing, White-crowned Lapwing, African Jacana, Common Sandpiper, Wood Sandpiper, Common Greenshank, Three-banded Courser, African Openbill, Saddle-billed Stork, Marabou Stork, Yellow-billed Stork, Glossy Ibis, African Sacred Ibis, Hadada Ibis, African Spoonbill, Black-crowned Night Heron, Little Egret (Western), Striated Heron, Rufous-bellied Heron, Cattle Egret, Great Egret,  Gray Heron, Hamerkop, African Harrier-Hawk, African Goshawk, Black Kite (Yellow-billed), African Fish-Eagle, Crowned Hornbill,  Brown-hooded Kingfisher, Pied Kingfisher, Lilac-breasted Roller, Lilian's Lovebird, Brown-necked Parrot, Meyer's Parrot, African Black-headed Oriole, Black-throated Wattle-eye, Brubru, Black-backed Puffback, Brown-crowned Tchagra, Tropical Boubou, Fork-tailed Drongo, Long-billed Crombec, Green-backed Camaroptera, Yellow-breasted Apalis, Gray-rumped Swallow, Plain Martin, Yellow-bellied Greenbul, Common Bulbul, Southern Yellow White-eye, Red-billed Oxpecker, Meves's Starling, Ashy Flycatcher, White-browed Robin-Chat, Collared Sunbird, Scarlet-chested Sunbird, White-bellied Sunbird, White-browed Sparrow-Weaver, Spectacled Weaver,  Blue Waxbill, Red-billed Firefinch, Southern Gray-headed Sparrow, African Pied Wagtail