The Amazing Planet and Nature Thread

I’ll join you for a trip one of these days and do the driving for you!

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By all means. Strange how it happens and one would think having just come back from two weeks it would ease the wanderlust somewhat but it doesn’t, actually. This year again is out, unfortunately but next years trip is already set down for our winter school holidays in June/July so as soon as the schedule is released it will be booked.

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Best time of year to go imo. I’ll probably be over briefly on my own in the next few months, but down in the Cape. Kids should be old enough to take to the Kruger in a couple of years.

It’s not at all. The Kruger is the most accessible park in Africa with a superb network of tarred and gravel roads that is easily traversed by normal sedans. The dangers faced are more by people lulled into a sense of security by the ease of access and then forget they’re in a completely wild environment. Elephants are the biggest danger and I treat them with respect at all times, keeping my distance until I am absolutely sure they’re comfortable with the presence of a vehicle. Sadly, others forget or don’t know this simple rule and get rolled around like a football. There are always one or two incidents a year.

The camps are fenced and safe but again, people do then let down their guard; snakes and scorpions are very prevalent and should always be looked out for. Just this trip we had a puff adder close to our tent, a baby black mamba under our tent and three hyena saunter through the camp gate. Gotta love it. In all, Kruger is the perfect self safari and is about as safe as you can get in the circumstances; rock up at any of the main rest camps and you will be pleasantly surprised at the facilities. When my boys are older and more bush savvy I will start taking them to the Kgalagadi and other Botswana reserves.

Absolutely, best time for viewing. The bush this trip was incredibly thick and at times almost impossible to see into. Had a sighting with no less than five male lions and unless we had not come across them walking on the road before slumping down next to it we would never have known they were they. I’m sure your kids will love the Kruger, it’s the perfect place to start an induction into wildlife.

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Why do you prefer Kruger? It seems to be a long way from where you live. Doesn’t SA have many such Parks?

Kruger is the biggest with the most biodiversity, fauna and flora species and ecozones. As a whole, the Greater Kruger in South Africa is about 22 000 square km in size. If one looks at it as a whole being the Limpopo Transfrontier Park it’s 35 000 square km. Nobody really does the Mozambique/Zimbabwe sides as they are relatively inaccessible, especially Gonarezhou, so let’s just use the 22 000 square km of the Greater Kruger which still makes it one of the largest national parks on the whole continent, not just South Africa. It’s comparable to the Serengeti, Chobe, the Delta, Ruaha, Tsavo, Etosha etc in its wildness, vastness and biodiversity. You can stand at some of the look outs in Kruger, like the pic I posted a few posts above the other day, and see nothing but endless rolling savanna as far as the eye can see or endless mixed savanna woodland in the South or mopani in the North with everything that you see being the Kruger. There are likely to be entire lion prides, leopards, hyena clans and wildlife out there somewhere that have never seen a human before.

There are other parks in South Africa yes, but nothing with the sheer vastness that I described above. After all of these years, I have still barely touched what it has to offer. I used to stay much closer and at one point in my life I actually stayed there and it is very much part of my life and psyche and to tell you the truth, it’s not where I grew up but every visit is very much a feeling of coming home rather than just a holiday and there is nothing quite like going home, is there. My life and family is here now so a 13 or 14 hour is just a necessary and incredibly beautiful chore on its own.

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Well, my photos from a mobile phone will never compare against @wyld.at.hrt 's stunning nature photos, that is just how it is without equipment.
But this Saturday, me and two friends went out to Sandsøya and walked to the Dollsteinhola. A natural cave of some legend. Archeology has proven that it was inhabited during the Stone Age. It is mentioned in many viking era sagas. Great men were there. It may have held a position of importance to the kultus of he Norse religion, we don 't really know why it was so important but it is widely famous in historical records. It is written in the old sagas that Orm Toralvson journeyed from Iceland to slay the giant Bruse who inhabited the cave, who had previously slain his foster brother Asbjørn Prude from Hordaland. Later, the Jarl of the Orkney Islands, Ragnvald Kale, visited the cave around 1100 or so. According to legends, he swam across the water cave. According to myths from the Viking Era, the cave goes under the ocean to Scotland. It is also mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britannia before 1800. What is more, even King Arthur (lol) landed here according to legend and did stuff in the cave (not really sure what, but part of the local Arthurian legend). So it must have been an important cultural, probably religious site.

On the journey we saw White-Tailed Eagles, ravens, frogs and goats, both live and dead. So a lot of nature too. We didn’t have a guide, so we only went down into the first large chamber of the cave. There is supposed to be another one if you crawl through the stone scree there, but we had limited light and it was dangerous, so we couldn’t progress futher. In any case a wonderful day trip. in stunning weather !

And now for some photos.





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Some more





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There was an eagle’s nest above the cave so i reckon eagle’s had killed the goats. We found two cadavers, one right inside and one deep down in the cave. Unfortunately, my friend took pictures deep down in the cave and not me.
A bit like a movie walking down the cave with ropes (it was very steep, you need ropes) past goat cadavers with intense stench of ammonia around them. Then the smell of corpses disappeared when we had reached the bottom of the cave thankfully.

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Beautiful @Magnus :+1::nerd_face:

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Love your posts on here. The land seems to be very much my type of place; beautiful, rugged, timeless and dare I say it, lonely. Pretty much exactly what I’m after when I go on my trips. Beautiful pics.

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Thank you ! :slight_smile:

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Highway in Western Qinghai

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China is a truly beautiful country, shame about the government…

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That could be said about anywhere.

The world is a beautiful place; Shame about the people.

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You people in the UK have no idea how lucky you are to have the BBC. No other broadcaster in the world comes close to providing the level of quality natural history programmes.

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