Going on an African Hunting Safari
June 23, 2009
Many people love the notion of going on an African hunting safari and feeling the cool African air as they cruise through the jungle. The thought of it is enough to create vacation dreams for many North Americans, yet translating those dreams to reality can be a little bit complicated. Regardless, that does not stop people from dreaming away about riding on the back of an elephant and enjoying the company of some locals before watching a lion chomp down on its prey. The adventure and majesty of Africa certainly comes alive during a wonderful safari trip.
The term “safari” simply refers to an overland journey. This term has been used to typically refer to visitors in Africa, although it has no actual geographical connotation. There is also a certain thematic element attached to the term, drawing upon visions of khaki clothing and a certain type of hat. Regardless of the stereotypical connotations of the term “safari”, the term still calls upon some adventurous notions that many people desire to discover for themselves.
The original term was a reference to the early big game hunters that frequented African. Men, typically of European descent, would head to Africa to bask in its glory and to partake in the lay of the land. During this trip, the men would gather in hunting parties and hunt down various rare animals. They would take trophies for themselves and display them on walls back home, as was the custom. It became a variable rite of passage for many men in the higher echelon of European culture, maintaining a status grip over those people for quite a few years before hunting became unfashionable.
These times often represent a brutal passage of time in the history of Africa. The notion was that Africa was a piece of property that belonged to Europe and, therefore, the animals on it also belonged to Europe. The historical significance of these safaris often carried deep-seeded notions of control and power to the extent of slavery over the continent, enabling Europeans to virtually rape and pillage the land at their leisure. To this day, that history plagues many Africans.
Now, the term “safari” refers to taking a photo safari. Instead of shooting animals with bullets and keeping the heads mounted on the hearth, people are taking pictures and putting together various photo displays of the magical animals they have seen while on safari in the beautiful continent. These photo safaris are becoming incredibly popular with people of all ages that wish to have the experience of a lifetime taking in the wilderness and grandeur of the incredible continent of Africa.
Safari parks are rather common in North America to draw upon the distinction of the African safari. This is a zoo-like tourist attraction that creates an environment where people can observe all sorts of exotic animals from a safe vantage point. The safari park is usually walked through or ridden through in a vehicle that would be driven by a guide. The guide describes the animals that are seen and offers a historical context for the park, giving tourists and guests a complete tour of the park and engaging them in knowledgeable conversation.
The game reserves in Africa tend to be a lot larger than a safari park, though. For this reason, most people still wish to head to Africa to see the magic of nature for themselves in as natural a setting as possible. Within the confines of a game reserve or a safari park, people are engaged with the pure wonder of seeing such incredible animals such as the lion or giraffe. As long as such areas are able to protect some of these animals, people will be able to participate in photo safaris for many years to come. The love of animals, exotic and domestic, may well be the greatest ally to the protection of various species threatened with extinction.
Source: Article Base
Accommodtaion in Namibia
Safari is an East African tradition and means to travel or journey. An African safari is a popular trip that has been undertaken for centuries by both Africans and other nations visiting Africa. The most enduring image of safari is the British explorer in his white hat and shorts, hunting for big game in the wilds of Africa. Africa is a very popular destination due to beautiful terrain and varied wildlife. African safari began centuries ago with Arabs and Swahilis making long voyages into mainland Africa to do trade with other markets. The word became synonymous with the caravans, hunting, and the sense of adventure. The traders brought ivory, supplies and slaves. Thankfully British control put an end to the slavery. The British soon brought people from all over the world looking for Safari adventure. What really attracted them was Africa’s wildlife, which still does today. Some people wanted to observe and study the amazing African animals, while others wanted to hunt them. Needless to say, soon it became necessary to establish an ethical and legal code protecting the animal population from over hunting. Today hunting is very strictly regulated to protect the animals. Many western explorers gained massive fame and their tales of Africa started the trend that still goes on today. They told romantic stories of the freedom and beauty of Africa, as well as serious tales of the dangers that face explorers. Drought, wild animals, disease and hostile tribes are dangers that still exist today and so the modern safari will be equipped very well and with caution. A safari trip that is unprepared for disaster could run into very serious, possibly fatal, trouble. Safari trips to Africa are easy to find and book. They usually start by taking you to a lodge where there are observation decks, entertainment, bars and beds. These lodges act as a starting point for the convoys of vehicles that will take you across the land and into game territory. Just like in the past, many safaris have a native African guide who adds his knowledge of the terrain and survival skills.
Source: Ezine Articles
Africa Hunting Safaris
Puff Adders, Cobras and Floodwaters
March 26, 2009
Africa Hunting Safaris in Namibia through Kowas Adventure Safaris
There is a huge wild valley in Zambia called the Luangwa Valley that just cannot be tamed. Of course, people have lived there since time immemorial, but they were unable to modify their world to any significant degree because the environment was just too tough for them.
In the 1790s chief Kazembe of the Lunda encouraged the first Europeans, the Portuguese, to open trade routes from Tete into Luangwa. The Portuguese found the place to be inhospitable and dangerous. They were plagued by malaria and troubled by wild animals.
In time, however, the Portuguese government granted estates throughout the Luangwa Valley, called Prazos, to families of mostly mixed Goan and African parentage. The Prazo owners formed their own bands of mercenaries and fought each other in this wild, lawless country. The ‘armies’ became known as the Chikunda, which is what the current inhabitants of the Luangwa Valley are often known as. By the 1890s Jose d’Araujo Lobo was the most powerful Prazo owner with an army of 12,000 men.
The strongest challenge to the Portuguese came from the Ngoni, an offshoot of the Zulu nation who were moving up from the south. The Arab traders from the coast also challenged them. But the British were the ones who finally forced the Portuguese to leave the valley, chased out the Arabs, and conquered the Ngoni.
What is particularly interesting about this rich history is that today one sees very little physical evidence of the Luangwa Valley’s past.
It has all been eaten by termites.
And things have not changed very much. We all built houses there, and lodges, and camps, and every so often the Valley (as it is affectionately known) reminds us that it is its own master. Every rainy season in fact.
I have never seen such active termites as in the Luangwa Valley. During the rains it seems that they go onto steroids and quite literally eat everything. We used to walk up to the bar at the nearby lodge in the evenings, and by the time we returned home the termites would have built a series of small towers coming up out of all the small cracks in the concrete floors. These humble beginnings of termite mounds could be four inches high when we caught them by surprise building away in our lounge. A colleague living nearby had a large personal library and kept each book in its own separate ziplock bag in order to keep them away from the busy jaws of the termites. They ate the back wall of our house and the thatch roof.
Snakes also come out aplenty during the rains. Big ones, small ones, medium-sized ones, up to five of them a day around the house and lodge. We had one particularly large cobra that seemed to live in a huge termite mound outside our house. Several evenings while we were drinking at the bar, our night watchman would come running up to tell us that this large snake was in the house and wreaking havoc. The snake was able to enter through the poorly crafted thatch roof, which was not good when our children were all tucked up sleeping in their beds. We would go down and usually find nothing. On one occasion, though, we found all the bottles on the bathroom shelf knocked to the ground. Then one day I found him in the roof of the outside long-drop and shot him from the inside with a 12-bore shotgun. It wasn’t very good for the roof.
Everyone tried to stay open year round and struggled through each rainy season with a dribble of wet tourists. Some new operators arrived, and one actually said to me in the bar late one night, “I’m going to show you guys how to run a proper safari business here.”
He sold his camp a couple of years later to an unsuspecting romantic.
There are a very small handful of safari operators and professional hunters who have lived in this valley for a long time. Adrian Carr is one of those people. Some readers might know Adrian due to a well-published, but unfortunate, accident with a fine Rigby rifle back in the 1970s. But that story has been documented elsewhere.
We had our small ramshackle collection of huts about 200 yards from Adrian’s house, and I apprenticed under him when I was doing my PH licence. So we got to spend a lot of time together in the bush.
We had a frightening encounter with a snake some years back. A buffalo had been wounded and we were following it. We spooked it twice, and each time we became a little more tense. Finally it entered the thicket along a dry, sand river. In we went and soon realized that its tracks were meandering back and forth and crossing themselves. We became even more tense. Eventually we found ourselves in a large stand of tall hyphereania. The two trackers were ahead of us and bent double, faces almost to the ground following the tiny drops of blood. We were behind, peering for all we were worth into the thick bush for any sign of the buffalo. Safety catches were probably off and fingers were probably curling ever so lightly around triggers. The buffalo just had to be close.
And then the two trackers turned into something molten and flowed back past us with such speed that we were slightly distracted by the sheer grace of it. My first conscious thought was, “OK, here it comes.” But there was no noise. No crashing of undergrowth and no heavy thumping of hooves.
And then Adrian leapt back, one nanosecond behind the trackers. That left me … brave … to face the music, and thinking, “That’s unlike Adrian.” And then I leapt back another nanosecond behind Adrian. And in that instant of us all leaping back we saw in front of us a spectre from every universal nightmare from every age of horror.
A seven-foot-long, two-headed puff adder was striking at us with both its hideous mouths agape and all four hideous fangs dripping with yellow venom. After leaping we staggered backwards, tripping over each other and stumbling to a rest several yards back. The buffalo was forgotten.
It took some time and a lot of confused chattering between all four of us:
“Huge snake!”
“Two heads!”
“Striking!”
“Both heads!”
“Let’s have a cigarette.”
But finally we went back to see the two-headed beast. By now, being a snake, and not very smart, it had settled down to doing what it had been doing before we had stalked so quietly onto it.
There, in an excited state of sexual bliss, and still joined at the vent, were two extremely large mating puff adders. With a long stick we hooked one up and it came with its partner attached. Inseparable they were.
But back to the story at hand.
Everyone with any sense knew that sooner or later the Luangwa River would flood properly. But we all built camps on the river. Of course!
Then in the rains of 2007 the river came up. Then it came up some more. “Oh it’s not too bad,” everyone said, “It’s good to have a proper rainy season for a change. This is just how the river should look at this time of year.”
And then overnight it rose even higher, and all the camps along the river were flooded. Water came up high enough that it flowed through windows and into well-decorated chalets. The lodges were all abandoned while everyone waited for the water to drop. And while everyone felt sorry for the lodge owners who lost a lot, it was really the local villagers who lost everything. These descendents of the Chikunda fighters had houses built of mud mostly along the banks of the Luangwa River’s tributaries. They all disappeared and people were left, standing on the edge of the one raised road that runs to the airport, with pathetic collections of what they had managed to salvage.
After a time the water started to go down, and the safari operators slowly started to move cautiously back in. The buildings were all awash with mud and slush. Adrian came back early and waded through what was normally dry land but was now a flooding Luangwa River, to get to his house that was on a slightly raised piece of land and thus almost dry. The water had receded enough to be lapping at the kitchen step.
Adrian and his partner Christina waded through flowing floodwater to their house and climbed the back step to survey the disaster. The inside of the house was, of course, a muddy mess, as they sloshed disconsolately from one room to the next. And in the main bedroom they found a large, black-necked spitting cobra.
One has to have seen a big black-necked spitting cobra to really know what a powerful presence it has. They are often over six-feet-long, and jet black. So jet black that they shine the deepest blue in sunlight. The scales seem as large as bathroom tiles, and they can be as thick as your wrist. And then they always turn to look at you when you approach. This is the most disconcerting. When a snake turns its head to watch you and fixes those dark eyes on you, you stop to think. The head is thick, rounded, blunt, muscular and … scary. The venom is a powerful cocktail of cytotoxins and neurotoxins and, of course, it not only bites but will also spit this venom into your eyes. I would think that after the black mamba it must be the most awe-inspiring African snake. So, of course, everyone is scared of them.
It is easy to imagine then, the fright they must have got when they walked into their bedroom and encountered the cobra. Adrian had a .22 rifle with him, and so he shot the snake. Then he shot it again, as you do with a large cobra in your bedroom. Then he carried the corpse through the muddy house draped over a muddy broom and left it on the kitchen step. He and Christina continued their house survey.
A few minutes later they returned and the snake had gone. They still had to wade back through the water where the snake had disappeared, so Adrian decided he had to find it. So he stood on the kitchen step, leaning out and hooking into the muddy water with the broom. About three metres away a single black coil of cobra rose slowly out of the water and disappeared in a gentle swirl as the current took it further away.
In every situation like this, there is a moment at which one could have backed off and saved oneself a useful place in the theory which Darwin propounds. But all too often we show that, indeed, we could easily be removed from the gene pool with no detrimental effect to the human race.
So into the water Adrian went to go and hook the snake and remove it from where he and Christina had to wade. And then a little deeper, above the knees fishing with the broom until, “Bugger me if I don’t feel it coiling around my leg … a couple of full, tight coils. So, like a Dinka warrior I lift my leg … slowly … stork-like from the water … and all six feet of shiny black snake is around my leg.” And if that wasn’t bad enough to send one to never-ending therapy, he continues: “The mouth is partially open, right up against my calf.”
Adrian had visions of dying cobras that we have seen bite pieces of wood or even themselves, but he somehow managed “to reach down ever so slowly and grab it just behind the head, all the while expecting a full bite.”
And his story ends thus “… I was shaking like a leaf. We then had a nice cup of tea (with lots of rum).”
Illegal poaching rife in South Africa
December 17, 2008
Africa Hunting Safaris | Kowas Adventure
Poachers in South and Southern Africa are on the increase and their most prized booty and fauna and flora are rhino horns, tortoises, local flowers and plants and shellfish. In addition hunting safaris are on the increase and foreign hunters are lured by southern Africa’s abundant wildlife, paying $50 000 for a hunt to obtain a prized trophy of a lion or other game.
The situation appears to be so bad that recently local newspapers labelled our national wildlife parks “killing fields” and wildlife organisations in the country are increasing security measures to protect conservation areas and their contents. It is believed that sophisticated rhino and other wildlife theft networks are in operation, using helicopters and trucks to “strip South Africa of its wildlife.”
And increasingly people are appearing in court on charges of stealing white rhino and buffalo worth thousands of US dollars. Even giraffe have been stolen. According to SA National Parks CEO, Mavuso Msimang, poachers and thieves are stealing millions of South African rands in animal, plant and marine life from our “national treasury” of reserves.
“These unscrupulous people are attacking the economic fabric of our national tourism industry,” he maintains. Msimang says most of the poaching inside Kruger is under control but that there are problems just outside its border with Limpopo, where “highly organised syndicates” are operating.
Elephants, illegal immigrants from Mozambique, flooding, and poachers rip huge holes in the park’s western fences, he says, adding that he has seen evidence that many lions have been lured through these holes by foreign hunters. There have also been several reports of canned lion hunting over the last year.
In another illegal poaching incident late last year two Slovakians were arrested for having more than 100 angulate tortoises in their possession on the Cape West Coast. The two men were charged with illegal possession, collection and transport of 113 angulate tortoises, also known as rooipens skilpad on the West Coast.
A Lamberts Bay policeman, who spotted them allegedly loading the tortoises into a vehicle, arrested them after discovering ‘a few suitcases full of tortoises’. It is believed South African tortoises are being illegally sold overseas for thousands of dollars. It is illegal to keep tortoises in South Africa without permits,and they may not be sold, collected or even given as gifts.
In addition there have been several cases of perlemoen, orchid and rhino horn poaching in South Africa. Perlemoen is an expensive South African seafood delicacy with a beautiful iridescent blue-green and bowl-like shell. Local police recently confiscated thousands of perlemoen in sacks or boxes, which were ready for export.
Then a German national was recently arrested and heavily fined for having prized local orchids in his possession illegally. Other plant thieves have also been brought to book.
In the Mpumalanga province of South Africa white rhinos, a key tourism drawcard, have had their DNA analysed and distributed worldwide to help protect against international poachers. Individual identikit files for each rhino, including photographs, markings, life history and preferred habitat, are being made publicly available to conservationists and interested tourists on a Geographic Information System database that has been set up for the easy storage, retrieval and display of information.
Poachers who are convicted in South Africa face stiff fines or imprisonment terms for taking fauna or flora illegally.
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