Game watching - Part 2. Gorongosa

4 years after our return from Angola we were back in Africa again, this time in Mozambique, living on a remote sugar estate on the banks of the Zambezi River. My sister and I both then started at boarding schools in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and our trip to school was by plane, taxi and train, and took almost a day to complete!

Shortly after our arrival we made our first trip by road, to Rhodesia, to visit the schools and get our school uniforms in Salisbury, the capital now called Harare. We flew to Beira, the closest city to us and picked up our car - I am not sure if it was a rental, or belonged to someone my father knew - a VW Beetle! Not the biggest car for a road trip for a family of four, but certainly up to the job - except it regularly got punctures, which we became expert at changing! On the way back from Rhodesia we were stopping off at a game reserve in Mozambique called Gorongosa (we actually used to fly over part of the reserve on our way from Beira to our home on the sugar estate), which was only accessible during the "dry season" because of the dirt roads.
We were somehow delayed on the way so were pushing on a bit on the dirt access road to arrive at the gates before they closed them - around 30 minutes before sundown, to allow vehicles back to the safety of the main camp in daylight - when we got another puncture! After a moment's hesitation to swear we all leapt out of the car and were back on the way in around 5 minutes, arriving at the main gate with minutes to spare! We were able to get the flat fixed overnight in the camp, and at first light were queuing at the inner gate, eager to get out into the reserve.
We were not to be disappointed! Back then Gorongosa was little visited, certainly not as internationally famous as Kruger Park in South Africa, but was well known for a large lion population

Sleeping lion near the old main camp - now known as "casa dos leões", "(lions' house)

Close up of sleeping lion

as well as large numbers of elephant, though it was almost the end of the first day before we came across any of these elusive giants. We had heard them in the thick forest, and come across fresh "sign", droppings and recently broken branches, but getting a clear sight of them proved extremely hard at first.

Our first elephant

My Dad had upgraded his camera to a Minolta, which had interchangeable lenses, but still used 35mm slide film, and had a 135mm telefoto lens, and later bought a longer zoom lens, and had also bought a mount so he could fix the camera on the car door for stability when using the zoom. The problem was he was the only driver, and through the viewfinder using a long lens the animals appeared much further away so an elephant about to charge was much closer for the rest of us, and we often shouted at Dad to move the car!

This one first pulled up a small bush to threaten us with

Late that first day we came across a pride of over 30 lions, and realised they would have to hunt daily to feed such numbers, so stuck with them for a while - but eventually had to head back to camp before nightfall. In those days you had to stick to the marked (dirt) roads, and there were no mobile phones or radios keeping you in contact with other park visitors, or the rangers, so finding anything of interest like this pride was hit and miss, or by instinct. We decided to return to the same spot at first light and see what, if anything, had happened.

Lion on the kill

We were right - the lion had killed overnight, and were finishing off the feast.

Even the young lions were enjoying the bounty

It was an amazing experience being so close to these magnificent beasts.

The big boss was centre stage

We sat for several hours, absolutely mesmerised by the sight of the "King of the Jungle" and his family feasting.

With full belly, looking for somewhere to sleep it off - the waiting vultures could now have their turn

It was hard to tell what had been on the menu, but could have been one of the numerous Gnu, Wildebeest, found on the Gorongosa plains 

Gnu, or Wildebeest

We were fortunate to see more elephant that day also ..

Elephant family on  the move

.. and had a wonderful stay in Gorongosa, which we all wished could have lasted longer!

Some of Gorongosa's buffalo, taken from the air while flying home over the plains (this part of the reserve is inaccessible to vehicles) from school!

Game watching - Part 1: Quiçama, Angola

In 1960 my family moved to Angola in Africa, my father having accepted a three-year contract with a British company based in Luanda, the capital. Back then it was quite an adventure travelling to Africa, and we spent almost 4 weeks on a ship from the UK.
It wasn't long after we got there that we made our first trip to a game reserve, called Quiçama (pronounced Kiss-ah-ma), which was around 70 kms (43 miles) from the capital. In those days almost all the roads in Angola were dirt, in very poor condition, and in many places impassable during the rainy season, which left huge potholes where the water had been standing. My Dad had a Ford Anglia as his "company car", and as this was totally inadequate for a trip like this, he borrowed a Land Rover from a work colleague who hunted ...

which was not really the best vehicle to use in a game park, which contained, among other things, Lion, Elephant and many Buffalo! In fact, in the picture to the left of the vehicle is a fresh pile of elephant dung! That first trip we didn't see very much in the way of game - a lot of buffalo, including one that burst out of the undergrowth just in front of us crossing the road, and plenty of antelope, but no elephant or big cats, which was probably just as well seeing as we had no protection in the Land Rover!

The campsite - very basic at the time, with electricity in the process of being installed.

Back in those days my Dad's camera was a 35mm Kodak Retinette with a standard fixed focus lens, which used film that produced slides that at the time had to be sent to the UK for developing - so it would be months before you saw the image you had taken!! Ours were sent from the developers to my grandparents, who would have a look at them through a hand-held viewer, before posting them back out to us. The quality was good, but all of the shots from the game reserve showed just a dot on the horizon, which was the animal we had spotted!

Sable Antelope - or Palanca Preta. One of the few photos where the animal was close!

I was only 7 when we arrived in Angola, but I learnt that to spot wild animals you had to be very quiet, and look really carefully - and mean "look", not just scan the area. A spot of colour out of place, a bush moving in no wind, unusual sounds, slightest bits of movement - and smell! Sometimes you could smell that something was close by!

Pretogues and Portunhol

I remember vividly the day my father came home from work in 1959, gathered the family and asked "Who wants to go to Angola?" We all jumped up and down and said "Yes!!! Where is Angola?"
So a few days later he bought a small blackboard and started teaching us a few basic Portuguese words - not that he could speak Portuguese, but he had learnt Italian at school and had a knack for languages, something my sister and I inherited (possibly helped by the fact my mother was Danish, though we never did learn to speak that). So at least we could say "Please" and "Thank you" before we set sail.
Early in 1960 we left a cold and snowy England on a boat from Tilbury headed for Luanda, Angola. I am not going to cover that adventure here - the days of seasickness crossing the Bay of Biscay are best forgotten anyway - because this post is about foreign languages. Our few words were not adequate at all, but my sister and I were enrolled at the local "English School of Luanda" where we had some lessons in Portuguese, but I seem to recall the ones about metric measures rather than anything about grammar and syntax, if we indeed had those!
There was a good expatriate community so we spoke English exclusively amongst our friends (Americans, South Africans, British), but I used to play with my next-door neighbour's children, a Portuguese family, so my linguistic skills improved, and I became pretty fluent, and even picked up some of the accent.
We were in Angola for three years before we returned to Africa, this time to Mozambique (another Portuguese territory) and started speaking Portuguese again. The same situation existed there, a very large expatriate community so most social conversation was in English, and, indeed, some of my peers lived there longer but had little interest in the local language. We were schooled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) so spent 9 months of the year away at boarding school, but when we were back in Mozambique I used to spend almost as much time with Portuguese friends as English-speaking ones, and my vocabulary came on in leaps and bounds, though my grammar didn't.
As I was not having formal lessons I knew nothing about correct verb tenses, proper sentence structure (though, fortunately, Portuguese has a similar sentence order to English!), syntax, and so on, but was becoming very fluent - though my friends teased me that I was speaking "Pretogues", not "Portugues", that is the Portuguese that was spoken by the indigenous population (the blacks, or "pretos"), who had no formal education and to who Portuguese was a second language (after their tribal dialect).
My command of Portuguese was now so good I was on more than one occasion mistaken for being Portuguese, despite my grammatical shortcomings! In 1975 (shortly before Independence), however, I left Mozambique for South Africa, and never returned, and my use of Portuguese diminished and dwindled, though I did have a few Portuguese-speaking friends in South Africa, until 1978 when I returned to the UK and stopped speaking it at all.
Fast forward to 2009 and my first visit to Brazil - 31 years after last speaking Portuguese - and it all started flooding back, much to the amazement of my nephew, who lived there, but had no idea of my language skills! What was amusing was that every time I spoke people commented on my command of the language, but then added "But it is Portuguese from Portugal!" - there are far more differences between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese than I ever imagined, and, 5 years later, I am still trying to get to grips with them all.

Now we come to Spanish. Because I do not have permanence in Brazil I needed to find a second home for the remaining 6 months of the year, and my research led me to believe that Peru might be a sound choice, except for the fact that I spoke no Spanish. Brazil is surrounded by Spanish speaking countries, and, in fact, apart from French Guiana (French), Suriname (Dutch) and British Guyana (English) all the other South American nations speak Spanish. There is fairly easy migration between the South American (Mercosul) countries, and there is a lot of Spanish spoken in the bigger cities (in fact my nephew always has a couple of native Spanish speakers working for him - he speaks Spanish as he spent a fair amount of time in Spain), and I found that my Portuguese helped me a lot in my understanding of Spanish, but realised I needed some help with my oral skills.
I decided to take some lessons in spoken Spanish, but found it far harder to pick up that Portuguese (or French back in my school-days), possibly because there are so many similarities in the vocabulary with Portuguese, but sentence structure is slightly different, and the pronunciation of letters and combinations of letters is vastly different. But armed with my basic skills I headed for Peru in 2012 on my reconnaissance visit, and found that I managed adequately, apart from one hotel where the only staff member could not, or would not, understand me - everyone else seemed to cope with my mixture of  Portuguese and Spanish (Espanhol) - Portunhol!
I am soon heading back to Peru for my third 6-month stay, and, though my Spanish is by no means great, I am confident that I can get by, and last year toured 5500 miles (almost 9000 kms) alone by motorbike without any problems. In some of the remoter areas there were no English (or Portuguese!) speakers so I had to manage, and even dealings with the Police at roadside checks (who were mostly amazed at this lone Gringo on a motorbike!) went without incident.
Although my Portuguese and Spanish are not that grammatically correct, I am pretty sure that I am fluent in Pretogues and Portunhol!

Practical joke

I am not by nature a prankster – I never try and fool anyone on April 1st, and though I enjoy a clever prank, rather than a slapstick one (I used to like Jeremy Beadle’s well-planned and executed tricks, but “Just for Laughs” leaves me cold), have never been much for playing them myself. I think it because I am intrinsically too honest, and do not like lying to, or deceiving, others.

However many years ago, while living in Mozambique on the banks of the Zambezi, I succumbed to temptation. Back in those wonderful carefree days many of us teenagers (16+) owned 50cc motorbikes – of the non-restricted variety, so they were capable of 50-60 mph flat out – and though there were no tarmac roads then all the bikes were road-going versions, so not really suited for the terrain! Mostly we owned 2-stroke Suzuki’s, but that was primarily because the Sugar Estate used them extensively, so could get them cheaply, but Pete had a 4-stroke Honda, which had a distinctive engine noise that everyone recognised. Most of us had learnt to ride on an old BSA, called Flash, that now had a 50cc Suzuki engine in it, the old one having died many years before, and this now belonged to Pete as well (his father ran the engineering workshop that maintained all the company vehicles).

Anyway, on that particular day Pete had taken his Honda in to be serviced so was riding Flash. The Zambezi was prone to flooding so they had constructed dykes along the riverbank, and another set inside to protect the village, and we often used to ride up on to these – or rather try and ride up on to them as in most places they were too steep for the little engines, especially with a 50-60 foot drop into the Zambezi just behind!  This day we had got on top further along and were riding along the footpath on top of the dyke when we came across a group of younger boys, probably 10-13 years old, who we vaguely knew. As 2 English boys we were recognisable to everyone! One of the boys asked where the Honda was – we all aspired to ride the 4-stroke as it sounded so much more macho than a 2-stroke engine – and Pete started to respond. Fortunately his Portuguese was not that good so I jumped in and the deception started!

I told them that earlier in the day we had been riding up on to the dyke and Pete had over-cooked it and ridden straight into the river! Bearing in mind that the Zambezi at this juncture is over a mile wide, and has a peak flow of some 300,000 cubic feet per second, so is some river. I continued that Pete had to abandon the bike and so it was probably at the bottom of the river. That was going to be the end of it, but one of them asked if we were going to fish it out, and, if not, could they try. I am sorry, but I could not resist this! I told them to help themselves if they wanted to, never believing that they really would, and we went on our way.

Four hours later, the Honda newly serviced, we passed by the same way, and noticed that there was quite a commotion by the water’s edge. There were two boys, plus an African domestic, tethered by ropes wading around in the water, and another 4 boys on the bank shouting encouragement. They saw us and called up asking if they were in the right spot, so I said they were about 10 yards too far down the river, but maybe the bike had been washed down by the current. All the time Pete was sitting on the Honda revving the engine, and suddenly the penny dropped! One of them noticed the deep 4-stroke engine noise – there was stunned silence before they came running up the dyke to where we were. Pete could hardly contain himself, but I compounded their misery by saying that Pete’s Dad had sent a team of men there to fish it out just after we left earlier – while they were gathering ropes and more help!

They just calmly accepted this, and wandered off, soaking wet and possibly having caught something nasty in the dirty river – I never owned up, and I guess they never knew the truth.

African Elephant Society

Kruger Park Elephant

When we lived in Africa we were always fascinated by the wildlife there – it was way before the advent of regular TV contributions from the likes of David Attenborough, and the internet was not even a twinkle in someone’s eye back then. About all we knew about Africa and the wildlife there was gleaned from books, and reports from travellers who had been there. The reality was much more amazing!

Whenever we had the opportunity we used to spend time in the Game Reserves there, and again this was before the commercialisation now seen, especially in Kenya and Tanzania, where minibuses ferry guests around, and keep in contact with each other so that any animal immediately is surrounded by vehicles, and there behaviour becomes anything but natural. Back then most reserves had dirt roads (though some had tarred access roads), and parts of the parks were only accessible at certain times of the year – you certainly were not allowed to drive “off-road” so had to be satisfied with what you could see from  these roads.

Quiçama, Angola

Our first Game Reserve was Quiçama National Park, in Angola, in 1960. We borrowed a Land Rover from a friend who used to use it for hunting, so it was open-topped, and had a raised “shooting seat” in the back (I must hastily add that my family were, and still are, very anti-hunting, we just borrowed the vehicle!) – these made it completely unsuitable for driving round a park where there were elephant, buffalo, rhino, and reputedly also some lion, but we were blissfully naive back then, and it made a great game viewing vehicle. My Dad actually got out and walked away to take this photo, which again is something you just do not do!

On Safari

This trip did, however, awaken our passion for wildlife, and many happy holidays were spent in parks and reserves in Southern Africa. Nowadays most parks “suggest” that you go game watching early morning and late afternoon, when animals are easily found at waterholes, and spend the rest of your day (and your money!) in the camp. We used to be sitting in the car at daybreak when they opened the camp gates, and then spend the whole day wandering about (in a car, of course!) until returning just before dusk, when they locked the gates again. We would take a picnic breakfast, usually bacon sandwiches Mum had cooked in our rondavel (cabana), and plenty of drinks in a refrigerated coolbox, plus the makings of our lunch – so we would find a quiet spot and make lunch somewhere in the reserve. Most parks had one or two places where you are permitted to get out of the car, but still be on the lookout for animals, some had toilets (primitive!) there too.

If we found a likely looking spot, like a waterhole, we might even spend the whole day there, watching the comings and goings of different animals throughout the day – at times it almost seemed as though they had allotted times to drink, to avoid traffic jams! During one such trips (in the late 60′s) we found an elephant watering hole and witnessed behaviour we struggled to comprehend. We are forever being told not to anthropomorphise animal behaviour (that means to attribute human emotions and behaviour to animals), but we could find no other way to understand what we witnessed. This particular camp, in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) had constructed brick-built drinking holes, fed by a wind-pump, adjacent to natural watering places, maybe a stream or a small dam – it meant that even in droughts there was fresh water, but also it meant that there was clean water for the animals to drink as well as a wallow. What we witnessed, though, was that all the adult males congregated round these holes, and the females and juveniles had to make do with the other water source. If an adolescent male approached these bulls, one of them would “growl” and he quickly returned back to the others. It looked like an exclusive male club, with a closely guarded membership!

The females and juveniles often struggled to get access to the other water supply, especially if it was a stream and had high banks, but they would line up and extend their trunks down onto the water – again what fascinated us is that they would close ranks so that the really small babies could not get close to the steepest places, and possibly fall in, but had to make their way along this row of big grey bodies until they found a space where the bank was not so high, and they could safely drink or play in  the water.

Evening at the waterhole

But what really amazed us one afternoon is that one of the big males, we guessed the patriarch, but there was no way of knowing, suddenly looked up rapidly – he had heard something in the distance (elephants communicate using sub-sonic rumbles inaudible to the human ear) – and he then set off away from the group across the bush. We could see nothing, but he had a determined stride and looked to have real purpose. About 500 yards away he stopped, and suddenly out of the trees in front of him another small herd of elephants appeared, and when they met they touched trunks and then started back to the others. It looked just like someone greeting friends at their front door! Suddenly he stopped again, and while the others carried on and joined the first group he again walked back and greeted a second group of visitors – and then stayed again while a third group appeared, this time returning all the way with them. As they got back to the watering holes the groups separated – the adult males to the “bar” and the females and juveniles to the stream, where the young ones all started playing together. One of the young adult males with the last group tried to join the males, but he too was “shooed” away – he obviously was almost an adult within his own herd, but not in this exalted group.

We sat in amazement in the car – had we really just witnessed this “human” interaction between elephants? We had no other explanation of what we had seen, but it was decades later that zoologists started to acknowledge that wild animals do actually socially interact, and have very strong hierarchical structures in the herds. Whatever it was we saw we were privileged to have seen such a touching display from the largest animal that walks on the earth with us!

Old Bull Elephant