A New Day at Panzi Bush Camp

My chalet at Panzi Bushcamp

The next morning, Glynn arrived at Marc's Treehouse Lodge to pick me up and carry me off to continue my South African odyssey at Panzi Bush Camp.  Panzi is a small reserve with boardwalks radiating out from an open veranda/dining room to little A-frame chalets.  The railed boardwalks which rise up through ravines to the rooms allow close-up views of the ravine vegetation as it arches alongside and over the path. 

My room was the furthest distant one from the dining room, at my request, to be closest to the viewing deck and waterhole, and I was within breathing distance of any passing wildlife, which I knew might include the resident porcupine or bushbucks, or passing hyenas and baboons, to name a few, which gave an exciting tang to the whole experience.  At night I would hear baboons and hyenas, and unknown things rustling around in the thornbushes.  Exciting!

The boardwalk to my chalet

 
To my delight, the A-frame had a tiny deck on the front end with a couple of deck chairs in which I could sit for sketching. I would spend lots of time here writing and coloring my sketches.  

My sketching gear and bird book

Here's my gear ~ my sketchbook, bag full of art gear (watercolor pencils and waterbrush, pencil sharpener, extra pens and all that other fun stuff we journalers like to play with) plus the pretty wooden bowl I had bought from a local artisan, in which I kept the interesting things I picked up along the trail, like seedpods, feathers, etc.  

My bushbuck sketch

An inquisitive bushbuck doe

After getting settled, I stepped outside to be met by this gentle bushbuck doe, a mere six feet from my my door. I was struck by her bright orange coat and liquid, black eyes, and although she didn't stick around more than a few moments, I took several photos of her which turned into one of my favorite sketches.

Notice the plant beside her in the sketch?  This is the Mother-In-Law's tongue which is found as a houseplant in many American homes and offices.  I was fascinated to find it poking up at random spots under thorn bushes in the South African soil, so I included one beside the little bushbuck. I'd never seen a Mother-in-law's Tongue plant outside a house or pot before.  They say travel is broadening. If so, it widens one's mind in the oddest places. . .

Glynn, Bev, John, and Margaret ~ plus Sally the dog and Kitty.

I was ready to relax, now, after all my game drives and moving from treehouse to treehouse at Marc's Treehouse Lodge, and Panzi was the ideal spot to do it.  Run by a family which includes Glynn, who used to be a park ranger, his mom Bev and dad John, and Margaret who takes care of the rooms, I felt very comfortable in the homey atmosphere.  

Most guests don't stick around during the day and lodges don't generally provide lunch, so I had come prepared to feed myself midway through each day with energy bars. This had added quite a bit of weight to my luggage, but it was essential unless I wanted to lose some weight (not a bad idea, but being hungry makes me grumpy and not inclined to sketch or write in my journal). 

Breakfast at Panzi Bush Camp

But Bev kept a fruit bowl supplied in case I got a yen for a banana, and coffee or tea was always available, which pleased me mightily.  And in my opinion Bev and John could cook for a 4-star restaurant if they chose.  Look at this classy breakfast!  Dinners were incredibly good, too,

The elevated viewing deck provided a great view of the waterhole, particularly at dawn and dusk, and I spent a lot of time birdwatching and keeping an eye out for wildlife.  

A kudu stops by the waterhole

One evening I watched a hamerkop (a big bird with a head like a hammer (which is what its Dutch name means) bathing at the water's edge. I saw kudu bucks visit in the dawn light, posing self-consciously as I watched through binoculars and sketched furiously in my sketchbook. 

All that remains of an ostrich

Glynn took me on a couple of walks in the bush, where we checked out termite mounds and antelope tracks in the dusty trail, and found a pile of ostrich feathers and the ostrich's skull, all that was left of a leopard's midnight feast.  

Giraffe with ox-pecker

The walks were terrific.  I had a chance to get so close to a giraffe that we were looking UP into its face as it placidly chewed its cud and gazed back down at us.  Notice the ox-pecker clinging to the side of its face ~ these birds remove (and eat) ticks and other parasites from larger herbivores. I wonder how they figure out it's not a good idea to remove a tick from a lion.......?  

We also found a zebra skeleton and skull, leftovers from another leopard kill.  There are leopards at Panzi Bush Camp, but not lions, because the lions can't get through the fence.  

Aloe tree

There are fascinating things growing out in the bush.  I really enjoyed the aloe trees, with clusters of big seedpods and thorny leaves.  The ravines around which Panzi Bush Camp is built are also beautiful, although they can be a big problem in the summer when the rains drain down off the Drakensburg Escarpment to sluice through such ravines as these.  

Rocky ravine

The boardwalks at Panzi are occasionally wrecked or washed away in these floods, and roads to the camp sometimes wash out as well.  But not in the winter, which is when I was there (August). 

Uh-oh, I've run out of time.  I will finish up my saga in the next blog. I've been working on the sketchbook tutorial (like these) for several weeks, which is why so much time had elapsed since the last blog entry.  I'll try to get to the next/last one sooner!

 BTW, I wrote a review about Panzi Bush Camp for TravelAdvisor here if you want to read my recommendations.

South Africa ~ Moholoholo Mountain View

Dan'l came by this morning to see my sketchbook. He spent an appreciative three hours with it, asking questions and puzzling out conundrums with me (why do Africa's shrubs have such prevalent thorns while American shrubs seldom have them?  What technique do millipedes use to keep from tangling up their many legs? How did the Voortrekker women (South African Dutch pioneers) use termite mounds for bake-ovens without getting bit by the mound defenders?). We always have fun with this kind of stuff, even if we can only speculate.

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DAY 1 at Moholoholo

Can you see the twig snake?

Our program, at Moholoholo started on August 3, with a warthog dissection.  Actually, the day started out with the amazing sight of a Twig Snake in a tree, waiting for some sunshine so it could warm up and start moving.  Our ranger/guide Pickett pointed it out to us. It was hard to see, even only two feet above our heads, since it was the same size as the twigs it rested on and its scales almost exactly mimicked the tree bark. You can spot it in the photo because it's head is a bit bigger.  Resting on a branch, its head would blend and you probably wouldn't see it at all.

Pickett trains us in anatomy

Now, as I was saying: warthog dissection.  The Coyote Trails course we're contemplating for next year is a practical one with many survival techniques covered. The female  warthog provided not only an amazing anatomy lesson from Pickett, including parts you could eat raw (the kidney was sweet, slightly chewy) and parts you probably wouldn't want to eat. It's good to know how to survive in the bush, and this was inherent in the course, so we had been expecting it.

We all took part in skinning and preparing it to use as bait later, when we would hang it in a weeping bushwillow tree to lure a leopard to to the wildlife cam. When the dissection was finished, I sketched the head, adding notes (taken from Pickett's comments) about how the curling mustache on a tuskless female resembles the tusks on an adult boar, so that a predator might mistake a defenseless female for a wicked-toothed boar if it got only a glance, and not try to catch it. Not having a toothy boar head to draw, I sketched a nearby warthog boar skull, which tells the tale nicely.

These aren't to scale ~ the boar would be twice that size!

Then we piled onto a game drive truck to go out into Moholoholo Reserve to put the warthog bait in place. We were all eager to see if we could lure the leopard in, and to do that we all took turns dragging bits of warthog along the trails to the tree so the leopard would know it was there.  Since there were leopard tracks right in the road, we figured we had a good chance of success, and the tracks added a thrill to the proceedings.

Sandy records her track notes

We got a chance to study tracks this morning and every day of the course, with comparisons between species, discussion about what the animal was doing to create that particular track, and a great many other things, such as when the track was made, why, how, and even what direction the animal was looking as it stepped along.  My roommate, Sandy, was studying diligently for her tracking certification, and  I was busily sketching every free moment, and well into the night, so we made perfect roommates (each involved in our own pursuits) and became good friends in our free moments.

The female is chewing bones as the dark male watches

The Reserve harbors a wonderful array of wildlife, from white rhinos and kudus to elands, pythons (we smelled one but never saw it) baboons and hippos and MANY other native wildlife.One of my favorite sightings was this giraffe pair. The female, on the left, was busily chewing bones with deep, hollow crunches (they do this regularly ~ to get enough calcium to support all those neck bones, I guess), while the male on the right watches. The male is unusually dark, and I understand that giraffes continue to darken as they age, so perhaps it is very old. 

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I have run out of time today.  More tomorrow or the next day.