Posts Tagged ‘Africa’

The only extant (living) species in the Order Proboscidae are the elephants. The order, however, includes a number of other now extinct species. The earliest record of a member in this group was a small pig-like creature called Moertherium. It lived in a swamp area in what is now modern day Egypt some 50 million years ago. There were a number of other species like it who in turn evolved into the Woolly Mammoths and Imperial Mammoths. Read the rest »

The lion has been one of the most talked about animals on the African plains, and not surprisingly has been the main topic of conversation around camp fires for thousands of years. The lion is the greatest of all the African cats, the largest in the world being the Asian tiger, and fortunately these cats never share the same habitat.

The lion’s most distinctive feature is the mane of the males. These manes are generally a tan colour, graduating to black. Adult male lions reach 120 cm (3.9 ft) tall at the shoulder and weigh up to a massive 200 Kg (440 lb.), the heaviest recorded being 260 Kg (572 lb.). The female are predictably smaller, averaging 10 cm (2.5 in.) smaller and 70 Kg (154 lb.) lighter. Read the rest »

In February 2007, Janet Cuthbertson from Suni-Ridge Org. ZA (013-525 NPO) contacted us asking if we’d promote Leopard Walk Lodge in Zululand, KwaZulu Natal. At the end of the e-mail, there were a few paragraphs about how they rehabilated an old pineapple farm and gave it back to nature, forming a wildlife reserve.

Among other things, they also mentioned False Bay School, which Janet established in 1992. I was so impressed by their achievements, that I offered to build a pro-bono website for Suni-Ridge. Read the rest »

The Kawaza School Fund is a private fund started by Robin Pope Safaris in 1988 to assist in improvements at Kawaza Basic School, one of the local schools in the Nsefu Chiefdom. They sent us this article in the beginning of January 2008.

Huge improvements have been made at Kawaza since this time and the school is almost unrecognizable from the first photos that were taken. Over the past 5 years other schools have been added to the list of schools that Kawaza School Fund assists. Read the rest »

As usual, elephants are on the agenda at the 14th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP14), which will be held in The Hague, the Netherlands, from 3 to 15 June 2007. The 55th meeting of the CITES Standing Committe will be held on the 2nd of June 2007.

This is a video message asking the members to let elephants keep their ivory. Dame Daphne Sheldrick shares her views on the ivory trade and the effects of poaching. As can be read in the African Elephant facts courtesy of Wildlife Campus, you can see that South Africa is in favour of culling and utilising all the ivory collected. Read the rest »

Our RYA sailing course was cancelled at the last minute, so we booked a last minute trip to Hurghada on the Red Sea in Egypt. We snorkelled, scuba dived, quad biked and visited Luxor including Valley of the Kings and Karnak Temple.

This was the first “last-minute” all-in booking that we’ve made. And we can see what the fuss is about. We’d booked a week from 28/08 until 05/09 in 2006 through a Dutch online travel agency at the Hilton Hurghada Long Beach in Egypt. Read the rest »

The plan was simple. We wanted to see as much of the coastline of South Africa as possible, as we were emigrating to Europe. Having shipped our belongings, we closed the door of the house for the last time and handed over the keys to the new tenants. There was now no turning back and we had three weeks until our flight from Johannesburg International Airport.

Armed with our trusty white VW Golf (no aircon), a handful of maps, a bag of clothes and some cash, we decided to head west. Firstly because we had never been that way to the coast before and also following our instinct to “Go west, young man”… Here follows our diary of the trip. Read the rest »