July 16: West Coast National Park

Here’s a quickie post to keep us all engaged while I remain hostage to the vehicle registration system for another couple of days. To kill a day, I decided to take a quick one day and night trip up the west coast to none other than the West Coast National Park, located roughy 200 km from Cape Town. But instead of heading inland to the Cederberg Mountains like last time, this time I headed over to the coast to a rather small Park that straddles a large shallow lagoon and supports one of only a handful of remaining patchs of coastal lowland fynbos vegetation. You might recall that last year I visit the De Hoop Nature Reserve in the Eastern Cape; this Park is a very similar landscape in terms of terrain, vegetation and wildlife, but located on the west coast.

This Park, as I said, straddles a large shallow lagoon, but it is connected to Saldanha Bay, a deep-water bay that has an important and storied history. Because the bay is protected from the storms on all sides, except for the narrow inlet, it provided a perfect safe harbor for boats partaking in the East India trade during the 16-18th centuries before passing around the Cape of Good Hope out on Cape Point near Cape Town, which was notoriously hazardous to ships under sail.

The Bay area was, of course, inhabited by natives (including the San) and early humans for more than 100,000 years before the Europeans arrived. Some of the earliest human archeological sites can be found in this area. But the European’s quest for trade with the East Indies brought the Portuguese, Dutch, French and Brittish to these shores, and they fought over possession of the Bay multiple times, with the Brittish ultimately winning out. There are all kinds of stories about ships from one country getting caught in the Bay by another and crews taken prisoner. There were even periods when pirates ruled the Bay. There are stories of starvation and disease among the sparse inhabitants because of the harse climate, scarcity of food sources and lack of fresh water, etc. They even had a colony site for people with small pox who were sent here to either die or recover. Anyways, lots of exciting things happened in this Bay years ago. Now, it’s mostly surrounded by upscale vacation communities, and the Park itself on one side.

I spent half a day in the Park, mainly visiting three different bird blinds and looking for wildlife – my first focused wildlife observations since returning to Africa this year! Saw Eland, Red Hartebeest and Bontebok antelope and lots of birds, including a few new species. The Park has no camping, so I found a campground just outside the Park on the bay shore in the town of Langebaan. Nothing too noteworthy, but I had it all to myself, so that’s a plus:

To close out this quickie, here are some pictures from the Park:

New Species:

• Levaillant’s cisticola
• Karoo scrub robin
• Angulate tortoise