June 2-6: Desert Solitude

For the past 5 nights and 6 days I have been in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) >100 km from the nearest road and settlement. Driving into the CKGR was a bit surreal, as I was driving steadily for 3 hours on a sand track through Kalahari thornveld – you remember, that thorny, scrubby, woodland vegetation comprised of grassland mixed with a variety of mostly acacia trees and shrubs on deep sandy soil – getting farther and farther from “civilization” with each mile. Here a couple of shots to give you a visual of the drive into the Reserve:

It’s interesting that no matter how confident you are in your self-reliance to get yourself out of most any problem situation, it’s impossible not to ponder in the back of the mind – even just a little bit – how it would really suck to have a vehicle breakdown this far from everything. And with each passing mile, you can’t help but ponder it a little bit more. Of course, you know that eventually someone would come by for the rescue, but it could be quite a while and the waiting and wondering would be torture. However, my Green Dragon is a self-contained house on wheels and I can live out of that vehicle for many days, weeks perhaps, if necessary. Knowing this provides a peace of mind that is very reassuring.

Of course, it is a certainty that on the main roads into and throughout the CKGR eventually you will cross paths with others; thus, rescue in the case of a vehicle breakdown is virtually guaranteed within a day or two at most. However, once you get off the beaten track on some of the less used roads, I’m not sure a rescue would be coming anytime soon. Check out this series of photos of a 3 hour loop drive I did that got progressively less and less road-like, and eventually there was no evidence of any recent vehicle use. Of course, the Green Dragon was made for this kind of overland travel, so no worries – into the wild I go!

I want to comment on the gestalt of this place before going any further. In the entire 6 days of being in the Reserve I saw a total of perhaps 6-8 other vehicles. Actually, for the first 4 days I saw only 1 other vehicle each day, but on day 5 at a water hole I saw I think 6 vehicles, but 3 or 4 of them were the same ones I had already seen days before. The point being that there aren’t many people out here in the central Kalahari.That, combined with the expansive, seemingly never-ending landscape, and star-lit skies spanning 180 degrees from one horizon to the other combine to create the ultimate feeling of solitude. Not loneliness or remoteness, but solitude – that feeling of being truly alone in nature. For me, there is simply nothing like this feeling of being completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No phones, no social media, no TV, no shopping, no people; no nothing, just me and the natural world. Sublime! Although I suspect this kind of desert solitude would not be comforting for some people, I also think that it would do most people a lot of good to disconnect in this manner every so often.

My first public campsite in the CKGR is in Deception Valley adjacent to Deception Pan at the public campsite called Kori. This isn’t really a campgound in the typical sense as there are just 4 sites and they are separated by hundreds of meters, so each site is essentially its own camp. My site consists of patch of bare ground with an Umbrella Acacia tree for shade and rudimentary ablutions, including a “drop” toilet in which the stuff that comes out of you “drops” into a pit (we would call this a “pit” toilet) and a “bucket” shower in which you fill a 5 liter plastic jug with water, raise it up overhead and pour it on yourself – but you have to sacrifice some of your own precious water for this purpose – NOT LIKELY! Oh, there is a fire ring as well. So, if you like a hot shower, flush toilet and picnic table at your campsite, this ain’t the place for you! You may be wondering how I can stay reasonably clean without a shower after several days; well, you take a cloth or sponge and wet it down with just a little bit of that precious water and wipe yourself clean – good as new! Here a few shots of the site and facilities:

At the Kori campsite, my evening serenade for about 2 hours beginning almost exact at sunset was not the usual cast of characters, but this critter. Can you guess what it is? If you can, you win the title of “Master of the Kalahari” and my admiration:

Is it bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian or perhaps an insect? Shall I tell you or shall I make you wait until the next post to ponder and perhaps lose sleep over? First clue: it is a reptile! Second clue: it lives in an underground burrow and comes out of its hole at dusk to serenade the world – actually to advertise its territory and attract a mate – but I prefer to think it is serenading me. OK, you give up, so I will tell you. It is a Barking Gecko. Yes, that’s right, a gecko. I was surrounded by hundreds – I’m not exagerating, truly – of these scaly creatures calling from every direction and distance – a cacophony of gecko “barks”. Since I will never get a decent picture of these guys, here’s what they look like from a borrowed internet picture:

Another exciting incident at my Kori campsite occurred on my last morning. I woke to the roar of a male lion to the east of me, probably on the Pan a couple hundred meters away – but it is exceedingly difficult to judge distances with the roar of a lion – so the estimate should be plus or minus a couple hundred meters! I am in an unfenced campsite by myself with nobody else around for many miles, but no worries, we have a mutual understanding – I don’t hurt them and they don’t eat me! All is good, so I get out of the Green Dragon to fix some breakfast and break camp, but still in the dark as I want to get going by first light to look for those twilight species. Still hearing the lion roaring to the east of me – good, got a tab on that one – when I hear another lion roaring to the west of me, probably a couple hundred meters away, plus or minus a couple hundred meters. Yikes, I am positioned between two roaring lions and it’s still dark so I can’t see very far. Are these territorial lions and I am in the middle on the boundary between the two? Or perhaps they are brothers and jointly oversee a pride – that happens quite frequently. Either way, I’m not sure how I feel about being between these lions without knowing where they are exactly, or where the lionesses are if they have a pride. So, with a little uneasiness and extra alertness I finished eating and broke camp. Felt a little more relaxed once I was in the Green Dragon on my way. You can’t buy experiences like this – well, actually you can.

I stayed at the Kori campsite for 3 nights and then moved ~30 km north to another public campsite adjacent to Sunday Pan for my last 2 nights. Pretty much the same kind of setup as Kori – patch of bare ground, shade trees, fire ring, and rudimentary ablutions. However, this site was much sweeter than my last. Not only was the site delightful, having some great shade trees, the site was situated on a “hill” overlooking Sunday Pan, and I was only a few hundred meters from the water hole where I spent considerable time. Here’s a picture of site:

Here is a very long composite video – sorry, but it’s 6 days worth of stuff – that I made of some of my observations in the GKGR, including a description of the landscape and some of the wildlife observations that I was able to capture adequately on video. Note, this 40-minute long video contains two long segments on lions that amount to about 26 minutes:

CKGR composite video (40 minutes)

This next section is primarily for my birder friends; in particular, those that have been to Africa before, but the rest of you may enjoy seeing the pictures of these birds as well. Lounge-chair birding from the campsite can be fairly productive. Here are some of the birds I saw literally from my lounge chair. – I kid you not! I only have usuabe pictures for a few of the species, but I included a few pictures borrowed from the internet for a few of the more colorful species to show the variety of beautiful birds visiting my campsite. Note, at the end there will be a quiz:

Here’s the rest of the birds seen, but without pictures:

• kalahari scrub robin
• red-billed quelea
• bronze mannikin
• cape glossy starling
• fork-tailed drongo
• acadia pied barbet
• black-chested prania
• long-billed crombec
• western barn owl
• tawny eagle
• bateleur
• pririt batis

Not bad hey, for just lying back in my lounge chair in camp? Now, here is the quiz. Which of the species above do you think is calling and singing in this not-so-great audio recording?

Did you guess the crimson-breasted shrike? Is so, you would be wrong. How about one of the cute little manakins? Wrong again! Here’s a clue to help you out. The species in the recording made the nests in this photo:

That gave it away. It was the white-browed sparrow-weaver. These guys are abudant and ubiquitous in this landscape as judged by all the nesting colony trees I saw on my wildlife drives, and they were very busy around both of my campsites.

This section is for Skylar – I hope you are watching! I made a video just for you that asks you lots of questions about the animals I saw while I was on safari for the past several days. Watch this with mommy or daddy, or both, and see if you can become a junior wildlife ranger by getting most of the questions right. Good luck, and let me know how you do.

Sklar video (10 minutes)

This last section is just some miscellaneous photos of the landscape and wildlife that I happened to like and thought I would share for those of you that like to look at pictures: