Year in the Wild Blog

Goodbye Addo…

I have just left Addo, but my second last night was spent at the highly recommended Narina Bush Camp in the southern part of the Zuurberg Mountains. It's a small tented camp alongside a river deep in a kloof. It was only me and intern ranger Mfuneko Fezi, and we sat round the fire listening to the Knysna Loeries croaking to each other. Mfuneko is a graduate of the innovative Umzi Wethu program in Port Elizabeth, which trains local youth in
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Airborne over Addo

The last two days have been busy! Yesterday I spent the day in the Woody Cape section of Addo Elephant National Park, and it’s another world. The scenery changes completely. Instead of the sub tropical thicket which characterizes the main section of Addo where most of the wildlife is, Woody Cape comprises dense evergreen coastal forests, long, sandy beaches several kilometres in length, and the largest coastal dune field in the southern hemisphere. (I presume the endless Namib coastline’s dunes
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From hell to paradise

Addo Elephant National Park is most famous for its conservation of the last remaining wild elephants in the Eastern Cape. A few hundred years ago there were thousands of the earth’s largest land mammal in this area of South Africa, as well as plenty of other wildlife like lions, leopards, rhinos, buffaloes and springbok. But rapid colonial expansion after 1820 meant most of this diverse landscape was transformed into dairy farms and citrus fruit estates.

The elephants had a penchant for
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