Pulse through the musical meccas of Burkina Faso and Ghana in a toe-tapping, hip-swaying African odyssey.
Rhythm and Power tours depart in December annually for a physically and mentally challenging journey designed to immerse you in the music and culture of West Africa.
Dance your way through Ghana as you study the subtle nuances of djembe, a skin-covered goblet drum, and dunan, a cylindrical drum topped with rawhide. Explore the bustling streets in Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city, jam with locals in Bolgatanga, in the country’s warm farming region, and celebrate New Year’s Eve in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.
Live with a griot family (a household of storytellers and musicians), perform in traditional ceremonies and muster strength and stamina as you master folklore dances. By the end of this 40-day journey you will march to the beat of your own drum.
Halfway through our cooking course in the pretty Bo-Kaap quarter of Cape Town, a young man, attracted by the pungent aromas wafting from our kitchen, approaches the front door to the home of our host, Faldela Tolker, and asks for food.
“Not now,” she tells him. “Can’t you see I’m working here?” He wanders off, chastened, but it’s clear this is not the first time he’s been attracted to this unassuming abode amidst the candy-coloured terrace houses of this neighbourhood, known for its kaleidoscopic buildings, cobblestone streets and quaint mosques.
In South Africa, there’s a concept called ubuntu, Tolker explains. It’s about interconnectedness, being open and available, and about sharing. In practice it means that some days Tolker can end up feeding 30 hungry people. And it partly explains why she allows strangers into her home for cooking lessons arranged by fair trade travel company Andulela. Having said that, Tolker (or ‘Tyra’, as she cheekily sees herself as Bo-Kaap’s Tyra Banks) is clearly not one to be interrupted when she’s elbow-deep in roti dough.
The object of the young man’s affection is obvious. Tolker’s golden, crispy dhaltjies, or chilli bites, are resting on paper towels in the kitchen after being deep-fried. These spicy hot balls are made from a mix of chickpea flour, all-purpose flour, turmeric, curry power, egg and Tolker’s special ingredient, which she calls “love” – more commonly known as salt. The resulting aroma is making it hard for us to concentrate on our current task of kneading dough for roti, the Cape Malay version of the Indian flat bread that will accompany our lunch. “The dough should be shiny and elastic,” Tolker instructs as we work it hard. “The more you knead, the less rising time you need.”
A skilled and organised cook, Tolker explains how she made a living for many years selling her home-style food to the lunchtime office crowd – until she became pregnant. She now teaches cooking to visitors who come for a taste of Cape Malay cuisine, culture and history. We listen to Tolker’s stories as we sip falooda, a lurid-coloured drink made from cow’s milk, rose syrup and falooda seeds. It’s a concoction Cape Malays drink to break their fast during Ramadan. It tastes of flowers and is delicious.
The Cape Malay people were first brought to South Africa as Dutch slaves from South-East Asia – Indonesia and Dutch Malacca – and also southern India. After the British abolished slavery in 1834, most of the freed slaves settled in Bo-Kaap, which became a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood as the Cape Malays had brought Islam with them. What they also brought was their wonderful culinary history, and it still thrives today, with several of their dishes considered classic staples of Cape Town cuisine.
Spices are central to Cape Malay cuisine and our cooking class started with a visit to the Atlas Trading Spice Shop, opposite Tolker’s house, with a guide from Andulela. Here workers rush about filling orders and stuffing brown paper bags with aromatic spices, scooped from jute sacks, destined for homes and restaurants across Cape Town.
The spices play a starring role in our next dish, a chicken curry. Made with green chilli, garlic, ginger, curry leaves, fennel, coriander, cumin, turmeric and a dash of honey to counteract any bitterness, the aromatic dish is rich and heady. As an accompaniment, we quickly make a tomato and onion sambal by combining finely chopped tomato and onion with white vinegar, black pepper, salt, sugar, fresh coriander and Tolker’s not-so-secret ingredient: a dollop of apricot jam.
Next, we tackle samosas. These delicious little fried savoury parcels are some of the best finger food ever invented, but we’ve never made them before as they always seemed too fiddly and deep-frying is messy. ‘Tyra’ gives us a withering stare worthy of a television soap opera, before instructing us how to make these correctly.
While the meat and spice filling has already been prepared, it takes us a few attempts before we perfect the technique of making a cone shape with the pastry, and filling it with the right amount of mix, before sealing the parcel into its traditional triangular shape. It takes a while before our creations are considered worthy of their time in the fryer.
The cooking soon winds up and we’re all sitting around Tolker’s dining table enjoying our morning’s work while her grandkids run about the house. The roti are amazing: light and fluffy, yet strong enough to wrap around a good chunk of fragrant chicken curry. The chilli bites and samosas are the ultimate finger food: the heat and quality of the oil has produced fried food that’s not overly greasy and tastes fresh. As the Muslim call to prayer rings out, Tolker surprises us with a plate of koeksisters – sticky, fluffy, syrup-coated doughnuts that we wash down with perfumed tea.
While we’ve learned a great deal about hearty Cape Malay cuisine, we’ve also learned a lot about ubuntu – through kneading bread, shaping samosas and sharing a stovetop together. Some locals fear that this once-poor neighbourhood is gentrifying and losing the flavour that gave it its soul. But as far as we can see it’s in safe hands, so long as residents like Tolker keep alive its culinary traditions, and the local spice shops continue to deal in such earthy delights. Just don’t pop around to Tyra’s place looking for a free feed while she’s busy. After all, even ubuntu has its limits.
INGREDIENTS
3 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp vegetable oil
Water
250g soft butter
Vegetable oil for frying
METHOD
Combine flour, salt and baking powder in a large bowl. Add oil to mixture and rub it in with fingertips until crumbs form. Add water gradually and combine to create soft, elastic dough. Cover and leave in a warm place for three minutes. Take enough dough to form a tennis ball–sized shape and roll out on a floured surface to form a dinner plate–sized disc. Spread butter on the dough. Roll up the disc to form a cigar shape, hold at either end, then gently swing like a skipping rope until it doubles in length. Place the dough ‘rope’ back on the bench and roll each end inward to form two spiral ‘snail’ shapes. Place one on top of other, covering with tea towel for 30 minutes. Roll out each one to plate-sized flat discs. Fry in hot oil until golden brown on both sides for about two minutes. Once cool enough to hold, clap roti between hands. Serve warm with a curry.
After a short but hot and dusty taxi ride across Togo’s capital city Lomé, we pull up outside the wooden gates to the Marché des Féticheurs and, somewhat reluctantly, cough up the inflated entrance fee for tourists.
I had expected a typically crowded, bustling African marketplace, but it’s just a barren car park with a line of wooden stalls up against the far side. Stacked in among crudely made tourist trinkets and other assorted junk are shrivelled monkey’s heads, animal skins, squashed lizards and tangles of slightly mouldy-looking snakes. Some of these magical ingredients will be incorporated by marabouts (holy men with supernatural powers) into malevolent juju rituals, while other fetishes will be purchased in the hope of gaining luck, love or money.
Many poor West Africans, rather than investing in education, health or housing, would rather spend what little money they have on fetishes that they believe will bring them good luck in exams or easy wealth. If these magically imbued trinkets fail to deliver upon their promises, then it is because they failed to invest enough; if they do get lucky, it only serves to reinforce superstitious belief, and such illusions of power can quickly become addictive.
It is not only the poor and the powerless who fall under the spell of voodoo and witchcraft: many of West Africa’s leaders and wealthy elites are drenched in the bloody and sacrificial culture of juju-marabou. When a shiny new BMW pulls in through the gates, the stallholders quickly abandon us to their grisly collections, and rush over into a rising storm of dust. Apparently the new arrivals are rich Nigerians who regularly journey to the Fetish Market. They are known to spend up to US$10,000 in a single visit. Such huge amounts of money, being offered for particularly rare or powerful magical ingredients, act as a great temptation to the poor and powerless: in Liberia and Sierra Leone, bodies have often been found emptied of their organs. The disturbing trend in East Africa of murdering albinos for their hearts and livers has recently spread to West Africa.
Once the wealthy Nigerians have left with whatever they had come for, the Vodusi (voodoo priests) lead us into a poorly lit back room and sit us down. They hand each of us a wooden bowl and proceed to hold up a series of fetishes they have blessed, giving a brief explanation of each object’s special powers, before dropping one of each into our bowls. One of the fetishes is an ugly little figure, with a sprouting of dried grass hair – it is supposed to protect your house. Another is a special necklace made of 51 herbs – they seem a bit vague about what that is supposed to do. They are all poorly made. I’m really not sure what I’m doing here but it all becomes clear when they ask us how much we would like to pay for the contents of our bowls. I tell them I’m not interested, as politely as I can manage, and hand back their offerings. The priest looks a bit disappointed in me and places a small pendant in my hand as a ‘gift’, which he assures me will guarantee good fortune when travelling. He then asks me how much I would like to donate and makes a polite suggestion of an appropriate amount that is clearly absurd. I hand that back as well. I don’t need it – the Gods of Travel are already with me. They then ask me to leave the room so that they can talk to my travelling mate Dave in private. A few minutes later, he emerges clutching a small plastic bag containing two small, crudely knocked-up figures. He had somehow managed to bargain them down from 60,000 CFA to 32,000 (about US$45). Apparently he has always wanted to own a ‘genuine’ voodoo fetish.
No nature experience is more primal and stirring that staring into the eyes of a gorilla and seeing your soul reflected back in the gaze of your ancient, primate ancestors.
Hidden deep within the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of southern Uganda, the Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Camp is a pure jungle awakening. Get back to nature among the mountainous terrain of volcanoes and waterfalls, while residing within a natural, yet luxurious retreat.
Take a trek to seek out the marvellous mountain mammals; if you’re lucky, curious gorillas may even venture into the campgrounds for an up close and personal visit.
After a day of trekking, private bathtubs in the campsite overlooking the jungle canopy are perfect for soaking and wildlife spotting as you wind down for the night. The onsite spa uses natural South African indigenous plants and local produce, including avocadoes and bananas, for organic wellness in the wild.
It is well worth the early pre dawn start to drift above the Masai; the only sound being the rushes of flame as the balloon pilot occasionally heats the air that keeps you afloat. It is certainly a whole new perspective to watch a lone elephant leaving a winding grass wake as the sunlight spills over the Mara or to look down on a giraffe nibbling an Acacia tree.
Outside of the game viewing the views from a hot air balloon highlights the beauty and vastness of the Masai Mara in a way that is impossible in a traditional open top vehicle.
One of you needs naps beneath a palm tree between meals; the other wants to plunge into the water, pull dinner from the ocean and take the windsurfer for a spin. Do all this and more on the Quirimbas Archipelago, one of the few parts of the earth where the marine environment remains largely untouched by human hands. Lying just off the coast of Mozambique, the archipelago consists of 12 major islands, about 20 smaller outcrops and any number of sandbar beaches.
One of the cultural gems is Ibo Island, with its strong Arab and Portuguese influences. Stay at Ibo Island Lodge, where there are just 14 rooms and a private sandbar beach for complete separation from the rest of the world – if only for a few hours. For divers, this is a must-visit. Shallow sites swarming with tropical life are suitable for newcomers, while those with a few stamps in their logbooks will want to hit the staggeringly beautiful drop-offs. One popular spot is the southern tip of Matemo Island, where you can see dolphins, turtles, groupers and stingrays in the drift.
I am pretty much naked inside the third and hottest steam room of a neighbourhood hammam in the ancient walled city of Fez. The attendant is applying rhassoul, a fine mineral-rich clay mask enriched with Morocco’s famous restorative argan oil, to my pink glowing skin, which she has just scrubbed with a zeal most Westerners would reserve for dirty floors. There must be 50 voluptuous local women here with me, some with fussy toddlers, others accompanied by prepubescent girls whose curious eyes can’t help straying towards the scrawny stranger.
I’d wanted to get under the skin of this most sacred and secret of Morocco’s cities – I just didn’t expect the experience to verge on literal. Sure, in Marrakesh’s fancy resort spas there are rarified private hammams, all marble benches and tiptoeing staff catering to precious Western sensibilities. Here, I’m washing – and sweating – in the midst of a convivial and noisy scene the way people have done for centuries, before homes had access to running water. My young guide Aisha (who I met just this morning) is lathering herself beside me before she sloshes a bucket of cold water over both of us. It is hotter than a pistol in here and we move to the outer steam room to start cooling off. In the communal changing rooms, the married women dress in pretty underwear, Western clothes and, finally, kaftans and head scarves, then we all file out into a chilly November evening as the last call to prayer rings out from the local mosque.
Fez is the cultural and spiritual heart of Morocco, its UNESCO World Heritage-listed medina the world’s largest car-free urban area. American writer and longtime Moroccan resident Paul Bowles called it “an enchanted labyrinth sheltered from time”, and today people live and work in its 9000 laneways much the same way as they have done for a thousand or so years. Donkeys remain the main form of transport. Long lines of mourners still visit the tomb of its founder, Moulay Iddriss II, the great-great-grandson of the prophet Mohammed, while its University of Al-Karaouine, founded in the ninth century, is the world’s oldest institution of higher learning.
On my first visit to Fez I had felt very much the tourist with an official guide leading me along a hackneyed path of historical highlights and shopping meccas, where I’d bargained for leather, carpet and jewellery in government-approved shops. Yet I was fascinated by this place of secrets, of veiled women and hooded men navigating narrow passageways that weave between high windowless walls. It was so radically different to Marrakesh, six hours drive to the south, which has become a sort of sub-Saharan Costa Brava, with mega-resorts and nightclubs fed by a constant stream of budget flights filled with sun-starved Europeans. Fez, on the other hand, followed a fervent daily rhythm in a time capsule, like a lost tribe in the middle of a maze, unaware that the rest of the world had moved into the twenty-first century.
It was time to take a different tack on my next visit.
A new energy is palpable in Fez, as British and French (as well as a few Moroccans) renovate its exquisite riads into boutique hotels, with artisanal, culinary and cultural tours on offer to help visitors understand the intimate fabric of life in the world’s most enduring medieval Islamic settlement. They are just the last in a long line of Berbers, Andalusians, Jews and Arabs who have come to call Fez home. While a few short years are but a blip on the Fez timeline, these newcomers celebrate its traditions and are helping adventurous souls peel away the layers of Fez culture, one hammam scrub at a time.
One morning, for instance, as roosters crow, Aisha picks me up at Dar Finn, a guesthouse painstakingly restored by Brits Beccie Eve and Paul O’Sullivan, who feel more like long-lost friends than hosts. “Fez is perfect for us,” says Beccie. “Paul has been working so long with African NGOs, he simply could not envision a suburban life in the Midlands.”
We walk over to the home of Olya and Rasheed in the Rcif district and step through their heavy wooden doorway into a courtyard suffused with birdcalls and the scent of orange blossoms. I spend the morning with them taking a cooking class and learning about Moroccan family life. Olya, dressed in casual sweatpants, dons an emerald embroidered kaftan and purple scarf and grabs a shopping basket to take us to her local market to pick up lamb and couscous, tomatoes, eggplants, garlic, cauliflower and peppers. On our return, Olya’s mother, Leyla, shows me how to knead flour, water and yeast in a ceramic bowl to make the daily bread. We then caramelise onions and steam the lamb tagine with a kaleidoscope of spices before moving onto pastilla, combining a fricassee of pigeon with chillies and cumin and layering it between thin layers of pastry dough.
I trade stories with Olya about parenting as she breastfeeds her daughter, while her mother whips up three delectable cooked vegetable salads. Then, in a time-honoured procession, Aisha and I follow local children to take the risen loaves of bread to the communal oven for baking. Every neighbourhood in the medina has five essential institutions: an oven, hammam, water fountain, mosque and school, and it is the children who do the bread runs so their mums don’t have to don their kaftans and scarves twice more each day. Sitting down to the family feast in the courtyard, I’m shown how to use the bread to scoop up the melt-in-your-mouth meat and vegetables; no other utensils required. Rasheed then prepares mint tea in a silver teapot and proudly shows me their wedding album, with Olya wearing seven elaborate outfits that culminate in a magnificent white-silk kaftan.
My appetite whetted for more adventures, I meet the owners of Plan-it Fez, who organised my family cooking class and hammam experience, among their many culinary, artisanal and cultural tours. Australian Michele Reeves is married to a local Fassi (Fez local) and Gail Leonard is a Yorkshire lass who started her immersion in the exotic at the London School of Oriental and African Studies and lived in Berlin and Tokyo before moving to Fez five years ago.
“Life happens on the inside here and our goal is to give people access to that inner world. Food is the glue…it offers a fast route into Fassi life,” Gail explains as she guides me on a fabulous souk tasting trail. After learning about myriad dates and spices, and how halal butchers kill the chickens in cages outside their shops (“they cut their throats right, left, right so that they die looking towards Mecca”), we head to the honey souk located in a traditional fondouk workshop.
According to the Qur’an, the lord inspires bees to roam freely to eat as many flowers as possible so that their nectar is both delicious and has health-giving properties. “This,” says Gail, “is very important in the medina, where faith is an essential ingredient of daily life.” We taste honey from orange blossom, thyme, lavender, fig, eucalyptus and acacia, and sample culinary argan oil and salted, aged butter. Moving onto street food, we sit down with the locals to enjoy a bowl of b’sarra, dried fava bean soup laced with garlic and olive oil, which I have to admit is more palatable than the steamed sheep’s head and stuffed camel spleen.
I move to Riad Idrissy, painstakingly restored by English designer and chef Robert Johnstone, whose other passion is the Ruined Garden next door, where he creates private banquets of slow-cooked mechwi lamb (roasted meat) as well as Roman and Sephardic Jewish feasts, each a tribute to his culinary anthropological research. He also offers lunchtime street food in the garden that “knocks off some of the rough edges” of what Gail has shown me in the markets. “Sometimes visitors, however adventurous, look like they’ve been caught in the headlights,” he laughs. “Walking around the medina is such a visceral experience.”
Thoroughly fortified now, I join an artisanal tour with Welsh resident and artist Jessica Stephens. Jessica started sourcing crafts for theatre designers five years ago and fell in love with the city. “Nothing is false or polished here. You really feel like you are stepping into something very authentic. It is like walking through a living museum,” she says.
We start in the Sbarine dyeing quarter, one of the oldest streets of the medina, where carpet weavers and tailors bring their threads to be dyed. We meet Mohammed, a man whose hands are permanently stained indigo. Jess pays all the artisans for their time, to change the age-old hustling dynamic. Almost all the craftspeople we meet are called Mohammed, testament to the fact that crafts and spiritual life are intricately linked in Fez. There is Mohammed, the last bone worker on Comb Street, who fashions buttons and combs from sheep horns. Then there’s Mohammed, a metal worker in the Seffarine Square copper-guild district, who is crafting a 100-chicken pot, the mellifluous beating of hammer on metal ringing through the air. And, at the Nourredine family cactus-silk weaving cooperative, another Mohammed tells us, as he clacks jewel-bright threads on his ancient loom, that he has no idea how long his family has been in this fondouk (business) because their craft goes back too many generations.
We visit the leather souks above the Fez River where, mint leaves pressed to our noses, Jess explains the centuries-old process taking place below us. Men in dye-stained shorts spend their lives washing, kneading and colouring fetid goat, camel, sheep and cow hides in huge open-air vats to transform them into Fez’s famed butter-soft leather, which is dyed with the likes of henna (orange), indigo (blue), cedar wood (brown), poppy (red) and saffron (yellow). And the secret to its suppleness: well, it’s the extra soaking in pigeon poo – whose ammonia acts as a softening agent – followed by kneading with bare feet.
Finally, Jess takes me to the Centre for Training and Qualification of Craft in Fez, set up by the King of Morocco’s Mohammed V Foundation. Here we watch young Moroccans learning ancient crafts such as carpet knotting, basket weaving, babouche making and plaster engraving. I buy gifts in the shop at fixed (and remarkably low) prices, knowing that all the money goes directly to the artisans.
I end my visit at Mike Richardson’s Cafe Clock, tucked in a 250-year-old former courtyard house behind the enigmatic thirteenth century water clock, whose mechanisms have been, rather appropriately, lost to time. With nfar trumpets used in Sufi music hanging from the ceiling and free wi-fi at its tables, Cafe Clock embodies the richness of Fez past and present.
“Music, art, faith and craft are intrinsically linked within the medina but often only within a familial environment,” says Mike. “I decided to create a fun and relaxed cultural cafe to meld the best of the best. Our ethos is that all can join in…at the cooking school, jam sessions, lectures, live concerts and film screenings.”
And they do. The night I’m there, gnaoua musicians play to a rapt audience, half comprising curious tourists, half locals. The young Fassi staff, their eyes bright with pride, dance with anyone who is keen. Everyone else is too busy eating Cafe Clock’s signature camel burgers, which, I admit, go down a treat.
It’s Summer in the Kalahari and the temperature, normally an energy-sapping 30-something degrees Celsius, is pushing 44. The wind is picking up and purple clouds, the colour of a bruise, are gathering. Serious rain is on the way. A herd of skittish springbok antelope hightails it to the dunes, and the swirling sand fills our mouths and eyes with grit. With no chance of picking up fresh tracks, the search for our big pride male lion is abandoned until daybreak.
Back at camp, while turning chops on the braai (South African for barbecue), we’re treated to a mother of an electrical storm above the distant dune ridges. It lights up the campsite with long flashes of piercing white light, like someone’s flicking the switch on a fluorescent lamp. Luckily the rain doesn’t come until much later, but when it does, the relentless drilling noise it makes on our tent means we’re hardly rested when it’s time to hit the trail again at sunrise.
At least it’s stopped raining. Provided we get out before anyone can spoil the trail with their tyre tracks, the wet sand should preserve any fresh pugmarks. The search is on for the black-maned bruiser who, like a tawny-skinned Tony Soprano, heads up the local pride. We’ve named him Big Daddy because he’s a massive brute and has recently fathered cubs. They’re old enough to be tumbling along with the family group, so there’s a chance we’ll catch up with them. Although, in these parts, the mortality rate for young lions is high. Abandonment and starvation are common, if the jackals don’t finish them first.
The lions of the Kalahari are legendary, topping the bucket list of every self-respecting bushwhacker in southern Africa. Experts will tell you there’s no real difference in physique between them and other African lions; that other lions can have luxuriant dark manes like this and other males can grow just as big. But they’ll also not deny that when you see a Kalahari male standing proud in this arid landscape he’ll appear bigger, more handsome and far more imposing than his savannah cousins.
We’re staying at Mata-Mata rest camp on the South African side of the remote Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. This vast national park, straddling the border with Botswana, is renowned for its big cat encounters. In addition to the famous lions, it’s also one of the best places on the planet to see a cheetah at full tilt, while the leopards, elsewhere shy and elusive, can be as bold as brass. Mata-Mata nudges the border with Namibia. The tourist track from here runs parallel with and close to the dry riverbed of the Auob, which flows only once every one hundred years. The open terrain is prime territory for wildlife watching, although it’s not the place to tick off the big five – there are no elephants, buffaloes or rhinos here. Instead you get close encounters. On successive game drives over subsequent days, you can follow individual animals, observing their behaviour and piecing together their stories. Along the way there’s the chance to meet some of the other critters – meerkats, ground squirrels, foxes, jackals, giraffe, brown hyena – who play cameo roles in this daily drama.
Despite its stifling temperatures and dramatic storm bursts, summer is one of the best times to see lions, who lounge close to the waterholes and patrol the riverbeds where prey like wildebeest and gemsbok gather after rain.
From the moment we leave camp our eyes are fixed downwards, scanning the trail before us. The secret stories of the Kalahari night are laid bare in this complex tracery of animal tracks. Here, there are the tiny tramlines of a tok-tokkie beetle, so-named because he makes a ‘tokking’ sound as he bumps his rear end on the ground to attract a mate. There, the jaywalking steps of an opportunistic jackal. He got sidetracked, digging out a rodent burrow, before moseying on his way. Swirling hoof prints highlight where a herd of wildebeest thundered over the sandy banks in a panic, disturbed during their nocturnal feeding.
Following tracks like this is the best chance to pick up the resident pride male before he disappears into the shade to rest. Lions can spend 20-plus hours sleeping each day so there’s only a narrow window of opportunity to see him at his majestic best.
It means skipping breakfast, but a combination of adrenaline and panic fuels the morning’s search. Tactics are discussed. Should we stake out Craig Lockhart waterhole, a popular meeting place for his pride, or Dalkeith waterhole on the edge of his range? For six days we’ve followed our lion through this wilderness in the hope he’ll lead us to his youngsters, but in the past 48 hours we haven’t seen a whisker.
Our attention is caught by the ‘wee-chee-choo-chip-chip’ flight calls of sandgrouse on their way to water. The birds must be an omen because not only do we notice there’s a huge rainbow hanging over the dunes, but there in the road is also a set of plate-sized prints, unmistakably lion. We slow to a crawl following the heavy impressions, picturing the alpha male laying claim to this track in the dead of night with his swinging, muscular movements. He might be anywhere by now and we could be stymied if his tracks leave the road, but the terrain here is open and, unless he’s already flat out under a thorn tree, there’s a faint chance we might still pick him up.
Then we’re on his tail, literally, being hypnotised by the cocoa-coloured pompom of fur flicking from side to side. Some 250 kilos of Africa’s largest carnivore is nonchalantly planting one gigantic paw in front of the other, creating the very trail we’re following. He’s not bothered by our intrusion. Even the thrum of the approaching engine isn’t enough to divert him from his progress. It’s only when we draw to a complete stop that he turns his massive head, disdainfully, to face us.
It’s difficult to describe just how vulnerable you feel when your eyes meet the unwavering stare of a predatory lion. We’re close enough to see the scars on his muzzle. From the look of his full stomach, he has been away on a kill.
The male stops, shakes out his mane then lifts his tail to scent-mark the nearby bushes. He yawns before settling down on the sandy bank by the track. There’s no sign of the other pride members. It’s highly likely this is the end of the morning’s excitement so we relax a bit and have a snack, as you do when you’re parked next to a huge male lion.
Suddenly he’s alert, staring intently beyond our vehicle. Through binoculars we make out the distinct shapes of two lionesses ambling this way. There, among their legs, are three fat cubs. When the youngsters join the male, they begin pulling his tail and play-fighting in the shade right by us. They’re comical to watch. One even peeps out at us from behind a tree trunk, fascinated, no doubt, by the constant clicking of our cameras.
The sighting is typical of the intimate wildlife encounters that reward your patience in this magical place. But heart-warming as this little domestic scenario may seem there is no room for sentiment or complacency. Big Daddy’s cubs may be safe for today but tomorrow in the Kalahari the daily struggle for survival starts over again.
It may be just to the north of South Africa and have some sights that would seem incredible to the average traveller – Victoria Falls and the Masvingo’s Great Zimbabwe ruins, a city built in a unique dry stone style, among them – but most tend to avoid Zimbabwe An unstable political situation caused by the compulsory acquisition of farming land and the human rights abuses committed by Robert Mugabe and his supporters made it a less than ideal place to kick back and relax, although visitor numbers are slowly increasing.
One of the reasons is the country’s standing as a wildlife management powerhouse. Tick off your game-viewing bucket list at one of the many game reserves, like Mana Pools on the Zambezi River with its elephants, hippos and crocodiles. For lions, leopards, Cape wild dogs, all number of grazing animals and the country’s largest number of elephants, Hwange National Park can’t be beaten, especially since there are a number of camping and accommodation options available there.
Harare is a surprisingly modern city, with plenty to offer visitors, including galleries and museums, lush parks, good food and browse-worthy markets.
It’s well known for safaris and sunsets, savannahs and strife. South Africa often makes wish-lists due to the Big Five, yet it doesn’t take much research to discover there’s a lot more to this complicated nation.
Head north for the best wildlife reserves, east for the coastline and south for the wine. Cosmopolitan Cape Town and its coast is a must-see, and opportunities to go cage diving with sharks or whale watching shouldn’t be missed. Take the time to explore the lush Drakensburg Mountains. Xhosa, Zulu and other indigenous cultures remain strong, and adventure sports and the braai (barbecue) rule everyday life. You may even grow to like biltong (dried meat). Try the zebra variety, cut paper thin and sprinkled with spices.
History is unavoidable in South Africa, whether it’s in visiting the sites of Mandela and the Freedom Fighters or going to a township where inequality is still rife. In the townships’ shebeens (unlicensed bars), you’ll banter with the locals while sipping the homebrew. Overall you’ll find a South African spirit that has been salvaged from the wilds of apartheid.
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