Charlene and I were fortunate enough to be able to travel to South Africa for three weeks last Fall, with a small group of people interested in birds, fauna and flora there. We spent a few days in and around Kruger National Park, where we saw lots of bird and animal life. We then traveled to Lesotho (a small mountain country imbedded within South Africa) by car (an adventure in itself!), which was quite interesting in its own right. Then we made our way to Durban, from which we flew to Cape Town. There we spent some incredible hours in Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, which has to be one of the floral wonders of the world. In addition to wonderous vistas of flowers and mountains, it also had a lot of neat birds.
Of course, no birding trip would be complete without a visit to some sewage lagoons, and we did travel to one on the Western shore with good results. We travelled down to the Cape of Good Hope, seeing besides some nice birds a few Southern Right Whales in close to shore.
After the group finished up, we took a pelagic trip for one morning, with good luck on the weather front (no seasickness!), and incredible views of all sorts of sea birds mobbing the trawler’s catches as they were hauled in.
Of course, we can only touch on the highlights in the brief time after the potluck dinner, but we’ll try to whet people’s appetites for all of the natural beauty and variety to be found in South Afrtica.