If he or she is worth their weight in salt, your guide will give you instructions and warnings throughout your African safari. You should heed these warnings. Other tourists, you might witness, may not heed these warnings but instead will flex their macho muscles which can lead to some bush entertainment. One such event I witnessed was down in the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania - an amazing caldera ten miles in circumference filled with wildlife. My guide and I had packed

I admire and rather enjoy dung beetles when I am in Africa. They are amazing creatures with a great sense of smell which they use to find the freshest of poo dropped from their favorite herbivore. A dung beetle can roll up to ten times their weight in poo. They do this either for food storage or for making a brooding ball. If it is for a brooding ball, you will see two beetles together often one is clinging to the ball catching a sometime bumpy ride to a soft spot in the

I left Olifants camp early morning knowing I had a 153-kilometer drive to Lower Sabie ahead and not wanting to miss a thing along the way. Not long after I got onto the H1-4 headed south – my first cup of coffee not even consumed - I came across a leopard in a tree with a dead impala hanging from a branch just off the road. Soon after I arrived, the leopard jumped from the tree and departed my viewing area before I could even think about taking a photograph. I sat – my hear

“Let’s go fishing”, my friend said. Tiger fish was to be the catch of the day. We arranged for a fishing guide early the next morning. I thought we would be fishing in a body of water that did not have hippos. Instead, I learned we would be fishing in the hippo rich Zambezi River there in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. When reality hit, I felt I had to bone up and be brave. The guide – a man about sixty years old who had fished that river most his life - parked his truck at a

As I gear up for my next trip to South Africa, including many nights in Kruger National Park, I start a pile of items to bring on the trip. My thoughts turns to what monkey repellent I will take this year; an air horn, a water squirter, rubber snakes... I've used them all during one trip or another to keep these cute, but monkeys at bay and away from my hut or tent. When they hear pots rattling in the outdoor kitchen as I begin to prepare food, the little menaces come scampe

I arrived at my bed and breakfast in Cape Town on June 4th after twenty-four hours of travel. The manager, during her tour of the beachfront guest house, pointed out the candles and matches provided in case of load shedding. Having friends in South Africa and following many South African social media sites, I'd heard of load shedding which is a rolling blackout; an intentionally engineered electrical power shutdown to various regions of the country at seemingly sporadic tim

In one of the amazing Punda Maria fixed tents, and after an amazing day, I slept like a baby until at some point in the night I heard a noise. It sounded as if something was plucking at an object and that object sounded crunchy and both the object as well as the unknown critter was not far from my bed. I sat up and searched my tent with a flashlight but saw nothing. I dismissed it as my over charged imagination then promptly went back to sleep. Only a few minutes later, the

In 2009, during my seventh trip to Kruger National Park, I realized I had become so familiar with Kruger that, on occasion, I would stop roadside and remember seeing the very sight I was looking at from a past visit. This park in South Africa is not small, it covers 7,332 square miles! Regardless of the vast size though, there are places so special they have become ingrained in my memory; forever if I am lucky. In 2007, I came upon a beautiful pond that was overflowing beca