Dear Readers, apart from our first day in South Africa, we have had absolutely stunning weather since our arrival, however today featured grey clouds and rain. But the West Coast National Park is stunning whatever the weather, and in some areas there were the sheets of yellow flowers that they show in the promotional literature..

Plus there are stunning sea views -and lagoon views –  sometimes you can see whales from the viewpoints, but apparently it’s the wrong time of year for the Right Whales to be passing.

There was a really friendly Grey Tit near the toilets – you can see their close relationship to our Great Tit.

And we actually saw some large mammals – a Gemsbok, a herd of Zebra and this stunning Bontebok. This species was hunted almost to extinction, but was brought back from the brink from a group of 17 individual animals. Today there are approximately 3,000 Bontebok. The one in the photo wandered over and passed our minibus with immense confidence.

And then we started the long journey back to Cape Town, but not before popping into a final bird hide, where two swallows were nesting. This bird was happily flying in and out of the hide.

The rain set in, and we headed back to Cape Town for the final days of our holiday. And we got our first views of Table Mountain – you may remember it was so grey that we couldn’t see it when we arrived.

Tomorrow, more botanising and bird-watching, and the chance of some penguins!

Cape Gannets (Morus capensis) at Bird Island

Dear Readers, today we had a visit to Bird Island at Lambert’s Bay, to have a look at the Cape Gannets. Although similar to the Gannets found in the UK, this bird is confined to southern Africa, and a large chunk of the population nest here. As always with. bird colony, there’s a lot going on, especially at this time of year, when couples from previous years are getting reacquainted, and young birds are attempting to pair up.

It’s not all about the gannets, though I could have sat and watched them for hours. There are also Cape Cormorants here…

…and Crowned Terns (plus a Hartlaub’s Gull)…

,,,all watched over by Harry, the presiding spirit of Bird Island, made entirely of flotsam and jetsam, and with a small bird nesting in his shoulder.

I would love to write a bit more about Bird Island, but it’s a 6 o’clock start again tomorrow, and so I’ll finish here. Only a few more days and it will be home time!

Dear Readers, today we spent all day up on the Nieuwoudtville plateau. As time is short, I just wanted to concentrate on two spots. The first was the Kokerboom (Quiver Tree) forest – these remarkable trees grow all the way up the side of the mountain, in arid conditions where you wouldn’t think anything could grow.

I’ve remarked before about the individuality of these trees – I guess that all trees are individuals (thinking of our great oaks and other splendid trees) but there’s something very idiosyncratic about Quiver trees. Maybe it’s the different bark patterns, and the different growing habits.

Apparently, last time our guide was here you could get out and wander through the trees. Alas, this time they were fenced off, presumably to protect them from people who would damage them. What a shame that people can’t be trusted to be respectful, but there we go. After all, people sometimes graffiti the trees in our local wood, so there are idiots everywhere.

Then we moved on to the waterfall just a few miles up the road. The view from the top made me quite dizzy!

There are 22 little waterfalls which all pour into this one.

All manner of birds and other creatures call this their home, but the most exciting birds we saw here were a group of Fairy Flycatchers, South Africa’s smallest bird. They were much too fast for me to get a photo, but here’s a shot of one so you can get the idea…

Fairy Flycatcher ((Stenostira scita) Photo By Francesco Veronesi , CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39952933

Close to one of the shallower pools we saw our old friends, the Milkweed locusts. They certainly seem to be everywhere!

Tomorrow we’re off to Lambert’s Bay to see the gannets. Very excited!

Dear Readers, the geology is the hidden hero of this part of the world – the landscapes are so breathtaking that it’s sometimes hard to convey them. But Letterklip, not far from the town of Garies in Namaqualand, combines ancient granite rocks with history.

‘Letterklip’ means ‘lettered rock’, and the stones are covered in writing from the Scottish Regiment that occupied the site from 1901-2 during the Boer/South African war.

In some places, the stones were fortified with dry stone walls.

But this is a site of great natural beauty as well, with some exquisite quiver trees.

And then there was this plant, which is rodent-pollinated, and has a very handsome tik-tok beetle in attendance.

This really was a remarkable site. I could see how these natural shapes have influenced sculptors throughout the ages.

And for good measure, the site was surrounded by troops of meerkats, and two rock kestrels were nesting amongst the stones.

It’s been a really busy day, but I wanted to share this experience with you. Now, it’s off to bed – there’s another busy day ahead tomorrow!

Dear Readers, today we spent the whole day in the Kamiesberg mountains above Kamieskroon, looking for interesting plants and for anything else we can find. The Kamiesberg range contains many granite ‘inslebergs’ – these are isolated granite domes which act almost as islands. Many plants can be found only on one of these inslebergs, so it makes plant hunting something of a joy. One particular flower that we found is so extraordinary that I’m going to leave it till last.

This succulent only flowers in the afternoon when it’s sunny – the rest of the time its leaves and flowers face down in a rather sad manner.

This is Gladiolus alatus, a beautiful red gladiolus that seems to love the granitic soil

Honestly, some of the ‘rock gardens’ are so beautiful that you’d think they’d been planted.

I sat on a rock under a tree and this bird turned up – a Large-billed Lark, if I’m not mistaken, and certainly living up to his name.

But when we got back to the hotel, we were shown this extraordinary flower. This is Anacampseros filamentosa, and it flowers for just one hour a day, at dusk. Sorry for the blurry photo! Low light and shaky hand.

With such a short flowering window, the question was always ‘what on earth pollinates this plant’? Well, one answer is ‘itself’ – the plant automatically self-pollinates for most of the time. This is not a great long term strategy, as cross pollination ensures genetic variation, but we did see some small flies around the plant, so maybe it is insect pollinated sometimes. Nature is so full of mysteries!

Tomorrow we head back south to the town of Vanrhynsdorp, with a visit to a private reserve to spot some plants. It’s going to be nearly 40 degrees, so let’s see how we do!

Angulate Tortoise making a break for it

Dear Readers, today we had a full day in the Namaqualand National Park, home to the highest concentration of succulent plants in the world, and more than a thousand endemic species. As previously mentioned, the vast sheets of orange and yellow daisies (including many gazanias) have finished, but there was still plenty to hold the attention.

Of course, me being me, I was greatly interested in the insects, like this blister beetle…

And this plant, a member of the borage family, was covered in bees and butterflies, including painted ladies which are all over the Western Cape at the moment.

The rock hyraxes are becoming firm favourites – they seem to be watching us from every rock. They remind me a lot of the marmots that we see in Austria, and I suspect that they occupy a similar ecological niche. However, the closest living relative of the hyrax is the elephant, so they are not related.

This next was a great surprise, however. What the hell is it?

This is a species of fungus, probably Podaxis beringamensis. For most of the time it grows happily in the termite mound, but every so often it breaks out. The termites probably don’t appreciate this, as it opens up the mound to infection and invasion, and I wonder if some of the debris around the base of the fungus is an attempt to repair the damage.

And how about this small army of locusts? We’re seeing a lot of these about this year, and I’m wondering if the early rains have contributed. These are Red Milkweed locusts, and they seem to spend lots of time hanging around and munching on the spring vegetation.

This was a great introduction to the plants and animals of the Namaqualand region, and I’ll be posting more when my wi-fi signal permits. Off for a trip around the Kamieskroon mountain range tomorrow. Onwards!

Dear Readers, today we left Clanwilliam  to head north to Namaqualand. Normally Kamieskroon is the heart of the spring flower display in early September, but this year the rains arrived a whole two months early, so the fields of orange and yellow daisies that get so much attention have been and gone. Nevertheless, this is an area that’s still full of interest for anyone interested in natural history.

On the way north, we gradually moved from the sandstone landscapes that we’d seen previously to granite, with a corresponding change in soil, plants and animals. But one of the most extraordinary manifestations of nature’s ability to adapt was in the quartz fields that we passed. On the face of it these are extremely inhospitable areas of quartz pebbles, but in this hot, dry region the quartz reflects the sun, reducing the temperature at soil level up to 10 degrees centigrade cooler than the surrounding air. The plants that grow here have adapted to low rainfall, high temperatures and thin soil in a variety of ways, and many of them are endemic – approximately 80 percent of them are found nowhere else on earth.

You do have to get your eye in, though, as many of them are extremely tiny.

These tiny stone plants, for example, store water in their fleshy leaves. They come in a variety of colours but look rather like jelly beans to me.

These plants spread themselves out to make the most of rainfall when it does arrive, and also have deep taproots

Some even have ‘conventional’ flowers, but these are always small and delicate.

When our guide announced that we were going to walk around on the quartz field I wasn’t expecting to find it as fascinating as I did, but it is truly a storehouse of remarkable plants. So remarkable, in fact, that our guide told us that these plants are now being poached for overseas collectors, hence my not giving details of which particular quartz field we visited. The chance of these plants surviving outside their home is so slim that stealing them makes even less sense.

And then we arrived at the Kamieskroon Hotel, which not only has a Siamese cat and three dogs, but, by some strange quirk of fate, has given me a whole apartment to myself, with full kitchen, sitting room, dining room and two bedrooms. I have no idea how this happened, but I’m just going to embrace my fortune. Tomorrow it’s off to the Namaqualand National Park, to see what we can find. See you there!

On the trail

Well, Readers, after a lovely night in the Yellow Aloe guest house in Clanwilliam, we headed off into the Cedarberg mountains to follow a trail that has been followed for thousands of years by the San people of South Africa. They have left their marks over generations in rock paintings. Nothing really prepares you for the landscape here: I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything remotely like it. The mountains are sandstone, and carved by the wind over generations into extraordinary shapes and colours. Add to this the lichens, the plants and the animals, and you have a truly unique habitat.

As yesterday, I need some time to digest what I’ve seen, and in some cases to identify it, but I wanted to share some photos with you now.

We saw some wonderful lizards…

….some spectacular birds, especially this Red Bishop…

and this lovely elephant shrew, a first for me…

There was also this spectacular cloud…

And then there was the rock art, of course. In some cases, wind and lichen have made the paintings (all made with ochre pigment) difficult to work out, in other cases they’re better preserved because they’re less accessible.

This one shows two dinosaur-like creatures on the left, and on the right, someone who appears to be about to dive into the water.

This one shows a zebra on the left, and below it a handprint. On the right is a group of people walking.

This zebra foal was probably my favourite!

The paintings range in age from 6,000 years to about 400 years – as was the case with the rock paintings I saw in Namibia, the San people were nomadic, and these paintings would have served a variety of purposes over time as they were added to by each subsequent generation. They remain enigmatic.

I was a bit nervous about today – clambering over rocks isn’t the easiest thing what with my balance issues, and the last thing I wanted to do was have another fall. But we all helped one another over the difficult bits, and in fact complete strangers were happy to give a hand up when the going got tough. And the reward is so great. What a magnificent country this is.

On the Shale Trail

Dear Readers, after a damp start to the holiday we headed off to the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden, close to the town of Worcester where we spent the night. This is an amazing place, the only botanical garden in Africa to specialise in succulent plants, and it has a ‘Shale Trail’, where the plants are wild, and a more formal botanical garden, which includes Karoo Desert plants, but not necessarily from the immediate region.I hope you’ll forgive me for not remembering the names of all the plants that we saw on the Shale Trail, and if you know, do give me a shout in the comments – the holiday is pretty full on, with not a lot of time for consulting with my guide books. I’m learning, but gradually! However, I did want to share some of my favourite photos, which I hope show the sheer variety of desert-adapted plants that thrive in the harsh conditions of the Karoo.

The more formal garden had some truly astonishing plants too…

I did really like the Quiver trees, with their leathery bark. Each one is so individual.

And this was a Chinese Lantern bush, such a pretty shrub!

And, of course, we saw some animals….this Angulate Tortoise, heading off back into the Karoo…

A Cape Bunting…

And how about this beauty – I think it’s a Malachite Sunbird.

And then, we headed off to the restaurant to have something to eat. This was a quirky place – it had an old Canadian organ, and the owner belted out a few tunes for us…

Plus there were a few outsized insects hanging around…

But excitingly, we saw a yellow mongoose…

Well, that was quite enough for one day, and we then headed off to Clanwilliam. Tomorrow we’re off to the Cedarberg Mountains, a UNESCO heritage site because of its extraordinary wind-carved rocks. We hope to have a look at the rock carvings of the San people, and, this being a botanical tour, to find a few more plants to look at. Let’s see how we get on!

Well Readers, after an overnight flight I’ve arrived in Cape Town and met the rest of the group for our Naturetrek plant tour. Unusually, there are three couples and no less than five single female travellers, so I’m not floating around as a gooseberry. Everyone seems really pleasant so far, and we set off for our trip to the town of Worcester in high spirits. As you can possibly just see in the photo above, however, Table Mountain had disappeared behind a blanket of rain, and so the day continued. By the time we got to our lunch stop, the rain was absolutely torrential. And so we didn’t get to the Botanical Garden to see the tortoises after all, though hopefully there will be lots more tortoises in our future.

To get to the other side of the mountains, though we had to go through the Huguenot Tunnel, a rather remarkable piece of engineering – it’s  3.9 kilometre s long, and was completed in 1988. It’s named for the Huguenot refugees who came to Cape Town originally in the 17th century, after the Edict of Fontainebleu outlawed protestantism in France.

I was wondering what these structures were – apparently they’re made by mole rats (not the naked sort). Also known as Blesmols, these little chaps spend most of their lives digging tunnels with their incisor teeth, Rather like the moles in the UK, these animals are rarely seen, though signs of their presence are everywhere.

Blesmol 0r African mole-rat (Photo by By Sharry Goldman – Cropped from: Seney ML, Kelly DA, Goldman BD, Šumbera R, Forger NG (2009) Social Structure Predicts Genital Morphology in African Mole-Rats. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7477. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007477.g001, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8103555)

Tonight we’re staying over in Worcester, at the Habit Guest House. Why it has that name is anyone’s guess, but it’s a very fine building, though the omnipresent window bars and razor wire take some getting used to at first. Plus, this is a first…

So I’m off to make a cup of Roibos tea, and then it’s an early dinner and bed. The weather forecast looks much better tomorrow, so fingers crossed!