Common Sense and Whiskey

Wild Horses

 

The coast is always close on Easter Island, and waves get up a good head of steam before crashing in. Drive out of Hanga Roa, the only town, and horses graze along the shore. They're self-sufficient and unfettered by fences. With the surf pounding behind them they make you feel free, too.

Sourpusses say they should be culled, environmentalists and preservationists, mostly. Those people say their hooves do more environmental damage than human feet.

Some Rapanui keep horses domestically and none of the horses, even the ones out on the coast, are wild, strictly speaking. They all belong to somebody, and they’re branded. But since there’s nowhere for them to go, they go where they will.

They sustain themselves and they look hardy enough, but you wish that with ownership came responsibility. Water is hard to come by for humans and animals alike, but no one provides for watering the “wild” ones.

They told me that if a horse dies on its own, more often than not its owner is nowhere to be found and it will decay where it drops. Everyone who passes will endure the flies and the smell.

There’s a curious driving habit on the island: Traffic maintains the center of the road, moving right only for oncoming cars. It’s because if you accidentally hit and kill a horse, shortly comes the profiteering outrage of the bereaved owner.

“They’re not valuable until you kill one. Then you might as well have murdered the king.”

 

•••••

More photos here.

Wildlife - Wednesday HDR

The hippo family lives along the Kazinga Channel and the colobus monkey somewhere alongside the road, both in Uganda, the horses are from rural Finland, the eagle from the Munich Tierpark Hellabrunn Zoo and the parrots from Antigua, Guatemala. All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here.

Zambian Democracy

Nice to see the peaceful transfer of power to a new President in Zambia. Had a little email chat with the people at Kapani Lodge in the South Luangwa National Park this morning. They said President Banda was gracious in defeat, that it's all very exciting and they're proud. Best of luck to incoming President Sata.

Several years ago we spent a week at Kapani Lodge and other Norman Carr Safaris properties in South Luangwa. They're really great people. Couldn't have been nicer. Here's one of their bush camps. That's the "honeymoon suite" in the background.

Check out some wildlife photos in the Zambia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Turtles!

It's not everyday....

Elephants Get the HDR Treatment

While we're spending some time on narratives from Africa, this week's Wednesday HDR comes from Uganda. These elephants live in the Queen Elizabeth National Park. The photo is a single shot re-exposed multiple times at different EVs and combined in Photomatix, then finished in Photoshop. Click it to make it bigger.

Another Monday Morning. Problem?

HDR of a baboon at the Tierpark Hellabrunn, Munich. It's a single shot re-exposed +3 to -3 EV and recombined in Photomatix Pro, then desaturated and sharpened in Photoshop CS5, with effects applied from Nik Software. Click it to make it bigger.

See more HDRs, more Animals & Wildlife and more photos from Germany at EarthPhotos.com.

Just a Wee Bit of a Safari Story

Elephant at sunset, South Luangwa park.

I've just come across this entirely by accident, and I don't know if I've seen it since I wrote it. I pass it on as it is, with a photo or two, and I'll see if I can find any more notes from this trip.

26 May, 2002, Kapani Lodge, Zambia: Sure the getting here was miserable. Thirteen thousand one hundred four kilometers was the first plane ride - leave shore over Charleston, South Carolina and don't see it again until Cape Town. On the map it was as if the continents were mountain peaks and we slid down the valley called the Atlantic.

That got us to Cape Town where it never dawned but rather the distinct gray of winter merely brightened up. Nine more hours of airports, and these were the difficult hours, hours 18 - 26 straight in public places, but finally, Lusaka.

Familiar traits of the developing world that once made us uneasy - only because of their familiarity - flooded back and this time were welcoming: The scent of wood fires, a banner marking independence (37 years ago) over the airport road, dust, pedestrians, desultory construction, and then the Holiday Inn and our room, where the air conditioning worked.

It would shortly be dark and after thirty-plus hours now we threw off our travel clothes and immediately went to find dinner. We never planned to see more of Lusaka than the view of a few concrete high rise blocks from the third floor elevator landing.

There was an Irish pub in the hotel - I think they called it McGinty's - and we downed a number of the local brew, called Mosi after the indigenous name for Victoria Falls, Mosi O Tunya, or the smoke that thunders. By now we'd drunk beer and napped and flown and done all that over again a few times. A buffet opened at 6:30 and we gorged and then slept twelve hours straight.

Then it was Saturday and a man named Webby delivered us back to the same airport and after hunting we found a woman named Beatrice from the copper belt (up by Lubumbashi, Congo where everybody's an expat in the mine trade and therefore a place that needs a travel agent, which Beatrice was). Beatrice was going where we were going. Nobody else seemed to be until finally we hunted down Ryan, a boy pilot from Durban, and finally we rounded up Kitty and Meva who were also thoroughly lost, and we loaded up the Cessna and left.

Which Way to Brazil?

Everybody gathered in the Conservation Center for a short talk shortly before dusk, and we all walked out to the end of the road and waited while Conservation Serivce people went out onto the beach with flashlights to find nesting turtles. It didn't take long.

We were on Ascension Island, South Atlantic Ocean. From here, incredibly, these green turtles found their way all the way over to Brazil, and then came back to lay eggs on this little tiny speck of land in the middle of the ocean. How did they do that?

Here's a really fascinating article on the lastest thinking.

See this photo and others in the Ascension Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Africa: Couple of Things

Along the lines of the previous post, once you've used the Global Rich List to see how you're doing, consider:

We once met a Canadian man in Johannesburg. He had been contributing to the cause, working with the U.N. in southern Congo and now he meant to earn it back, in private business in the Copper Belt around Lubumbashi, in Katanga Province near Zambia. He was bringing his wife to approve the deal, and he promised they would live well, right on a golf course.

This Reuters article suggests he was right. It says that some 50 million of Congo's 67 million people live on less than two dollars a day, but in Lubumbashi,

"Membership at the governor's new gym costs $300 (193 pounds) a month, the gastronomic menu at the new $350-a-night hotel is going down a treat and traffic guided by lemon yellow-uniformed police runs smoothly under sunny skies."

*****

And just a quick note - spend a few minutes with the wildlife portfolio of Tobias Seiderer. Some outstanding stuff. This photo of one of the tree climbing lions in the Ishasha Wilderness in Uganda, is from EarthPhotos.com's Uganda, Animals & Wildlife and HDR Galleries, but Tobi's been there too. Here's his Flickr Photostream.

 

Random Fact

Via the BBC: "Trains have killed 118 elephants in India since 1987, according to the Wildlife Trust of India."

Adding Insult to Injury (from Crocodiles)

This photo, from the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, is as close as we got to the UN/NGO-dominated town of Goma, Dem. Rep. Congo. U.N. charters flew in almost constantly. Click the photo for a larger version you can actually see.

 

To and from Gisenyi, long haul trucks from the Indian Ocean ports of Mombasa and Dar es-Salaam brought goods to supply eastern Congo. Congo itself, mind you, fronts the Atlantic Ocean. But the state of its infrastructure is so dismal as to require the eastern half of the country to be supplied from the other side of the continent.

So it's no real surprise to see this article from the AP: Wildebeest roadblock? Highway planned in Serengeti. Along with the crocodiles in the Mara River, it's one more obstacle the wildebeests really don't need.

*****

Right now the annual wildebeest migration across the Masai Mara is in full swing. Here are a couple of sites tracking wildebeest movement:

Annual Wildebeest Migration
The Great Migration