A lazy morning, to recover from the two days of travel to get to South Africa, meant more time to bird on the deck for me. Then in the afternoon, Oliver took us on a short hike in the Magaliesberg Range (across the valley from Mabela Rantjes) to Groot Kloof (Great Canyon). Hot and muggy on the way up through a thick forest where we could hear but not see Red-chested Cuckoos (called Piet-my-vrou (which means "Pete my wife" (?),really), for their call, in Africaans). Then we broke out into a more open scrub, a type of thorn veldt maybe, that was just gorgeous and was like what I had imagined Africa would look like. Every now and then we heard the deep bark of a baboon coming from the forest. After a sweaty hike up, we came to a junction of three kloofs and made our way down into the canyon to a creek. A nice pool had been scooped out so we all had a snack and cooled off in the water.
While we were relaxing it started to cloud up, so Jason got us moving so we wouldn`t get caught in a lightening storm. We scrambled out of the kloof and when we got to the top there was a family of 3 baboons across the kloof from us. Grabbing my camera, I just could not have been more excited.
And then the strorm hit, almost on top of us. We were totally exposed, and Dani was in a metal framed carrier, so Jason beat feet out of there. We followed suit, but the storm caught us pretty quickly, before we were half way out. Thunder and lightening, and it just poured rain. Torrentially. Like we never see in the Northwest. We got completely drenched, and towards the end we started running down the rough trail, I don`t know why, we were already as wet as we could be. Running and laughing and singing - it was just a great joke. When we got back to the farm, I had to very carefully dry out my bird book over a period of several days so the pages didn`t stick together.
