This week at Adonsonia

This was a fairly quiet week as we were mainly busy in our workshops or behind our desk. But even in a quiet week there are always some great photo opportunities around the Lodge.

We are seeing our resident pair of Brown-hooded Kingfishers more often now that the Woodlands Kingfishers have left for warmer climes. In the beginning of the week the male was warming up in the early morning sun and provided a lovely photo against the blue winter sky.

Our ‘vintage’ game viewer got a new lease of life with a few small repairs so we went out for drive. It was a wonderful winter evening and the light was fantastic.

On Friday I saw a lot of vultures heading over towards the neighbours behind the koppie. After watching for a while to see if they were rising or landing I could see that they were indeed landing, which meant there was a very good chance of a kill of some sorts. I went out to see if I could find it, but unfortunately it was too far from the road to see. But the vultures were most obliging subjects for photos.

With so many vultures flying around the chances of getting a good shot were fairly high ;)

Did you know that a group of vultures in flight is called a kettle of vultures?

Mea culpa!

Ouch! It’s been 2 months since my last blog post….mea culpa!

It wasn’t that nothing happened, and in my head I wrote lots of posts, but somehow I just didn’t make the time to sit down and type them out, add the photo’s, upload them, link to them…. You get the picture…. I love sharing our experiences here at the lodge but I wish it could go straight from my head to the blog :)

Anyway…

We have been working on a lot of stuff to make the lodge even nicer. We now have a King size bed in Koedoe, and a Queen size in Waterbok, and all rooms will have mosquito nets soon. Michel has been hard at work on the outside of the lodge, rebuilding the carport and storm proofing the roof even more.

Even work is fun when you have a giraffe in the background

A lot of admin was done; we are now on booking.com and AirBnB and very soon you will be able to book with us directly from Facebook and the website.

Also Michel has put up pages on the website for Penga Ndlovu Customs, handmade knives, and I am working on my page for Glass Monkey Beads.

And in between we a week full of unexpected adventures with our guests. Including a lion sighting in pyjama’s, the guests that is… not the lion!

The best way to start a week at the Lodge, with a lion posing nicely on the driveway

But enough of the excuses… I am determined to better my ways and have at least one blog post up each week from now on!!!

Happy Monkeys

When we bought the lodge we bought it lock, stock and barrel. This included all the furniture, curtains, wine, trophy heads and various other surprises hidden in the cupboards. Also ‘included’ was our ‘bush wake up service’ consisting of a troop of vervet monkeys, who sleep in the trees around the lodge.

At the moment our monkeys are in hog heaven. Not only are the guava trees starting to bear fruit (none for us as the monkeys eat it before it is ripe!), but our wild fig tree on the front lawn is also full of figs for them to eat. So they spend the first few hours of the day stuffing their faces with figs, and a couple of hours in the afternoon as well.

A quick blog about Lions

Since the beginning of this year we have been spoilt by lion sightings.

We hear them roaring close by and they regularly wake us up at night…….

We see them when we are coming back from getting the mail…

We see them passing the house…..

We see them just ‘lion’ around….

And we even see them pooping….

So we are very spoilt, and because of this we almost take them for granted and see them as big ol’ kitty cats.

Until…. you are at a lion sighting and this big male just walks straight at you, looking you in the eye… and then when he passes the car, so close that you can almost touch him, you realise that he is huge, almost level with the car window…. then, when the goosebumps subside, you are once again aware that these are Lions, and they are the owners of the Bush!

Expect the unexpected

As far as the larger mammals on the reserve, we generally have a good idea of what we see or what we are going to see or are looking for. We quite often hear or smell them before we see them or there are other signs that they are there. The smaller animals however are often unexpected sightings, and sometimes very unusual!

On Saturday we were having a relaxing day after saying goodbye to our guests. As I could hear a lot of birds outside the bathroom window I decided to take the camera and see what I could find. Unfortunately most of them decided to stay in the leaves of the trees but I managed to get this rather nice shot of a Scarlet-Chested Sunbird.

And then, as I rounded the corner of the Lodge I saw a Leopard…….

…………………Tortoise that is. Actually it was two of them, and they were finally catching up to the fact that it had been Valentine’s Day a week ago. He looked absolutely thrilled, she was more interested in the grass blade she was eating!

And then after all that excitement I had another nice find, one of my flip-flops that the monkeys had stolen was lying there waiting for me. None the worse for wear apart from some extra bite marks :)

I’m still missing one of my other pair, but that one is bright pink with a flower on it, and it has gone walkabout before, so I don’t think that will come back any time soon. Maybe we will see a monkey wearing a pink flower on its head one day…

It never rains, but it pours…

In this case literally. on Wednesday we got 100mm of rain in just over an hour! 

Luckily it was just rain, no winds or storm like we had before. Also all the repairs held up well and we had no leaks. So the Lodge came out of it unscathed.

And outside the Lodge wasn’t too bad.. the water was about 5cm deep and flowing fast, it did take lots of topsoil with it despite our efforts to encourage the grass. But still, without the grass that has grown it would have definitely been worse.

A bit further out from the Lodge it was worse, the water coming down to the spruit (dry riverbed) at the bottom of the property had come down hard! We had moved our entrance road a couple of weeks back as it went next to the spruit and was in danger of being washed away… that was a good move, as it had indeed been washed away. Unfortunately the alternative road also was partly washed away so there is work to be done for at least a temporary repair while brainstorming a permanent solution.

The only casualty of the rain was our trail cam. It is on a tree at the dam, and even when we had the hard rains a few weeks ago it was still at least 1.5m above the water… now however the dam was not only full but overflowing!

Water from all over the plot flows into the dam, so now the camera is about 1.5m under water. We went out as soon as we remembered but it was too late :(

Still we have tips about what to do when we can recover it, so we will see what happens.

In the meantime the spruit is now dry again, the dam is not overflowing any more, the bullfrogs are having a wonderful (and noisy) time and the reserve is looking green and beautiful. We have phone coverage again even though the power cuts continue… 2019 is definitely turning out to be an interesting year!

Some days you get stuff done, others not so much….

It started off this morning at 6am; lots of lion roaring close to the house. As both Michel and I were just about awake our eyes opened in a flash and I was up looking out of the window trying to see if he/she/they were on that side of the house while Michel was pulling on his clothes. As we had a lion kill next to the house last week we are now extra alert to the sounds, and this sounded like it might be another one. The monkeys were calling in alarm, so we knew he/she/they were close!

We both went outside to determine where the sound was coming from, Michel to listen and I went to observe the monkeys. Michel found him first, and we could see him from the house, no kill. But we got a few shots after climbing up to the top of the watertank for a good vantage point.

We then got a message that more lions had been seen on our property nearer the entrance, so we hopped into the game viewer to go and have a look. One male was still there, but the other male and 2 females had moved off. It started to get crowded as a couple of other lodges came to join us (3 vehicles - yes, we are spoilt!), so we decided to head back to the Lodge to finally have our morning coffee.

Unfortunately the kettle wasn’t working, a problem with the electricity supply. One phase was down, meaning some things work, like chargers and lights, other things like a/c, kettles and microwaves don’t. So while Michel put a pan of water on - love my gas stove! - I tried to call the power company to report the outage… and tried, and tried, and tried….. It wasn’t until an hour later that I realised I didn’t have any airtime and couldn’t call or message anyone, including the power company.
I go out to the workshop to ask Michel to put some airtime on my phone.... and almost trip over a monkey lying next to the path! He’s just lying there; limp, eyes shut, breathing heavily. When I crouch down next to him he opens his eyes but makes no attempt to move. I look to see if I can see what’s wrong, Michel thinks he sees burnt hair, but we have no idea what that could be. Otherwise no signs of anything wrong. I remember seeing him earlier this morning, he was the last one to go out foraging and looked fine then.

He was in a fairly shady spot and it was not too hot, so we decide leave him in peace and check up on him every so often. After about an hour I decide to bring him some water, so I do that and he drinks it down greedily. Somehow this also brings him round as suddenly he gets up, moves away and starts growling at me, I’m just glad he is better. After a few minutes he seems to be fine and scampers off, away over the lawn and off into the bush to look for his family, leaving us wondering.

We don’t have to wonder long however, we’re just discussing it when the power comes back on. I go out and see the guy from the power company finishing up work. I asked what it was and he tells me it was a blown fuse.

I tell him that it has been an eventful day what with lions and monkeys… And then we both come to the same conclusion: the monkey probably somehow short circuited the power, blowing a fuse and blowing himself of the electricity pole at the same time!!!  I hope he learned his lesson, in the meantime I’m going to call him Sparky!

And all that happened before 11.00 am…  I just wonder what this afternoon will bring :)

Inspection

In-between the multitude of work going on, jackhammers and angle grinders making an enormous racket, and people walking to and fro we still had the great pleasure of watching animals big and small passing by.
They even came to visit us to inspect the work done thus far.

Continuation

After a few weeks the "old place" is nicely taking shape.
New tile floors have been laid.
New doors have been hung and the electricity has been totally done over.
The kitchen has been upgraded to facilitate the creating of much needed meals and refreshments.

The start

After we bought the plot with an old farmhouse we started the rebuild in the beginning of July 2016.
We removed all the old "stuff" and found many unexpected treasures between everything the previous owners left behind.
Beautiful wooden statues and sculptures.
Great hand carved indigenous chairs.
For a wood lover like myself it is pure heaven to be able to take these old and "tired" pieces and tend them with love and care and see them come to life and restored them to their former glory.
These pieces are put prominently on display throughout the Lodge and they look stunning