HDR Photography
For all of the anecdotal (and statistical) dangers on the road in South Africa, people spend a lot of time there. (Really, you could say the same of the chief transportation modes in any part of the world.) Whether it’s walking, hitchhiking (lots of hitchhiking), or hanging out in the back of an invincible Toyota, people get to where they have to be.
Another in my very long line of photographs of small structures on beaches: this lone stick, keeping watch over a pool by the edge of the Indian Ocean. A massive storm the night before had filled the ocean with silt and covered the shore with enormous puddles—earth and sea had been mixed in a way that neither particularly seemed to appreciate (not to overly anthropomorphize or anything).
As you might expect for a charming town on the Indian Ocean, St. Lucia is heavily carpeted with folks ready to sell anything and everything (to tourists, of course.) The waves were crashing just beyond this dune—I could already smell and hear them—but on this little rise, under the shade of the coniferous trees, beach towels and toys were for sale. The brightly colored array, flapping in the breeze in a strangely orderly way, brought to my mind nothing more than some strange local variation on a Shinto shrine.
In the seaside town of St. Lucia, by the shores of the Indian Ocean, markets were filled with souvenirs for tourists from around the globe. The carving and painting and construction that went into this array was astonishing—I can’t imagine how many total person-hours are on display here.
This zebra mare isn’t part of a stallion’s harem yet (she’s young), so she hangs out, grazing and scratching herself on cars, by the tents of Zulu Nyala. Though by no means domesticated, she was remarkably docile (and uninterested in the behavior of the humans going about their daily lives around her.)
The herds of impala in Zulu Nyala Reserve have almost no fear of the people who come to see them. During the wet start of the summer, that leads to scenes like this one: a verdant savannah hillside, dotted with impala and craggy trees and brushed by the breeze. I start to think that there could be no danger to ever disturb this peace—even if I could see the inevitable cheetah hiding in the grass.
African savannah isn’t the homogenous, steady monotony that it appears on the Discovery Channel. (Well, back when the discovery channel showed nature documentaries, anyway.) Dirt roads and hills criss-cross it, and fever trees like this one grow where more water is available. The yellow-green bark comes from photosynthetically active cells. The name comes from an interesting illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: when early European settlers went near water, they tended to contract malaria (thus the fever). They incorrectly attributed this to the trees, rather than the mosquitos breeding in the water.
Atop the hills of South Africa, I was reminded of the composition of one of my favorite pictures (of the Bay Area), and the vast changes that I’ve experienced in the seven months since I took that picture. There I was, on the other side of the planet, looking across a veritable (pardon the cliché) Garden of Eden and the little quarry used to build the lovely structures of the adjacent game lodge.
A couple of hours of sleep following intercontinental travel will never be enough to prepare for a herd (or “tower,” technically) of giraffes in the dawn light. From the back of the Millenium Falcon of off-roading Toyotas, the majesty and immediacy were perfectly balanced.
In eastern South Africa, the Zulu-Nyala game reserve offers an array of Hemingway-esque tents. The texture-mixture of stuccoed stone walls on two sides and waterproof nylon on the others makes the perfect rustic/luxurious combination.
(And the view of impala wandering outside the window in the morning didn’t hurt, either.)
Decaseconds 