Mosi-oa-tunya

...(the smoke that thunders) - local name for the impressive falls on the Zambezi River that Dr Livingston "discovered" and presumptuously renamed in honour of his queen - was inscribed as a Natural World Heritage Site in 1989, shared between Zambia and Zimbabwe. During the 90's and early 2000's, the integrity of the property was threatened by uncontrolled urban development, unplanned tourism development, noise and water pollution, and invasive species. Since 2006, some progress was made in the form of a joint management plan and Zambia's moratorium on some construction and tourism infrastructure projects, although issues related to development of infrastructure, tourism facilities and services, control of pollution, extraction of water from the Zambezi and eradication of invasive species still need to be addressed. (On my recent trip to the Zambian side, I did notice a lot of "alien hacking" on of Lantana - originally from South America, but now sadly a common invasive weed around the world.) With most Zimbabweans having rather more pressing matters to deal with at present, the upside is that there is no construction on the south side of the gorge, while a number of luxury lodges are springing up along the Zambian banks in anticipation of the tourism spin-off from the 2010 World Cup. The World Heritage Centre is however keeping tabs on developments and has requested detailed reports on the state of conservation of the property, including information on the potential impact of all new tourism developments, as well as progress made in implementing the Joint Integrated Management Plan.

If you're interested to read more have a look at www.unep-wcmc.org/sites/wh/mosi-oa-.html and whc.unesco.org/en/list/509


A moonlit view from the Zambian side of the falls at relatively low water - lights of the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls across the river on the right horizon.

kokerboom

Sorting through my archive has led me back to the good ol' days of film... A few years ago I went on a three day flower photo trip up the West Coast with my friend Fran, and we ended up at the quiver tree forest near Niewoudville late one night, where we promptly went about setting up our cameras in the dark. I shot this one on my lovely Pentax MZ5n (at a mere 410g it was half the weight of my Brikon, making it a shutter-happy hiker's delight - sadly it has since been pinched).


Facing due west, stars streak through the sky behind a mature quiver tree.

The quiver tree (or kokerboom in Afrikaans) is so called because the hollow branches were used by the bushmen to make quivers for their arrows. They are fascinating and beautiful trees, with the most wonderfully textured bark. If you're interested, more details about the trees can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A26151482. Along with so many other species, the trees are under threat from global warming - read more about the report at www.bgci.org/conservation/Aloe_dichotoma. The quiver trees flower around this time of the year, so if you happen to be in the area, you might want to pay a visit to the forest - details and directions from www.nieuwoudtville.co.za/information31.html.

water ranger's hut

This week's pic was taken two years ago and it very almost went to whatever afterlife ex-digital photos go to! Another HDR image from 5 exposures, I had an idea for processing the image, but didn't have a spare moment to work on it at the time, and then I forgot about it as more and more photos piled into my library. Now that I'm finally getting stuck into the task of organising my digital library (whittling it down from over 20,000 odd photos to around 2,000 usable images) I noticed that these images were missing from all my hard drive backups! Fortunatly I'm paranoid enough to burn a DVD as soon as I download the images from my camera, and there they were, although for some reason unknown to the Me Now, the Me Then had deleted the RAW files but kept JPEG versions... However, since I'm combining the exposures into a single high definition image, ending up with same quality image as I would with the original raw images, I'm not too devastated!

I think this is one of those images that look better large, so click on the image to view the large version...


Just before taking off at the end of a search & rescue training exercise on Table Mountain with the SA Airforce, (and shortly after the Oryx had a hoist failure with me on the end!) a ray of sunlight pushed past the mist that was starting to race up and over the mountain, illuminating the water ranger's hut perfectly. I have no idea how I managed to handhold the camera still enough for 1 second while I shot a burst of 5 exposures - perhaps the vibrations of the aircraft cancelled out my shake - but the images line up perfectly and the only movement evident is in the mist as it sweeps up towards the hut (hence the odd ripple line effect).

water dance

With all the rain we've been having, the streams are flowing in full force, and gullies that are wonderful scrambling routes up the mountain in summer are currently waterfalls!


High-speed shutter action over a Silvermine stream - pot luck really, as the water is moving so fast and is pretty much unpredictable as to where it's going to leap up, so it takes a bit of patience watching for a pattern, estimating the focal distance since there's nothing to focus on, and hope that some of the dance will be conveyed in one of the shots!