Africa | Hither And Yon

Game Changer

At first it looks like a storm cloud gathering on the horizon. On a hilltop perhaps 500 yards dead ahead, dust is erupting in the yellow hues of dawn, shafts of early morning light shooting through agitated particles like lasers. These perfect lines are then interrupted by a huge, dark..

Travel

18 May
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Cheetahs Prosper

One morning in the Serengeti a tawny eagle was sitting on an acacia tree. The sun had risen a few hours earlier and the bird had used most of the daylight for gathering twigs to assemble into a nest. The acacia’s wicked thorns were almost as sharp as the eagle’s talons –..

Travel

12 Jul
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The Start of Everything

The smartest animal in the savannah, at least in evolutionary terms, is the waterbuck. It doesn’t have the best eyesight, nor the quickest reactions; its horns are not particularly lethal, its muscles not especially well developed. But in nature’s endless game of who eats whom, billions of evolutionary choices and..

Travel

10 Dec
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The Hospital Built by Gorillas

In a jungle on a mountainside, in the southernmost part of Uganda, in the very heart of Africa, there stands a hospital, a hospital built by gorillas. It’s an ongoing job, and though the Bwindi Community Hospital first opened 12 years ago, on some mornings you can still faintly hear..

Other

13 Nov
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Man and Beast Alike

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest…” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899. The grey-cheeked mangabey makes a big noise for..

Travel

27 Apr
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The Winds of Change

I am sitting in a restaurant, in coastal resort of El Gouna, Egypt, watching a flock of huge tropical birds hovering over the Red Sea. Most of them have enormous, multi-coloured wings that droop only slightly at the tips, harnessing as much of the wind as possible. Their flight paths..

Travel