There has been a lot of summer rains in the area so everything is one of the 100s of shades of green or mud brown.
The photos tell the story.
A sharp turn back over the tarred Punda Maria airstrip after checking no game on the runway before we land
A young Nyala bull unperturbed by me on the deck of my tent
A platter-sized mushroom which we left out for the baboons - if they ate it, it would be suitable for our consumption too. They relished it!!!!
Approaching one of the primary schools I work with
OMG!!! I was horrified when I asked to see the school library!!! Turns out this is actually the school storeroom of textbooks. Still, I was not impressed with the state of the storeroom.
This is the actual school/community library next door to the storeroom - very neat and more my expectation of a learning centre.
The schools have feeding schemes and each child gets a meal when they attend school. Adults from the community come to school to cook for the children on the premises.
Classrooms are overcrowded with too few teachers (between 70 and 90 children per teacher) so teaching also happens outdoors under the trees.
Approaching one of the villages the schools are in. Note the scourge of modern society - LITTER!!!! Will we ever be able to get people not to litter?????????
Typical homes in the villages I work with
Normal village streets. Note all households have access to electricity which works on a pre-paid system and many households cannot afford electricity so deforestation is still rife in the area with locals chopping down trees for wood to cook food.
None of the houses have direct access to water so they collect water at the taps located on some street corners. As with much of rural South Africa, local government is rife with theft from the coffers resulting in poor service delivery and these villages only have water three days a week and women and children have to collect water from the taps on street corners whenever water is piped through to the villages and this can be anytime of the day or night! (pic taken through car windscreen)
Wilderness Adventures Parfuri Camp manager, Landi, purchases crafts from local women to sell in the Camp Curio Shop.
A village hairdresser.
Of course I did find time to explore the Pafuri Concession in the Kruger National Park - a yellow floral carpet.
Babies everywhere!
Lots of game around.
And spiders
A buffalo family on a termite mound
Fever Tree forest
Early morning dew on a spider web
Green floral carpet in the fairyland of the Fever Tree Forest
Gnarled bark on a tree branch
We had to drive up and down the runway clearing the game away so the plane could land on Pafuri's gravel runway to take me back to Joburg to the overcrowded reality of city living!
Flying along the Limpopo River looking over towards Zimbabwe.
