Water, water everywhere—except at Mana Pools…!

Most people who meet someone who works for the National Security Advisor would probably have a brief chat and then forget all about him. I didn’t. Toby impressed me so much with the ‘mystical, blue light’ at Mana Pools and the chance to walk right up to the animals with a guy called Stretch Ferreira that I booked a trip as soon as I got home!

Things didn’t quite go according to plan. I hardly saw any blue light (mystical or otherwise), and there had been a severe drought, so there was only one pool with any water in it, and the landscape looked like No Man’s Land.

However, it was still an enjoyable two weeks. Stretch knew his stuff, and he was soon leading me into the bush to get up close and personal with lions and elephants. Standing 10 yards away from a growling male lion took a bit of getting used to, but Stretch was happy to use humour as a defence mechanism!

In fact, all the staff were happy to have a laugh, and I got on well with Al, Tor, Reuben, Hilda, Jen and Hana.

The Camp

Getting to Mana Pools ain’t easy. I had to fly from London to Kigali with RwandAir (even though it always sounded like ‘Ryanair’!), then on to Harare, where I took a charter flight to Mana Main airstrip. Tor picked me up and dropped me off at Goliath Camp—almost exactly 24 hours after I’d left Putney!

It was a tented camp rather than a lodge, so the facilities were fairly basic, but I had everything I needed. After more than 10 years of visiting Africa, I know better than to try to use the shower or expect hot water or electricity in my tent, but that’s fine with me. It’s all about the wildlife.

When I arrived, Jen put me in the tent with the best view. It was a nice thought, but I was only ever going to be in my tent during the hours of darkness, so what actually mattered was that it was the furthest tent from the main area. This always seems to happen to me. I don’t know why…

Anyway, Jen moved me into another tent after the first night and then, finally, to Tent 1, which was not only the nearest to the main area but also close enough to the Starlink terminal to get internet access. Result!

Daily Routine

The daily routine at Goliath Camp was pretty much what I expected, with the usual five meals a day and a lot of time spent at the bar!

• 0515 Breakfast in the main area

• 0600 Morning game drive with Stretch (and sometimes Tor, Al or Reuben) in the Land Rover (including tea and cake at around 0830)

• 1300-1330 Lunch in the main area

• 1600-1630 High tea in the main area

• 1630-1830 Afternoon game drive with Stretch and sometimes Tor (including sundowners)

• 1900-2000 Dinner in the main area (although I only ate once when Stretch insisted I try his fillet steak!)

When I met Stretch for the first time, I told him I wanted the regular ‘Mana Pools experience’, so he spent the first week showing me lions and elephants. After that, I preferred to spend a bit more time photographing birds in flight, so I generally went to Long Pool with Tor at dawn. I’d spend a couple of hours there before having tea with everyone else and then having a ‘proper’ game drive afterwards.

When I was in camp, I spent most of my time as usual rating my photographs. I didn’t take that many, so I could usually get through them all before the next game drive. The camp looked out over the Zambezi river, so elephants, warthogs and waterbucks often came for a drink.

On one occasion, we even had drinks in the river! It had been a very hot morning, reaching 111° F/44° C, so a few of us took a cool box and sat in the water to chill out. A lone male elephant did wander along, but he was happy doing his thing, so we just watched and took photographs from the water.

The other departure from the normal routine came when Hazel came to dinner. Hazel was a spotted hyena, and Stretch had known her, her mother and even her grandmother for years.

All the guests were eating around the dining table as normal when we were suddenly called to go to the staff area behind the wooden screens. There, we sat down as Hazel came to join us. It was the most astonishing experience!

She was a big animal, and it was very cool to watch her eating chicken bones right in front of our feet! In a way, it was the ultimate validation of the Mana Pools experience—you really can get up close and personal with the wildlife there!

Food and Drink

As is my wont on safari, I only ate one meal a day, which was lunch. That led Stretch to call me ‘No Food Nick’ or ‘No Dinner Nick’! Guests who wanted breakfast could have porridge from the saucepan on the fire and tea or coffee from the pots on the sideboard in the main area.

Lunch was the usual African buffet, with a main course and various salads with homemade bread served in the main area. It was mainly hamburgers, pizzas or some kind of quiche. I was there long enough to have every meal twice!

Staff

I got along pretty well with the staff at Goliath Camp. Stretch was always making a joke about something or other, and Jen, Hana and Tor were very chatty—especially Hana. It’s funny who you meet on safari, and Hana happened to be Zimbabwe’s national BMX champion nine times over! She’d even qualified for the 2024 Olympics, but a late injury put paid to that. Shame…

If you’ve never stayed at Goliath Camp, it’s hard to describe what everyone was like, but I’ll do my best. Those of you who’ve read Swallows and Amazons should understand…!

• Stretch = Daddy (‘Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.’)

• Jen = Mother (sensible and practical)

• Al = John (a tall, take-charge kind of guy)

• Tor = Roger (Ship’s Boy wanting to graduate to Able Seaman—ie safari guide)

• Hilda = Peggy Blackett (shy and unassuming)

• Hana = Titty (for reasons I couldn’t possibly tell you!)

Stretch also had a few expressions he used to use on a regular basis. I called them ‘Stretch-isms’:

• ‘Gyppoes’ (for Egyptian geese)

• ‘Failure is not an option’

• ‘Let’s get serious, guys’

• ‘Let’s have a peep’

• ‘That’s a sweetie!’ (if he liked a photo)

• ‘Beautiful, beautiful!’ (if he liked an animal)

• ‘Photographic moment’

• ‘Smoke break’

• ‘The whiff of coffee and the tinkling of teaspoons’

• ‘I’ll sleep like a security guard’ or a ‘dead baboon’.

He also had a cap saying ‘I’d rather push my Land-Rover than drive a Toyota’…!

Guests

When I arrived at camp, I sat on the deck for a drink with a group of conservationists working for the Preservation of At-Risk Wildlife (PAW) Foundation. Charlie was a keen photographer, so it was nice to chat about wildlife photography with him over the next few days.

As usual on these trips, I stayed longer than everyone else, which meant I had to say a lot of goodbyes! When Charlie and his group departed, there followed a succession of other guests. Most were couples from Zimbabwe, South Africa or the United States, but one of them was a young man travelling on his own.

We all got along pretty well, so it was fun to go on game drives together and swap stories over dinner. One of the guests had known Stretch since schooldays and served with him in the Zimbabwean special forces. ‘Krugs’ told a wonderfully funny story about the two of them taking 14 new recruits into the bush for an orientation:

“You must never run away” was Stretch’s key message, but would it sink in? Halfway through, a young male lion jumps out of a bush and confronts Stretch on the path. Krugs is right behind him, carrying Stretch’s rifle in a zip-up canvas case, and Stretch whispers to him, “Don’t worry. He’ll f*** right off.”

But he didn’t, so Stretch and the lion continue to stare at each other. Finally, Stretch whispers, “Gimme the f***ing gun!” It’s deathly quiet, so when Krugs starts to unzip the gun case, it sounds so loud that he stops after an inch!

The lion’s growling by now, pinning his ears back and waving his tail from side to side, so Krugs thinks, “Oh, my God. We’re all dead!” But Stretch still needs his gun. “Gimme the f***ing gun!”

Krugs again starts unzipping the case, and this time he opens it a foot or so before he has to stop because of the noise. In the meantime, all the new recruits have scarpered, running off in all directions, so it’s just Stretch and Krugs.

“Gimme the f***ing gat!” Stretch shouts again, and this time, Krugs unzips the case all in one go. The noise is so loud that the lion runs off into the bush. Stretch and Krugs can’t see him any more, but all the other soldiers can for the first time, so they run even further away!

Behind the bush, Stretch and Krugs can now see an impala carcase. The lion had just opened it up and started feeding, so that’s why he wouldn’t give ground.

Finally, Stretch and Krugs manage to round up the troops, and they walk back to camp—but Krugs never goes on another one of Stretch’s trips again!

That story should give you some idea of what it was like staying at Goliath Camp…

Wildlife photography

Whenever I go on a photographic trip, I have an idea of which photos I want to take. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t, but it’s always important to have a shot list.

When I went to Mana Pools, I was hoping to see plenty of African wild dogs and leopards, and I wanted to get that classic shot of an elephant standing on its hind legs to reach the highest branches of a tree.

Well, I saw wild dogs three or four times, but I didn’t manage to take any decent pictures, and I only had two leopard sightings. One of them came just after sunset, so it was very dark, and I had to slow my shutter speed down dramatically to avoid a sky-high ISO (see below).

I did see one of the elephants, Boswell, standing on his hind legs, but he was wearing a collar! I can’t believe that National Parks allow their animals to be collared. It ruins the experience for anyone watching them—especially if you happen to be a professional wildlife photographer…!

Mana Pools is great for elephants, but I’m not a huge fan—unless they’re giving themselves a mud or dust bath. Our best sighting came at dawn one day, when we walked over to see a small family pottering about (see below).

We also saw a few lions, but I wasn’t happy with my shots, so I had to make up for it by photographing birds. Long Pool was the obvious place to go, and it was easy to spot grey herons, African spoonbills, great egrets, saddle-billed storks, common sandpipers and pied kingfishers either looking for food or flying over the water.

Having had so few opportunities to take action shots, I decided to concentrate on slow pans. They’re hard to pull off, but it’s worth it if you get lucky as they convey much more of a sense of energy and movement than a simple freeze-frame (see below).

The only danger with all the white birds was the risk of clipping the whites, but I deliberately underexposed my images. Shooting in manual with auto ISO, I started off with a stop of negative compensation, but I raised it to 1.3 and then 2 stops after checking the ‘blinkies’ on the back of the camera.

When I’d done slow pans to death, I moved on to taking portraits. This was relatively easy with the grey herons and saddle-billed storks as they’d stand at gaze for minutes at a time, but I also managed to capture a few common sandpipers and black-winged stilts (see below).

The other birds were more mobile, searching for fish and other prey in the water, so I did get a few ‘action shots’, I guess. I also took a burst of a passing grey heron at 1/3200 of a second by accident (!), and there was a nice squabble between two yellow-billed storks (see below).

Apart from that, we also saw plenty of birds at random on our game drives. There were hardly any little bee-eaters, but plenty of lilac-breasted rollers and a nice African fish eagle taking off (see below).

Finally, I had a few lucky moments that were completely unplanned. For example, we saw a boomslang snake by the side of the road, a frisky impala and a hippo pod in beautiful light…

All told, I was a little disappointed with my pictures. They were mostly good rather than great. However, I don’t think I made too many ‘mistakes’, and my Z8’s pre-release capture mode meant I very rarely missed capturing a bird taking off—even if it often flew off the ‘wrong’ way!

Verdict

Normally, my enjoyment of a photographic trip depends entirely on the quality of the pictures I manage to take. However, I’m trying to get away from that mindset. I want to be more relaxed, and I don’t want to get angry or frustrated just because I miss a shot.

In the end, I enjoyed Mana Pools, not just because of the photographic opportunities, but also because of the location, the food, the staff and all the other things that go into making a safari special.

My thanks go to Stretch and his team for looking after me so well and, of course, to the other guests for putting up with me! Maybe I’ll go back in July when the grass is greener and the pools are full of water…

Species

Animals

African bush elephant

African wild dog

Boomslang

Cape buffalo

Cape grysbok

Chacma baboon

Common eland

Common house gecko

Common warthog

Common waterbuck

Dwarf mongoose

Greater kudu

Hippo

Impala

Leopard

Lion

Nile crocodile

Nike monitor

Nyala

Plains zebra

Serrated hinged terrapin

Side-striped jackal

Smith’s bush squirrel

Spotted hyena

Birds

African fish eagle

African harrier-hawk

African hoopoe

African openbill

African paradise-flycatcher

African pied wagtail

African skimmer

African spoonbill

Bateleur

Black-crowned night-heron

Black-winged stilt

Blacksmith plover

Blue waxbill

Böhm’s spinetail

Broad-billed roller

Brown-hooded kingfisher

Cattle egret

Carmine bee-eater

Common sandpiper

Crested guineafowl

Crowned hornbill

Crowned lapwing

Dark chanting-goshawk

Dark-capped bulbul

Dickinson’s kestrel

Double-banded sandgrouse

Egyptian goose

Emerald-spotted wood-dove

European bee-eater

Fork-tailed drongo

Glossy ibis

Goliath heron

Great egret

Green-backed night-heron

Green sandpiper

Green wood-hoopoe

Grey go-away-bird

Grey heron

Grey-backed fiscal

Grey-headed sparrow

Hadada ibis

Hamerkop

Helmeted guineafowl

Hooded vulture

Lilac-breasted roller

Lilian’s lovebird

Little bee-eater

Little egret

Little sparrowhawk

Malachite kingfisher

Marabou stork

Martial eagle

Meves’s starling

Meyer’s parrot

Pied kingfisher

Pink-backed pelican

Purple-crested turaco

Retz’s helmet-shrike

Ring-necked dove

Ruff

Sacred ibis

Saddle-billed stork

Southern ground hornbill

Southern red-billed hornbill

Spur-winged goose

Squacco heron

Swainson’s spurfowl

Tawny eagle

Three-banded plover

Tropical boubou

Trumpeter hornbill

Verreaux’s eagle-owl

Western banded snake-eagle

White-backed vulture

White-crested helmet-shrike

White-crowned lapwing

White-fronted bee-eater

Wire-tailed swallow

Yellow-bellied greenbul

Yellow-billed kite

Yellow-billed stork     

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