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I have now arrived at Buffelskloof and my final stop on my expedition but getting here was not a journey to remember. Apart from the long roadworks and the frequent lorries reducing speed to a crawl, those bits of the countryside that did look appealing to drive through were blighted by continual rain...
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One should never be such in a hurry that one does not pause to double-check. At the top of Dumbe mountain that I climbed this morning, I had a breathtaking view of Cape Vultures catching the thermals at eye-level to where I was standing and soaring upwards. I started taking photographs but my memory...
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This was to be my last day in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg and it started off much as yesterday had. The cloud was low and to add to my problems I also found out that the pass to take cars up to the Little Berg was closed. This meant that I had to start my hiking at around 1400m rather than the 1900m...
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If I thought the cloud was low yesterday, it was nothing compared with today. Not even the wetlands in front of the cottage were visible. My plan to do a hike on the way to my next stop were abandoned and I just hoped that as I headed north the weather would improve. I planned my route to see if I could...
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On any trip there are days where regardless of planning things go wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. The target today was a good long walk on Highmoor towards the Giant's Castle. I woke to find the clouds so low that one would not even know that there were mountains across the valley...
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It was time to move on from the heat and humidity of Durban. Syd kindly accompanied me out to the Natal Midlands, where we hoped we might find K. ichopensis and K. buchananii , but we only managed to find more populations, albeit good ones, of K. laxiflora and K. linearifolia . I then carried on back...
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Today I was privileged to be shown around Durban by two of the experts in Kniphofia, Dr Syd Ramdhani and Prof. Himansu Baijnath. Although not the most floriferous day on the trip, it was one of the more enlightening ones because apart from seeing the pokers in the field, I was able to talk about poker...
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Yesterday was an exhilarating day except for the lack of pokers: a good long walk, many beautiful flowers and the tension of trying to out run a thunderstorm. It had felt worthwhile because I had come across one poker right at the furthest extreme of the walk. However, that feeling was rapidly taken...
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When I arrived at Elton Farm , my intention was to use it as a base for exploring Bushman's Nek, where I hoped to find Kniphofia brachystachya . It had been recorded from a couple of sites in the area, although neither of the localities was very specific. However, one cannot ignore the imposing presence...
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Are you a person who has to climb something "because it's there"? Despite my focus on plants on this trip, there is still a part of that mentality inside me which is difficult to shake. So when I had found all the Kniphofia I was wanting to find at Rhodes by 11 o'clock this morning...
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There are not many places in the world where you can drive for 50km and not pass another car but the highlands of the Eastern Cape is one such place. It is hard to understand why this area is so rarely visited, the scenery is beautiful and spectacular in its wildness. Possibly it loses out to the renown...
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If yesterday was a disappointing day, today could hardly have gone better. But it would unlikely to have been so without the helpful assistance of Monique, the manager of the King's Lodge at Hogsback . I have received a lot of assistance in planning my route from a variety of experts, but there is...
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Sometimes it is better not to build up expectation - a lot of planning has gone into this trip and in the process I have imagined the joy of coming across the various Kniphofia that I will be seeking. Today was my venture into the eastern end of the fynbos in search of the "original" red hot...
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One of the reasons Colesberg gets so cold is that it is so high, 1400m (around the height of Ben Nevis). The central plateau of Africa is all at a considerable altitude from Nairobi to Johannesburg. At some point, though, as one heads towards the coast one has to descend and in South Africa, this descent...
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Kuilfontein Farm is not the sort of place that one would expect to find a common British garden plant to be growing. The Karoo is a generally harsh environment, where most plants barely get over a foot tall, either because of the shallow soil, the lack of rain or the constant grazing. Nevertheless, in...
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