Deep in the heart of the Greater Kruger National Park, nestled in amongst gnarled and ele-beaten Mopaneveld, sits a half-century-old Rondawel. Its peaked, thatched roof is crowned by a Zambian soapstone elephant, trunk up to the East in anticipation of each day that the Scarab rolls the sun across an endless African sky.
This is My Home. My world. My little Patch of Nature’s Paradise.
While elephants have been a very dominant feature in my life, the natural world is filled with multitudes of wonders that are all so fascinatingly intricate and intertwined. There are the delicate blossoms that emerge from the dusty winter aridity, and the intense, sometimes iridescent colours of the insects that emerge and live in inter-dependent wonder. Then there are the scents and sounds that fill the senses in this world that envelops me.
I have been drawn to and obsessed with the natural world all my life, but for over three decades, I have been able to immerse myself in it, live in it and be a part of it every day.
I have made it a life’s quest to do this very thing in as many parts of Africa as time has allowed. This self-discovery and exploration of Africa’s wildlife has filled me with a driving passion and a head filled with awe at a planet that so few appreciate, a world that we are neglecting and the destruction of nature that we are ignoring.
This blog is my insight and journal of this little piece of the world, the open skies and timeless days living within the territories of so many different animals, under ancient trees, surrounded by vast, untouched bushveld, with hardened bare feet, walking in the footsteps of the giants. A living world that sustains me and makes me want to see another day.
Circa 2019
Life, however, has a way of disrupting utopia. In 2017, in a very short time span, I endured several severe medical setbacks that forced me to leave my beloved paradise and seek life-saving treatment abroad. The country that I had loved so deeply, promoted wholeheartedly and bled for, refused me life-saving dialysis after my transplanted kidney failed, and were it not for my Jewish heritage, in which Israel’s welcome was, in itself, a gift of life and life-saving treatment, my days would have ended by the end of that year.
I currently reside in a very different and foreign environment…
Here are some of those life experiences. From my life, living from elemoment to elemoment in the African bush, but also, about more recent times and my life in a strange country, with whatever of nature I can find here.
