LULA IN MOUNTAIN ZEBRA NATIONAL PARK

The people are warm, helpful, and some of the most generous, salt-of-the-earth folks you’ll ever meet. The food is organic, inexpensive, and rich in flavour, and you’ll always find someone who has a veggie garden somewhere who’ll proudly show you their lettuces and insist you take home bags of it to complement your fragrant and herby Karoo lamb.

This region is vastly unappreciated and rarely visited by wildlife lovers, though it boasts some of the most wonderful wildlife viewing opportunities, usually with loads and loads of depth of field, in malaria-free safety.

For the most part, it feels untouched (although it is true that overgrazing has had an enormous impact on the flora here), rugged, and abundant, with bat-eared foxes and jackals, and somewhere hiding out there, are leopards, wandering around in unfenced nature. You may feel that the Karoo is tame, but living here, you very quickly learn how the safety you feel in cities is merely an illusion.

The Great Karoo was once home to vast herds of plains game, lions, buffalos, ellies, rhinos and cheetahs, and in some areas, game reserves have popped up to restore agricultural Karoo land to its former glory, reintroducing some of the most iconic African animals. With the crowds rushing up to Kruger, it’s almost guaranteed that sightings in this part of the country will be an exclusive experience like no other. You might not have the infamous leopard sightings of Sabi Sands here, but there’s still plenty to fill up portfolios and keep a photographer in the editing suite for days. 

Even with all of this going for it, the Karoo is one of South Africa’s best kept secrets, and this is a point of pride for those who call this part of the world home.

LULA IN MOUNTAIN ZEBRA NATIONAL PARK

As a wildlife photographer, I’ve learned that you don’t always get to take pictures of dotted cubs or perfect black-maned lions, that sometimes you will actually find what you’re looking for, but in a horribly shaded area, or perhaps you’ll find something just a smidge too far for your longest lens to reach. You may spend hours squinting up trees, under trees, on ridges, at watering holes, and start to worry that your limited time in the wilderness may end without a single decent image. Which is usually about the time I decide that the B-roll animals will have to do in the meantime.

And that is the magic of the Mountain Zebra National Park. The animals that people tend to gloss over, or photograph in the absence of a ‘better’ sighting, are right there, centre stage, and none quite as spectacular or as special as the Mountain Zebra itself.

The Mountain Zebra National Park was formed in July 1937 to protect this remaining near-extinct subspecies. The National Parks Board, who proclaimed a 17 km2 area for the zebras’ preservation populated it with only five stallions and one mare! In 1950, a local farmer, H L Lombard, donated eleven zebras to the park, helping to bolster the gene pool and increase zebra numbers, though by 1964, the population was still critically low, with around 25 zebras in the park.

Since then, the park has grown in size and in zebra numbers. In 2015, the park’s herd number was over 700, and the park had grown to 284 km2, which considering its humble beginnings is a victory for the beautiful Mountain Zebra, as well as a plethora of other animals who enjoy the safety of the park. It just so happened that we’d arrived in the middle of a baby boom. Oh my hat.

The Cape Mountain Zebra was nearly driven to extinction, but thanks to several conservation efforts, it’s now classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN. They can be found on mountain slopes, open grasslands, woodlands, and areas with sufficient vegetation, but they prefer mountainous terrain, especially high plateaus (generally up to 2000m above sea level) with different grass species.

They’re also the smallest of the zebra species, with narrow and numerous stripes, especially on their heads. The widest, horizontal stripes are found on their bottoms, and you’ll notice that they don’t have any ‘shadow stripes’ seen in plains zebra. Cape Mountain Zebras also have white bellies.

They tend to live in breeding groups with up to five mares, their foals, and a mature stallion. Stallions who haven’t established a harem of mares tend to stay in bachelor herds. Foals leave their herds around 22 months of age, a mechanism to prevent inbreeding.

Although enormous strides have been taken to bolster the numbers, the Cape Mountain Zebra is still at risk, facing the conversion of habitats to agricultural land, hunting, persecution, and potential inbreeding between the two subspecies (The Cape Mountain Zebra and the Hartmann’s Mountain Zebra) which could increase the risk of inbreeding depression and susceptibility to disease.

Due to the increase of rhino horn poaching, it’s estimated that there are only 6,480 black rhino left in the world. Classified as critically endangered by the IUCN, enormous lengths are being taken to protect this species from extinction, including, dehorning, anti-poaching tactics and the use of anti-poaching dogs.

Unlike their cousins, white rhinos, black rhinos have a hooked lip and are herbivorous browsers, eating leafy plants, twigs, branches, shoots, thorny wood bushes, small trees, legumes, fruit, and grass. They are generally thought to be solitary, though a mother and a her calf have a strong bond.

Black rhinos tend to have a reputation for being agressive and will charge at perceived threats. They also have the highest rates of mortal combat recorded for any mammal, with around 50% of males and 30% of females dying from combat-related injuries!

The misconception that the Karoo is flat is never more evident than in Mountain Zebra National Park, framed by the backdrop of the rounded dome-peaks of the Bankberg mountain range, its deep-etched valleys with gushing rivers and streams, and flat mountain-top plateaus, which at first appear to stretch infinitely, but drop off steeply down intimating cliff edges. The air was fresh, the stars were bright, and the cumulous clouds gathered in skyrise-tall towers just about when we thought we couldn’t handle the heat a moment longer. There was water everywhere, and at first we wondered whether like at the Kgalagadi, we’d have our work cut out for us, as animals tend to not frequent watering holes when there are puddles around, but this proved not to be the case.

The park itself, though it appears to be fairly sizable, is easy to traverse in a day or two. There are only a certain number of roads, some tarred, some gravel, and some only accessible with a 4×4. All are worth exploring, though we found that the 4×4 routes, though less populated with people, were also less populated with sightings. The views make up for this immeasurably!

This time we stayed in the park’s accommodation, in a well-equipped, spotlessly clean and very comfortable cottage with a lovely patio and a built-in braai. The staff were the friendliest SANParks staff I’ve ever met too, which is definitely worth noting. Although we haven’t had any truly terrible experiences anywhere, barring the super lumpy mattresses at Berg-en-Dal rest camp, it truly felt as though Mountain Zebra National Park was a cut above the rest in terms of a welcoming experience.

What was surprising though was how few visitors we saw during our stay. As the last weekend before back-to-school, we were expecting people like us, trying to soak up the last of the holiday feeling before getting stuck back into real life. The camp was almost empty, and although there were people in some of the cottages, the entire main camp was very quiet. Unlike the Kgalagadi, you come to Mountain Zebra to enjoy slower paced sightings and slower paced moments.

And on the subject of that, even though we haven’t yet branded our new car, we ran into some old friends from the Kgalagadi at Mountain Zebra National Park who initially recognised Max. What a small world. ‘From lions to monitor lizards,’ Chris told us through the car window, and he was right. That afternoon we watched tensely as a monitor lizard hunted around a ground squirrel den. He took a few minutes to climb inside and seemed to contemplate his next move. Standing on two legs like people in order to see, the ground squirrels held their little paws to their mouths and kept a watchful distance. The lizard moved on eventually.

The Cape Mountain Zebra was nearly driven to extinction, but thanks to several conservation efforts, it’s now classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN. They can be found on mountain slopes, open grasslands, woodlands, and areas with sufficient vegetation, but they prefer mountainous terrain, especially high plateaus (generally up to 2000m above sea level) with different grass species.

They’re also the smallest of the zebra species, with narrow and numerous stripes, especially on their heads. The widest, horizontal stripes are found on their bottoms, and you’ll notice that they don’t have any ‘shadow stripes’ seen in plains zebra. Cape Mountain Zebras also have white bellies.

They tend to live in breeding groups with up to five mares, their foals, and a mature stallion. Stallions who haven’t established a harem of mares tend to stay in bachelor herds. Foals leave their herds around 22 months of age, a mechanism to prevent inbreeding.

Although enormous strides have been taken to bolster the numbers, the Cape Mountain Zebra is still at risk, facing the conversion of habitats to agricultural land, hunting, persecution, and potential inbreeding between the two subspecies (The Cape Mountain Zebra and the Hartmann’s Mountain Zebra) which could increase the risk of inbreeding depression and susceptibility to disease.

• Our incredible roosterkoek boerewors rolls! We’d picked them up from a little restaurant in Cradock and made a braai one evening. Delicious!
• How lovely it was to run into Chris and Mary, who reminded us that we’re not alone when we look back on our old photos, wishing we could take them all over again now that we’ve learned so much.
• The guy who welcomed us at the gate. He was so warm and helpful and made us feel very excited to be there.
• We saw a number of birds and had routine morning visitors to our patio, who’d come to clean up the insect buffet attracted by the light the night before.
• The pool was amazing! We were cooking by the time we arrived and settled, so it was absolutely lovely to take a dip and feel human again.
• It was glorious to see zebras, hartebeests, wildebeests and springboks hanging out in big herds on the plains.
• We napped between game drives, which is something I don’t usually do. I’m almost always too excited to look at photos and footage, so this time, it was so lovely to really relax and go with the flow.

• Our incredible roosterkoek boerewors rolls! We’d picked them up from a little restaurant in Cradock and made a braai one evening. Delicious!
• How lovely it was to run into Chris and Mary, who reminded us that we’re not alone when we look back on our old photos, wishing we could take them all over again now that we’ve learned so much.
• The guy who welcomed us at the gate. He was so warm and helpful and made us feel very excited to be there.
• We saw a number of birds and had routine morning visitors to our patio, who’d come to clean up the insect buffet attracted by the light the night before.
• The pool was amazing! We were cooking by the time we arrived and settled, so it was absolutely lovely to take a dip and feel human again.
• It was glorious to see zebras, hartebeests, wildebeests and springboks hanging out in big herds on the plains. 
• We napped between game drives, which is something I don’t usually do. I’m almost always too excited to look at photos and footage, so this time, it was so lovely to really relax and go with the flow.