We crossed paths on a frozen stream. He was easily over ninety years old, though the dry winds here will give wrinkles to a child, and make guessing age difficult. I was trailing the hill pigeons and inadvertently followed him to the small adobe building that was his home. We spoke freely without understanding each other’s words, his voice was beautiful and I was perplexed that anyone was living alone so high up in the valley. Both the long key he pulled from his robe and the wooden door it unlocked seemed from another time. I stayed a moment to help him prepare his evening's firewood, he moved slowly but showed remarkable skill splitting kindling with his hand axe. I wonder what it feels like to be there some nights, around that crackling fire when the Himalayas breathe heavy and the wolves howl outside.
#snowleopard #himalayas #leh #ladakh #kashmir #meditation #conservationphotogrsphy #indiansafari #wildernessculture #wolves #worlderlust @nikonasia
Contact me for our next snow leopard expedition.
Perhaps there will come a time where we preserve great tracts of land not because of their economical, social or even scientific significance, but simply because they are wild, and that is something we value beyond measure.
#wild #angola #insidenatgeo #intotheokavango #wildernessculture #natgeo #kembo18
@intotheokavango
Phantoms.
35 x 25 inches. Printed on archival paper, limited edition of ten.
Available at the End of Ivory Exhibition, Christie’s Los Angeles (23-25 October) or online. All proceeds go toward elephant conservation with DSWF See catalogue link in bio.
#elephants #conservation #dswf #namibia #africa #endivorytrade #giants
North Luangwa, Day 12.
We had been warned before we reached the tributary. The crocodiles here, locals told us, had learned to hunt fishermen by striking the hull and knocking them from their dugout canoes. Whether through intelligence, conditioning or culture, a threshold had been crossed.
We passed the confluence and almost immediately felt the river change. Every large crocodile we encountered slid from the bank and came for us with intent. Some of them were larger than our canoes. They rode their own bow waves, heads up, aquaplaning across the surface at a speed that seemed unfathomable across the current…a hundred million years of apex predator perfection. We stole glimpses of them over our shoulders while frantically trying to weave through the hippo pods and submerged tree
stumps, and we paddled with everything we had.
They closed the distance between us alarmingly fast but if we held our nerve we found we could usually out endure them. When this was not possible we slapped our paddle blades flat on the surface, the loud crack imitating a gunshot would occasionally give them pause. Sometimes nothing worked except to rush for the opposite bank and get out. On two remarkable occasions, the hippos intervened and chased the great reptiles away from us.
A river that still has the ability to frighten us is a river that is still alive and wild. These crocodiles once shared this valley with the dinosaurs. Specters of the Luangwa, they are one with the water.
It is us who are the momentary guests here- our entire human history is to the river a relative blink of an eye.
📷 @jameskydd
🎥 @rainervonbrandis
#luangwa #crocodiles #wildrivers #greatspineofafrica
Diary entry
Luangwa expedition - Day 7
These first days on the canoes we have been carried by the river, the powerful current shaking the dried reeds like a bony rattle.
Grass frogs summon the rain from the sky, violent storms that would steal an untethered canoe from the bank. We drink from the rainfall pooled on a spread canvas.
We pass a fisherman’s wooden mokoro for the first time on this river- always a significant moment for us - seeing the vessels we once used for these expeditions.
White-fronted bee-eaters somersault in acrobatic arcs over us, hunting their quarry above the water. Yellow-billed storks stand on ceremony along the sandbars with their breeding plumage blush. A monitor swims across the current ahead, ancient and watchful.
Tracks adorn the sand bars- evidence of the increasing abundance of life- clawless otter, water mongoose, the prints of a Goliath heron the size of our own feet. We see the first tell tale signs of crocodile - a slide marked into the mud - we have been more deliberate about the placement of research nets and the water sonde, and do not linger at the water’s edge.
📷 @jameskydd
#LuangwaDiary #Luangwa #Zambia #TheWildernessProject
There is a particular kind of humility knowing that the Luangwa River we are travelling on, sleeping beside, drinking from… was already ancient when these mountains first rose around it. That it has outlasted the lakes it became, and the lakes that became it. That our entire human presence in this valley - evidenced in stone tools we have started to notice along its banks - amounts to barely a whisper in its memory.
The very oldest sediments here were formed from moraines as the ice sheets of Gondwana melted. They became a river. That river became a chain of megalakes. The lakes receded and became a river again. Through all of it - the breaking apart of continents, the slow emergence of the mammals that crowd its banks downriver, the first appearance of our own ancestors - water has flowed through this valley, southwestward, always southwestward.
📷 @jameskydd
#LuangwaDiary #Luangwa #Zambia #TheWildernessProject
Diary entry
Luangwa expedition Day 1
The Source, Mafinga Hills
We left the others in the dawn light, three of us, two days of food and the research equipment.
There is a kind of doorway somewhere in the foothills of mountains, a subtle veil that when walked through it the mountain is no longer seen but felt.
Our packs and the gradient pulled our bodies into a pose of worship, at times we were on all fours, ascending into a landscape from some older, stranger version of the world.
We were not alone - metallic pill millipedes scuttled amoungst neon slime moulds and starry mosses, scarlet and gold kite spiders dangled from the low umbrella canopy, antlions floated past like embers. A pair of curious ravens decided to follow us for the rest of the day.
We ran low on water and followed the sound of it - a pool beneath a waterfall, just wide enough to cool our limbs. Below us the whole valley, three thousand square miles of haze and silence and ancient woodland.
Near the top the mountain relented, rolling open into high meadows of extraordinary greenness - glittering with surface water, scattered with proteas and giant orchids standing improbable and magnificent in the grass sea. And then, in a fold of the mountain, a sliver of sacred forest in a sea of grass, the first thread of the Luangwa.
We camped within sight of it - barely enough energy to pitch the tents before a storm came hard over the ridge and flooded them. The ravens returned with their kin. Twenty of them diving and somersaulting through the clouds that blanketed us.
Flashes of lightning illuminating the tent. The plaintive cries of nightjars. The source flowing somewhere below in the dark. Sleep.
📷 @jameskydd
#LuangwaDiary #Luangwa #Zambia #TheWildernessProject
The Luangwa is one of Earth’s most ancient rivers, birthed over 300 million years ago, when glaciers were melting at the edge of the world and the first rivers were finding their way south and west across Gondwana.
It has witnessed the dinosaurs, the first mammals, and the first hominids. And today, still unmodified by dam or major diversion, it runs as wild as any through one of the greatest concentrations of wildlife left on our planet.
Starting tomorrow a small team of us will attempt to navigate and survey the entire length of it - from its source in the Mafinga Mountains on the Zambia-Malawi border, through an estimated 1100 kilometres of wilderness, escarpment, floodplain and gorge, to its confluence with the Zambezi.
We will be documenting everything we can about the Luangwa’s hydrology, ecology and communities along the way, hoping to provide the understanding necessary to safeguard the water, people and wildlife for the rest of time.
We will be sharing our journey on @greatspineofafrica .
#greatspineofafrica #luangwa #zambia #riverconservation
Nyungwe rises like a green cathedral on the roof of Rwanda - a living archive of water. Its blanket of mist seems to continually spill upwards into the clouds, the condensed exhalation of an ancient forest.
Nyungwe is not only a forest; it is a watershed. From its folded hills and peat-rich soils nascent streams braid into arteries - some turning west toward the Congo, others beginning a long, patient journey north. This is the birthplace of a river that will carry many names along its course - Rukarara, Nyabarongo, Kagera - but whose final name we know as the Nile. What falls here as rain in the cold mossy shadows will travel thousands of kilometres and one day spill into Lake Victoria, drop over Murchison Falls, flood the Sudd Swamps, parch the Nubian and Saharan deserts, feed Khartoum, Luxor and Cairo and join the Mediterranean.
In a warming world, Nyungwe speaks an obvious truth with urgent clarity: water security begins not in pipes, wells, or dams, but in intact landscapes - and the futures of rivers are written at their sources.
@greatspineofafrica
#greatspineofafrica #rivers #nile #africanparks nyungwe
The golden threads of last light fall on the dark waters of Tanganyika, one of the world’s oldest and deepest lakes.
Contact us for extraordinary curated journeys rooted in purpose and place.
#tanzania #tanganyika #safarious #travelwithpurpose #wilderness
If you could choose one wild place to return to, where would it be?
Deep in the Namib there is an ephemeral river that snakes between ancient rock and dune. Somewhere along its course right now rock martins are diving through the arms of the winterthorn trees and floating above the broken clay mosaics where water once ran. A gust of sage-scented wind is lifting the sand in a tango embrace and the first barking geckos are heralding the change in light. Toktokkie beetles scuttle amongst butterfly-shaped leaves and the great oval footprints of giants.
Here in the oldest desert, with one of her last remaining elephant herds: this would be my choice.
Contact us for extraordinary curated journeys rooted in purpose and place.
#namibia #safarious #travelwithpurpose #wilderness
A magical conversation with the South African explorer, author and conservationist, about dreams, ancestors, talking parrots, elephants, rivers, watersheds, and the animating essence of the African wilderness — including his latest collaboration with filmmaker Werner Herzog. Listen, share and be inspired by @drsteveboyes , who gives the art of travel new meaning in the latest episode of the podcast, GonetoTimbuktu.com. Available now on all major streaming platform
Elephant image: copyright @jameskydd
#explorer #okavango #angola #elephant #river #nile #congo #zambezi #nationalgeographic_ #conservation #wernerherzog
