Letter from Cape Town

Geography Professor Keith Clarke sent the following letter and spectacular photographs to the Department on September 4, 2013:

It is 6:10 am, and I am sitting in the restaurant at the Victoria and Alfred (not Albert) Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa, watching Table Mountain emerge from the dawn twilight. The top of the station, which is only now becoming visible against the horizon, is today’s first destination, via cable car. I’m visiting South Africa for the National Geographic Society’s Committee on Research and Exploration during our annual Field Inspection. Today, we visit the national museum and the botanical gardens, and we have no less than six lectures to hear, a middling day for the committee. I’m eager get started.

We began our inspection tour this year a week ago in Johannesburg. There, we traveled to the site where early man, Australopithecus sediba, was discovered at Malapa. The site is in the process of having a huge cover built, so that it is both protected and visible, even though it is at the end of a bone jarring ride along a very undeveloped road. From there, we drove to Witwatersrand University, to see the actual fossils. Move over Lucy; with such remarkable finds, the two million year history of Homo sapiens in Africa is being rewritten here, in the southern spring.

From JoBurg, we flew in small planes to the field station at Sabi Sabi, a private game reserve that forms part of the buffer zone for Kruger national park. There, in three short days, working with our ranger Steve and tracker Heavily (I kid you not, Shangaan babies are named for how their mother feels at birth) we saw an apparently endless stream of birds, mammals, and vegetation. On the first night, we tracked a male leopard as he marked out his territory along a road. The next morning we saw zebra, elephant, rhino, and water buffalo, including finding a leopard devouring the remains of an Impala in a tree, audibly crunching the bones while ripping out pounds of meat at a time. We got out of the jeep to walk among the giraffe, so tall and amazingly graceful as they strip the upper tree branches. Then we saw more leopards and lions, the latter when we got up early to view another leopard, a female, then followed her concerned glance to the horizon where four male lions were casually surveying the grazing Impala from the next rock pile.

Coming out of the savanna was a letdown, leaving me longing to return with my family. The two flights here to Cape Town were spectacular for the fact that snow had fallen on the mountains beyond Stellenbosch, a reminder that here in the Southern hemisphere there are still a few weeks of winter left. But for me, there are just a few days before Fall classes, new students, and faculty meetings. As I gaze up at the sun, now in the east but heading to the north by noon, and now illuminating the tiny cloud streaming from the summit of Table Mountain, somehow, Santa Barbara seems a long way away.