Forays in southern Africa

Here are a few scenes from some of my travels this year. If you're coming to FOSS4G 2008 you might be lucky enough to experience some of these. If you haven't decided to come yet, perhaps these will entice you. Make the best of your long journey to Cape Town and travel a bit after FOSS4G. In April I went with family and friends on a 4x4 trip through the Central Kalahari National Park and Moremi in Botswana. The baobab below is at Khubu Island, high ground in Sowa Pan, the bed of an ancient dried up lake, where we spent a night on the way back. Notice the MapBender cap offset by the baobab tree. You'll have to travel to the north end of South Africa or beyond to see baobabs.This family of tuskers trumpeted as we surprised them in Moremi. You'll see elephants in many reserves, a few fairly close to Cape Town.

A view over the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers in Mapungubwe National Park, World Heritage Site and Transfrontier Park, where we went camping in July.

One normally associates hippos with waterways in savanna and thicker bush but this family have been reintroduced to the Seekoeivlei Ramsar wetland in the Highveld grassland outside the small town of Memel in the Free State Province. I was there in August to see my brother's Green building project.

A trip to South Africa is amiss without a visit to the Kruger National Park. With only a few hundred cheetahs in the whole park we were lucky to see two males wandering along the side of the road. We spent a weekend camping there after I gave a presentation on Open Source GIS at GISSA Mpumalanga meeting in Nelspruit.

Hope to see you at FOSS4G 2008! Register now!