ZIMBABWE: Almost 12 Days In The Omay, The Nyakasanga Special With Dalton &York Safaris

[Backyardsniper]

As I am sure not everyone is interested in spending a great deal of time reading my ramblings about this hunt in order to get the information they are looking for as far as whether or not they should be interested in booking a hunt with Dalton&York, or book their future hunts through Buchanon Hunts, I will do a very brief review of all that up front here. Now, for those who have the patience, or are simply bored and wish to subject themselves to what I am sure is a very sad attempt at writing an entertaining report of a very fantastic first safari, to those individuals I would say, stay tuned, as I will do this in installments of a day or two at a time. Since this was my first safari and I have no other first safaris to compare it to I can only assume that not all first safaris go as this one went. All of the facts I have written herein are in fact facts. While I have tried my best to add a little artistic flare to the writing and also tried to convey the true emotions and feelings of the moments as they felt in those moments, the facts remain the facts. If I say leopard sawed, then a leopard did in fact saw, if a tsetse bit then a tsetse did in fact bite, and so on and so forth, you get how this works.

The short version of the review:

Dalton&York, should you book with them, are they professional, courteous, honest, can they put you on the animals you want to hunt, will they put forth the extra effort to give you the hunt that you want? Yes, the answer to all the above in the experience I had with them is a very confident yes on all accounts.

Buchanon Hunts, should I use them to book a future hunt? Also a very solid yes. Michelle answered more questions than any one person should have to answer. Always available, always happy to help, genuinely cares about you having a great hunt. One of her past clients commented on the Facebook post when we were leaving and said "100%enjoy 0%worry" That is about as accurate as I can describe what Buchanon hunts does. If you need more details on this feel free to PM me and we can chat.

Qatar Airways. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure you and your gun are in the same place at the same time. This is a plus. They don't do this because they care about you, they do this because if you and your gun are separated then they have to deal with a gun and they don't want to do that. Either way it's a win for you. Other than that, if you have to fly cattle class like I do, then it is what it is. The flights were on time and the flight attendants were nice. The seats are small and I am not, the other people on the plane are annoying and you are just gonna have to deal with it for 16-30 hours depending on where you are going. On the upside the Chicken Biryani is pretty damned decent for airline food.
Amanzi lodge in Harare is very nice. If you have to overnight in Harare I highly recommend it. Nice rooms, excellent restaurant.

That pretty much sums up the review portion. There was not really much to complain about on this trip other than the taxi driver who didn't want to turn on his meter when we left DFW for the 2.2 mile drive back to our hotel that lasted about 4 minutes and then told me I owed him $55. He did not get $55 and he left with his feeling hurt very badly. Don't use the taxis at the airport, I knew this and I did it anyway, thinking that there might be some shred of decency left in humanity, there is not, but if there are no cameras and you are bigger than the taxi driver then it works in your favor.

 

[Backyardsniper]

Arrival Day


The 787-8 came to a halt at the Robert Gabriel Mugabe airport in Harare and it had been a long trip indeed. We were met when we disembarked the plane, and we began the circus that is customs, visas, weapons clearance and all that goes along with that. I was tired and grew impatient with the second weapons inspection at the domestic terminal. I mean seriously, there were 5 of us in a damn broom closet trying to read the serial numbers on my guns with cell phone flashlights. What have I got myself into? Liam, the pilot, met us there and helped out with the situation. We stacked our gear in the little Cessna 206 and took off in the tiny plane for a 1 hour and 30 minute flight to Nyakasanga and the Chirundu Safari

Lodge. We flew over The Great Dyke and we gazed at the round tobacco patches. About an hour into the flight, we crossed over the Zimbabwe side of the Zambezi escarpment. The landscape immediately changed, and we were now in wild Africa. This was the moment that my feelings changed. I had been so unhappy about all the trouble that we had getting this trip off the ground that I was certain I was not going to enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It appeared I may have been wrong.

I looked down at the Hippos in the Zambezi as we banked the plane; it passed over the first elephant we saw on the trip as we dropped into land. Dana was feeling sick from the ride but was better almost as soon as we landed; it was a bit of a sporty ride. We met Sunny and Zvito, the trackers, and Michael, the national parks game scout. I drank my first Zambezi beer;

it was delicious, standing on the dirt runway the emotions were strong. Was this really it, was I really here standing on a dirt runway with a professional hunter with his crew of trackers? I was really on an actual safari! We made our way to the lodge just a short drive away, and after unpacking bags and assembling rifles, I emptied the carry-on backpack and refilled it with hunting gear.

Now came the moment of truth as we departed camp to go sight in rifles. I knew York would be drawing a lot of conclusions from my performance in the next few minutes. While on the way to shoot, we stopped to take a look at a herd of elephants with a large tuskless among them. Shortly after that, we passed a lion track in the road, and we got out and discussed it. I saw my first buffalo track as well. I was definitely taking it all in! Perhaps a quarter mile down the road, we saw the owner of the lion track. A pair of them and one of those laid under a bush not 10 yards from the road, and we sat and looked at him. The young male stared at us with his huge amber eyes. It seemed as though they simply looked straight through you. He was most unconcerned with our presence!

While still on our way to shoot the rifles, I was introduced to the tsetse fly. I did not much care for him. We saw a troop of baboons, Francolin (spurfowl), guineas by the dozen, and a sand grouse that I did not get a good look at. I saw my first large Baobab trees, and York and I discussed the things that tree likely had seen come to pass in the thousand or so years it had been standing there.

Now here we were. At the place of the testing, the place where no matter how much you have practiced, no matter how confident you think you are, this is the place you will be nervous! He is watching you. He is judging you. Everything from the way you remove the gun from the case to how confidently you handle it. He watches to see if you check to see if it is loaded. He watches to make sure you don't flag him or the rest of the crew just because you "think it is unloaded", and we have not even got to him watching you shoot it yet! The Mopane flies were thick. They were in my face, my eyes, my nose; this would be a real test of your ability under field conditions. I pulled out the 416 first, the great Sako that had once crossed the kitchen counter of @TOBY458 was now gonna have its day in the bush. It did not disappoint. The 416 was dead center. I was happy with this. Now the bruiser of egos and shoulders alike came out of the case. I pushed the break lever to the side and confidently dropped two of the big shiny torpedoes in the tubes. The first shot from the 470 was center of the black as well. Ah, but now my nemesis, the last shot to complete the trifecta, to put all the rounds in the black and actually look like I knew what I was doing. It was not to be on this day though. I centered the dot on the black and applied The appropriate pressure to the rear trigger and just as it broke I saw the red dot work its way to the left just a touch. “Shit! Pulled it a little," I said. "That one is gonna be just outside the black on the left," I told York as he started down range to check the target. The second shot was in fact pulled slightly left, about 2 inches out of the black. I called it when the trigger broke. I joked with York that I had hoped to instill some confidence in my PH with a display of marksmanship, but it had not worked out the way I planned. He laughed and said he did not think we were gonna have any problems with the shooting.

On the trip back to the lodge the sunset was surreal. I stopped York to point out what I was sure was a warthog hanging in an Acacia tree. It was convincing enough that York had to check it with his binos, but it was in fact a bundle of oddly woven branches, with one branch hanging down that did one hell of an impression of a warthog's tail. This tree would from henceforth be known as the leopard tree, and was an important landmark for all the remaining days of the hunt. We stopped and looked at another herd of elephants from maybe 50 yards away. York gave me some instruction on shot placement from various angles and distances.

Once back to camp, we stood on the veranda talking, and I had no more than got the words out of my mouth, "Really would be cool if I could hear a leopard saw while we are here." When as if on cue, a leopard sawed just outside of camp. We went down to the fire pit and watched an elephant across the pond at 100 yards. A nice 20lb young bull, he might as well have been a 100lb bull, I was in awe just the same. We ate crocodile nuggets breaded with a tangy citrus tasting spice paired with a cucumber, almost tzatziki tasting sauce. York noted these nuggets were from a small croc, ten feet or less, as they did not eat large crocs because of their propensity to eat people, and well, that would just be kind of weird, and I agreed that seems to be a sensible rule.

Dinner was roasted beef loin with a scalloped potato dish, along with a beet salad. The pepper paste was delicious and very spicy. This pepper paste and I were to have many issues before the trip was over!

Shortly after dinner, we retired to bed so as to avoid feeling bad the next day, the next day would come very soon for me.

 

[Backyardsniper]

 

[Inline6]

Patiently waiting for the rest of the story.

You are doing well so far, keep up the good work.

 

[TOBY458]

Come on now! On with the show!

 

[Karl Johnson]

Great write up so far. Looking forward to the next chapter!

 

[BnC 04]

So far, so good. Looking forward to the next installment.

 

[revturbo9967]

Tagging so I can keep up.

 

[Backyardsniper]

Day 1

Buffalo are not as dumb as they look!



I woke up at 02:30 unable to sleep and still very jet lagged. I made a trip to the bathroom to return some used beer to the world and introduced myself to a very strange looking spider that was hanging out on the bathroom wall. This spider as it turns out is what they call a "daddy long legs" which looks entirely different from the spider here at home that goes by the same moniker. At 04:00 still unable to sleep, which is not at all uncommon for me, I was wishing I had my notebook to make note of all the days happening before I forgot. I decided instead to gild the Lilly a bit by reading from the Gospel of Rourke while actually in Africa on my own safari and it dawned on me that I could take notes on my phone. I am not a technology guy. Now it is 04:45 and here we are, the alarm just went off on my phone as I lay here in the bed typing all the events from the previous day, and now it's time to get up and see what the bush has in store for me on my first day of Safari. We had a little breakfast and left camp around 06:00 as we drove past the Leopard tree I smiled.

The game was fairly elusive early in the day. I had started learning some Shona words from Michael, the game scout. He and I would develop an interesting relationship over the course of the hunt. Michael was a very serious fellow that had an accent that reminded me very much of the character in Black Hawk Down who said, "We don't need a lot of Arkansas White boys." Our relationship was cemented on the day we killed the kudu, when on the ride back I was picking at him about his AK-47 and asked him if he knew what those three positions on the selector lever were? He looked at me quizzically and I pointed at the lever and said "Safe, Not safe, and Fuck You!" this drew an uproarious laughter from him as well as Sunnyboy and Zvito. From that point forward, we were now just a bunch of guys on a hunting trip.

Right about 08:50 we had our first elephant sighting, got on tracks and the elephant trumpeted from 200 yards away and was gone. The wind was bad and the elephants departed the scene quickly. It was fairly quiet after that until 11:30 when we spotted 2 dugga boys in a pan right off the side of the road and one of them was a NICE ONE! The stalk was made, but the wind betrayed us at the last second. Although I don't believe the wind betrayed us as much as I did when I brought the rifle up on the sticks too fast. Both of the buffalo whirled and were gone in a flash.

We proceeded down to one of the pans and had a long, long lunch with a hippo that refused to surface. It was a great opportunity to see a ton of wildlife, and as a general rule they do not shoot over these larger water holes, except obviously for Hippo and Croc or in the odd event that you happen across an absolute monster specimen of some animal or another. So we glassed, napped, and waited for the wind to settle. It seems between 11:00 and 3:00 approximately, for some reason, the wind will pick up and it is very unpredictable. We resumed our search at 15:00, leaving the lunch spot and running directly into a young hippo bull approx 300 yards down the road. He jumped up and ran about 10 yards off the road and stopped and stared at us. York and I dismounted and watched him for a while. York took the opportunity to give me a lesson on hippo judging and shot placement. We then left there, went to the main road, and went up one road and ran into buffalo tracks. There was a great degree of discussion between Zvito and York as to whether or not we should follow the tracks now or let him get farther ahead as they were worried he may have laid down not far from where we were and perhaps we should wait for him to get up, head for his afternoon drink and then pick up the tracks. The decision was made to see where the tracks led. It turns out they led right into a buffalo about 50 yards ahead. Moving slowly along the tracks, York stopped to show me where the buff had rubbed his boss on a tree. In another 20 yards York and Zvito hit the ground in a low squat. The rest of us followed suit. There was a sudden explosion of brush maybe 20 or 25 yards ahead and a whole lot of unhappy buffalo erupted from underneath a very thick tangle of bush. It was a truly impressive sight to see the speed and agility these animals have at close range. Fortunately the bull exited the bush moving to our left and not in our direction. Your first look at one of those things at full speed in tight quarters is not something you will soon forget!

We traveled on and saw lots of impala, made a couple of attempts at a short stalk but none of them would cooperate. I saw a large Kudu cow standing in the road. This being the first Kudu of any kind I had ever laid eyes on, I couldn't help but take notice of how much larger they were than I had imagined.

I enjoyed several beers on the way back to camp, obviously after shooting hours, and as we turned on the cut through road for the lodge, the sunset over the leopard tree was very beautiful indeed. I knew this was going to be a very special 12 days.

 

[Flewis]

Damn, I never have guessed you had such a writing talent. I’m very impressed. After all you delt with l’m glad it was what you hoped for and more.

 

[Backyardsniper]

 

[Backyardsniper]

 

[Backyardsniper]

Damn, I never have guessed you had such a writing talent. I’m very impressed. After all you delt with l’m glad it was what you hoped for and more.

Thank you. I thought I would give this writing thing a try. I must have used up all my bad luck before the hunt. Ha ha

 

[Angelo_orygun]

Awesome start, this is one of my dream hunts so I can’t wait to read more!!

 

[Mekaniks]

Thank You for bringing us along. Cant wait!

 

[Inline6]

I must say, I really like Michael, the game scout!

 

[Kevin Peacocke]

Arrival Day


The 787-8 came to a halt at the Robert Gabriel Mugabe airport in Harare and it had been a long trip indeed. We were met when we disembarked the plane, and we began the circus that is customs, visas, weapons clearance and all that goes along with that. I was tired and grew impatient with the second weapons inspection at the domestic terminal. I mean seriously, there were 5 of us in a damn broom closet trying to read the serial numbers on my guns with cell phone flashlights. What have I got myself into? Liam, the pilot, met us there and helped out with the situation. We stacked our gear in the little Cessna 206 and took off in the tiny plane for a 1 hour and 30 minute flight to Nyakasanga and the Chirundu Safari

Lodge. We flew over The Great Dyke and we gazed at the round tobacco patches. About an hour into the flight, we crossed over the Zimbabwe side of the Zambezi escarpment. The landscape immediately changed, and we were now in wild Africa. This was the moment that my feelings changed. I had been so unhappy about all the trouble that we had getting this trip off the ground that I was certain I was not going to enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It appeared I may have been wrong.

I looked down at the Hippos in the Zambezi as we banked the plane; it passed over the first elephant we saw on the trip as we dropped into land. Dana was feeling sick from the ride but was better almost as soon as we landed; it was a bit of a sporty ride. We met Sunny and Zvito, the trackers, and Michael, the national parks game scout. I drank my first Zambezi beer;

it was delicious, standing on the dirt runway the emotions were strong. Was this really it, was I really here standing on a dirt runway with a professional hunter with his crew of trackers? I was really on an actual safari! We made our way to the lodge just a short drive away, and after unpacking bags and assembling rifles, I emptied the carry-on backpack and refilled it with hunting gear.

Now came the moment of truth as we departed camp to go sight in rifles. I knew York would be drawing a lot of conclusions from my performance in the next few minutes. While on the way to shoot, we stopped to take a look at a herd of elephants with a large tuskless among them. Shortly after that, we passed a lion track in the road, and we got out and discussed it. I saw my first buffalo track as well. I was definitely taking it all in! Perhaps a quarter mile down the road, we saw the owner of the lion track. A pair of them and one of those laid under a bush not 10 yards from the road, and we sat and looked at him. The young male stared at us with his huge amber eyes. It seemed as though they simply looked straight through you. He was most unconcerned with our presence!

While still on our way to shoot the rifles, I was introduced to the tsetse fly. I did not much care for him. We saw a troop of baboons, Francolin (spurfowl), guineas by the dozen, and a sand grouse that I did not get a good look at. I saw my first large Baobab trees, and York and I discussed the things that tree likely had seen come to pass in the thousand or so years it had been standing there.

Now here we were. At the place of the testing, the place where no matter how much you have practiced, no matter how confident you think you are, this is the place you will be nervous! He is watching you. He is judging you. Everything from the way you remove the gun from the case to how confidently you handle it. He watches to see if you check to see if it is loaded. He watches to make sure you don't flag him or the rest of the crew just because you "think it is unloaded", and we have not even got to him watching you shoot it yet! The Mopane flies were thick. They were in my face, my eyes, my nose; this would be a real test of your ability under field conditions. I pulled out the 416 first, the great Sako that had once crossed the kitchen counter of @TOBY458 was now gonna have its day in the bush. It did not disappoint. The 416 was dead center. I was happy with this. Now the bruiser of egos and shoulders alike came out of the case. I pushed the break lever to the side and confidently dropped two of the big shiny torpedoes in the tubes. The first shot from the 470 was center of the black as well. Ah, but now my nemesis, the last shot to complete the trifecta, to put all the rounds in the black and actually look like I knew what I was doing. It was not to be on this day though. I centered the dot on the black and applied The appropriate pressure to the rear trigger and just as it broke I saw the red dot work its way to the left just a touch. “Shit! Pulled it a little," I said. "That one is gonna be just outside the black on the left," I told York as he started down range to check the target. The second shot was in fact pulled slightly left, about 2 inches out of the black. I called it when the trigger broke. I joked with York that I had hoped to instill some confidence in my PH with a display of marksmanship, but it had not worked out the way I planned. He laughed and said he did not think we were gonna have any problems with the shooting.

On the trip back to the lodge the sunset was surreal. I stopped York to point out what I was sure was a warthog hanging in an Acacia tree. It was convincing enough that York had to check it with his binos, but it was in fact a bundle of oddly woven branches, with one branch hanging down that did one hell of an impression of a warthog's tail. This tree would from henceforth be known as the leopard tree, and was an important landmark for all the remaining days of the hunt. We stopped and looked at another herd of elephants from maybe 50 yards away. York gave me some instruction on shot placement from various angles and distances.

Once back to camp, we stood on the veranda talking, and I had no more than got the words out of my mouth, "Really would be cool if I could hear a leopard saw while we are here." When as if on cue, a leopard sawed just outside of camp. We went down to the fire pit and watched an elephant across the pond at 100 yards. A nice 20lb young bull, he might as well have been a 100lb bull, I was in awe just the same. We ate crocodile nuggets breaded with a tangy citrus tasting spice paired with a cucumber, almost tzatziki tasting sauce. York noted these nuggets were from a small croc, ten feet or less, as they did not eat large crocs because of their propensity to eat people, and well, that would just be kind of weird, and I agreed that seems to be a sensible rule.

Dinner was roasted beef loin with a scalloped potato dish, along with a beet salad. The pepper paste was delicious and very spicy. This pepper paste and I were to have many issues before the trip was over!

Shortly after dinner, we retired to bed so as to avoid feeling bad the next day, the next day would come very soon for me.

You write well BYS, I am feeling this trip.

 

[BRICKBURN]

Keep it coming.

"Sporty" plane rides are a treat.

 

[TwoTracks]

Heck yeah! I’ve been waiting a long time for your report. Congratulations in advance.

 

[VertigoBE]

Excellent writing so far @Backyardsniper. Can’t wait to read about the next few days!

Thanks for taking the time to write all this down