Tag: South Africa

Consider the Southern Right Whale…

…of South Africa. The Southern right is one weird-looking mammal, more like an alien life form than anything I thought I recognize as being a whale.

Each Southern right whale can be individually identified by the horny growths known as callosities that grow on their heads. Their heads are  much hairier than most whales. And they have TWO blowholes. Who knew? The Internet is a vast place of useless information! *

This sign from an earlier day’s walk shows the Southern Right whale

They spend June – November off the coast of South Africa. When Uwe and I finally got to really travel again, the Garden Route of South Africa in November sounded perfect. Even though there are no gardens, just a lot of spectacular ocean views, and we’d hopefully see migrating whales. (The place-namers must have drunk too much local wine when they named that stretch of territory.)

The town to see whales is Hermanus. We walked from our hotel to the jetty where we’d catch a whale watching boat. The scenery included local art.

Not quite sure what the artist intended, but it’s a pretty cool sculpture

 

Cute, if anatomically questionable

 Out in the bay we spotted fins first.

The closer we got to the pod of 4 whales, the easier it was to spot the callosities.

These were whales?

Looked to me like futuristic submarines rising to the surface

And then one of the whales lifted its head. The Southern Right are baleen whales. They swim with their mouths open, continuously feeding as food filters through the baleen hairs.

You’re looking at a screen of baleen

We left the boat content but still not quite sure what life form we’d just spent a day observing. I had a hard time narrowing down Uwe’s photos of the Southern Right whale for this post! **

I’ll be talking about a close relative of the whale. It is NOT what you think! (heh heh heh) Any guesses?

Stay tuned for the next post.

NOTES: https://www.whaletrail.co.za *For more dubiously useful information, go to these earlier posts to learn what to call groups of whales: The Animal Kingdom: 22 & The Animal Kingdom: 37 **Uwe’s comment: I had a hard time?! He had to decide which to keep out of the more than 500 photos he took that day! ©2023 Jadi Campbell. All photos © Uwe Hartmann. Uwe’s photography may be viewed at viewpics.de.

My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out. 

Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. Broken In: A Novel in Stories was  semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award from Hidden River Arts and Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book of the Year Award (Short Stories). The Trail Back Out was American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies, Runner-Up for the 2021 Top Shelf Award, 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist, and awarded a 2021 Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award.

Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.

 

Introducing Pia Newman

Pia Newman, Übersetzerin / Webtexterin / Virtual Assistant, currently in Cape Town, South Africa

Allow me to introduce an amazing woman! One of my writing buddies and best friends here is Pia Newman, aka the Planelope. [1] She spent a weekend here recently, to visit with me and the others from a group of friends who used to write together on a regular basis. And drink while talking about writing. And laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

Pia’s been off on a grand adventure. Make that: Grand Adventure. She’s seeing the world with an entity known as the WiFi Tribe. We as her friends are living vicariously, following along as Pia resided and worked first in Bali, then in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and now in South Africa.

Pia first discovered the WiFi Tribe last year on FB. She was looking for a way to travel more while working, and not necessarily by herself. She’s gained a community of like-minded digital nomads who travel and grow together. Pia gets new motivation from shared creative energy, just like what she used to have with her local writing group (us). But with the WiFi Tribe, she gets to see the world….

A maximum of 25 (usually 20) people in any spot at any given time makes the experience intimate and truly tribal. At the moment there are 3 tribes for 2018: Africa/Asia, Europe, and South America.

Working at home has lots of distractions (don’t I know!).  What excites her most about the WiFi Tribe is that it’s a work group that really, truly works. As Pia says, “If you work around other people typing away 40, 50, or 60 hours a week, it will motivate and inspire you too…”

But I’ll let Pia speak for herself. She writes an awesome blog about her experiences. You can get information on her book projects, too. So, everyone, without further ado, here’s Pia!

Pia Newman: Writer & Digital Nomad/

NOTES: [1] We call her the Planelope because no one plans like Pia. No one. She used to get up to write at 6:00-7:00 before going to a full-time job. If her dedication isn’t bad enough, her productivity puts the rest of us to shame too: she’s already written 8 first drafts of novels and polished 3 of them. And in 2012-13 she did a one-year course online to get credentialed as a screenwriter. If she wasn’t so wonderful we’d seriously hate her. ©Jadi Campbell 2018. Photo by Julia Kallweit.

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

The Animal Kingdom: 17

It’s time for yet another post on animals for your reading amusement: installment #17 from my blog thread describing what to call groups of animals … See how many you can guess. Answers listed at the bottom of the page.

  1. You won’t find this crèche in a crèche.
  2. The dissimulation’s dissimulation about what kind of animals they were didn’t last long.
  3. This herd must have heard – it has ears to hear.
  4. How the scold scolded!
  5. The mob wasn’t big enough to mob the fields.
  6. We heard the crash crash through the brush.

Answers:

Mob, South Island, New Zealand
  1. Crèche of penguins
  2. Dissimulation of birds
  3. Herd of rabbits (domestic only)
  4. Scold of jays
  5. Mob of sheep
  6. Crash of rhinos
Crèche, South Africa
Dissimulation, Inle Lake, Myanmar

NOTES: © Jadi Campbell 2017. All photos © Uwe Hartmann. To see more of Uwe’s animal photos and pics from our trips go to viewpics.de.  Fun animal names from www.writers-free-reference.com, Mother Nature Network and www.reference.com.

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

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