We had heard that not too far away from us, as the Incomati river meets the sea is a place renowned for its birdlife so we thought we’d have a bit of an explore. In the UK this normally involved packing cagoules, fleeces, stout shoes, RSPB membership cards, binoculars cameras and more. Luckily with the weather had moved out of the ‘UK mode’ it had been in for the past few days. We just needed to grab binoculars and cameras and head out into the sunshine.
It’s about half an hours drive or so north to Marracuene, a local town. Once in Marracuene, it’s over the bridge and off the tarmac. This was where we had gone biking a couple of months ago, and we had noticed then there seemed to be a lot of birdlife in the local fields. The roads had got worse since our last visit as the recent UK style weather (as described by the locals) had brought 3 days of rain in the middle of the dry season. This meant the normally rutted and bumpy dirt roads also had large pools to navigate. Some were shallow while others were more challengingly deep. It was always quite difficult to tell how deep it was until you were committed.
Within minutes of leaving the tarmac we were stopped, watching what I now know to be, a Great White Egret (see Facebook for all the help I got with this). We were just in bird watching paradise, low lying scrub leading up to the river just filled with a wide variety of birds, almost all we’d never seen or heard before. There was no car park, sign-posted path and board along the way pointing out common birds. This was a wide dirt track wandering past a few buildings and into the scrub.
We pulled over onto another sandy track and got out to have a look around. We got to the edge of the river and saw the most amazing crabs. It took a while to work out what they were as they looked so odd. Black scuttling creates with a weird bright red thing. If you moved to close or too fast they scuttled back into their holes. Once we got close enough and stayed still long enough we saw them to be black crabs with one giant red claw. They were totally black and then had one oversize red claw. They were quite amazing and quite tiny. Each crab was a couple of centimetres across.
Once I dragged myself away from the crabs and stood still in this scrub for a few minutes I could see it was just alive with birdlife. We headed back into the car and on a little further to Praia de Maceneta. What I would describe as a tropic version of Spurn Point. It did have rather more palm trees, white sand and warm clear seas, but I think the comparison stands. After a drink at the bar at the end of the mainland, we wandered onto the sandy connection between the mainland and the rest of the spit of land. We sat for a while on the sand watching the world go by.
For those of you that know me well must know that by this time my thoughts had turned to food. We headed back down along the Incomati and found an amazing spot for lunch. Lourenço restaurante. A beautiful terrace overlooking the scrubland to the river to one side, a wonderful garden to attract the birds on another and the pool to the other side. We sat drinking freshly squeezed juiced and watching the birds. Again thanks to my friends I found we saw some square tailed drongos and black and white flycatchers. The drongos were amazing with mid-air acrobatics flying to a point almost hovering then coming back the way they had come. They almost had the control of a hummingbird. The garden had a feeding table set up so the birds were constantly coming and going. I did manage to recognise the sparrows amongst the other birds, and some turns flying in the distance. This gave us plenty to keep us busy while the prawns were being barbequed for lunch.
After lunch, we headed to look at some of the deserted beachside bars and restaurant as places for a trip another day. Then it was back through the deep pools and rutted dirt track back to the tarmac and home
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