The Restory Retreat Centre

The antipodes as depicted  in a manuscript  of  the "Topographia Christiana" (Kosmas Indicopleustes, 6th century AD) For some inexplicable reason the adults of my childhood were all in agreement that the end of any tunnel started in South Africa will be somewhere in China. How often have I heard: “If you keep digging here you’ll have to start learning Chinese. When you pop out on the other side of the earth all those Chinese will be standing around the hole looking in and you’ll have to explain to them what you are doing there.” Suffice to say that I kept my holes fairly shallow. It is the sort of information that you put away as you grow up only to be taken off the shelf again when you have children or grandchildren digging holes in the garden. This week I discovered that we are all a little off the mark with our calculations. By a few continents actually. And such digging through the centre of the earth right down from where you stand has a very fa...

Photograph by Alan Manson Wakkerstroom, February this year. As we were driving into town that particular morning, there were so many of these falcons sitting on the telephone lines next to the road that we had to stop and look. They were unfamiliar to us. Eastern Red-footed Falcon was the description our bird book gave us. Nice. The insert in the wildlife program on SABC 2 about a month ago had more information. The Amur Falcon, formerly called the Eastern Red-footed Falcon, is one of the very small raptors, weighing the equivalent of about four slices of bread. But ironically they also have one of the longest migration routes of any bird of prey, travelling the 25 000 km from their breeding grounds in Northern China and Southern Siberia to our summer grasslands in South Africa. In the process they have to run the gauntlet of mass killings by nets in Nagaland in India and long uninterrupted crossings over the Indian Ocean. Source: avibirds.com We thought w...