Camp 2: Pongola Part 1

 

Day 4, 9^th June – To Pongola

We had an early morning and watched the sunrise before packing the buses for our road trip to the next destination – Pongola Game Reserve. This day consisted of mostly travelling, as the journey took 9 hours in the minibus. We had a good singalong and was able to see the change in climate and environment as we ventured further south. I was particularly interested when travelling through towns and villages to try and gauge the way of life beyond a game reserve.

We arrived at Pongola and took in the amazing view of Lake Jozini that runs alongside the reserve. By this time, it was the afternoon and the sun sets at about 5:30 pm this time of year, so decided to call it a day before exploring the reserve tomorrow.

 

Day 5

Today we got up early to go for a bush walk, which is an apt description as Pongola is a savannah with wild bushes rather than the grassland of Ezemvelo. We first stopped by the vulture diner, which is where carcasses are put to give vultures safe food. This is because vulture poisoning has become a real issue in the area, being devastating for their numbers and the rest of the ecosystem. Normally, it is young men from local communities who poison the vultures to sell to traditional healers who use the brain for foresight. The healers themselves do not use much of the brain and is still sustainable, but groups of people have taken advantage and overexploited them for trading. Poison is a particularly devastating way to kill them as they are then eaten, and the poison is passed on to other animals.

The rest of the walk saw us up to a viewpoint where we could look over the reserve and Lake Jozini. Here, we got a brilliant sighting of a Martial Eagle circling above our heads. On our way back to camp, we saw our first giraffe!! About 20 metres away from us it stopped and stared, we all did the same, gawping at this beautiful creature towering above us. Around the corner were three more, a real morning treat.

On return we had breakfast, then went out to learn how to do a game count. Each of the team had a role to play, I was working out the orientation of the sighting of each animal. Among this, we would count how many of each species there was in each sighting, gender, age and distance from the car. This is important for calculating the health and abundance of each species, which helps determine decisions to be made at the end of each year. On this drive, we went down to the lakeside and saw our first hippo and crocodiles. Whilst we went, Zama taught us how to identify rhino (white and black) and elephant dung and tracks. This man did it with no effort, it was quite amazing.

Lunch was burgers, which I thoroughly enjoyed. After we had a talk about conservation in South Africa and learnt the many aspects that need to come together for an effective project, in which there are many challenges. We discussed the different types of game reserves, from purely ecological, to photo tourism, to hunting reserves. There is an overwhelming reliance on private reserves across most of South Africa, although the biggest ones are state owned and led. On these private reserves people can operate how they please, breeding and hunting how they like. This is a controversial topic but hunting can be a sustainable way of running a reserve, benefitting the ecological systems more broadly. Tomorrow, we visit one of these reserves.

 

Day 6 – 11^th June

Today we visited Belvedere Game Reserve, the private reserve I mentioned previously. We were given a talk by the owner who told us that he runs his reserve like a business. Using hunting permits to have foreign hunters pay huge sums of money to kill kudu, impalas and wildebeest for trophies. A part of this side of the business was his selective breeding of black impala and golden wildebeest which he kept separately and sold for much higher prices than the standard genetic groups. He also has a butchery business making many meat products, including biltong, which I had been waiting for. These parts of the reserve, he argued, were to make it financially sustainable. He then let us try his products, showed us the on-sight butchery and drove us to see his black impala and golden wildebeest. After a nice lasagne lunch made by his chef, we went back to camp. On the journey, we went through Candover, the community that we would be staying in on Sunday.

At camp, we had a discussion about what we had learnt about hunting reserves, the different arguments and what we thought about it. Mike and Zama encouraged us to share our ideas and gave us their own insights off the back of it, putting it into a wider conservation discussion with South African context.

We then went out for another drive but stopped near the lakeside to complete a bioblitz on I Naturalist – an app where people share pictures and identifications. We saw more hippos poking their heads out of the water and collected all the data we could without walking off too far.  

After a delicious curry for dinner, Mike took us on a scorpion hunt around camp. I thought we’d be searching for ages under nooks and crannies – but to my surprise he put on a UV torch a picked one up from a tree within 5 metres of where we were standing, which freaked everyone out a bit. He assured us that these ones weren’t dangerous and let us all hold it, only a few backed out. This was one of the coolest things I had done so far and everyone was really invested. Mike then took us to the edge of camp where he gave us a star talk – being a fan of astronomy, I was fascinated, as seeing the stars from the Southern Hemisphere was a goal of mine. He talked us through some of the constellations using his brilliant laser pointer and identified Jupiter and Venus. After, a few of us stayed stargazing and scorpion hunting.

We finished the evening by watching the opening game of the World Cup – it was Mexico vs South Africa, so, you know who we were rooting for!! Unfortunately, South Africa got two red cards and lost the game. Despite this, it was one of my favourite days so far.