With at least 400 private game reserves, national parks, and public/private conservation areas, South Africa has a lot of options when it comes to going on safari. Try searching TripAdvisor for South African safari lodges and you’ll find hundreds, every one with an oddly similar web site displaying pictures of lions, giraffes, luxurious swimming pools, and rugged land rovers. There are tent-based eco-lodges that offer walking safaris (ages 16 and up), air-conditioned bus safaris through national parks, mountain lodges, forest lodges, desert lodges, and lodges in areas with mysterious and appealing names, places like ‘the wild coast’ and ‘the savannah bush veld.’ Deciding where to go is dizzying.
And then there is Kruger, South Africa’s largest national park. Containing all of Africa’s most famous animals (well, not all — no gorillas, for example) and comprising 2 million hectares of land, it’s roughly the size of Wales. Yes, Wales is the example I was given by a ranger (if that doesn’t give you a palpable feeling for its size, perhaps nothing will). This is where we decided to go.
However, after a brief bit of research fairly late in the game, we discovered that saying you want to go to Kruger doesn’t necessarily get you much closer to a plan. There are dozens of lodges around Kruger, many in private game reserves and many enclosed by fences. What to make of this? They all claimed to be big and to feature the Big Five, but how big is big? And what are the Big Five? Fortunately, after some moments of doubt, we signed up for a safari adventure with the well-reviewed but ungainly-sounding And Beyond.
And Beyond (the rangers pronounce it as one word, roughly like Ambien) turned out to be a very well-run operation. Shortly before leaving the U.S., we received a mysterious package postmarked from South Africa that contained a variety of safari-lodge shwag, including a leather-bound journal for taking field notes, a pair of 4x mini-binoculars suitable for identifying small birds, two cds of African music for the kids, and leather satchels for packing it all in. Good customer relationship management.
And Beyond runs a dozen or so eco-lodges around Africa, and we went to two of them over the course of seven days (Monday to Monday). This turns out to be kind of a lot of time to go on a safari — more, anyway, than most people spend with And Beyond. But it allowed us time to watch animals without being rushed, to visit a nearby village, and to see three fairly different climatic zones .
We travelled by plane, an intimate — not elegant — 10-passenger prop-plane that was also delivering a group of orthodox Jewish folks to a different spot (one of the men offered to recite the Tefilat HaDerech, the traveller’s prayer, along with anyone who wanted to join him). Driving was an option, but it would have taken six hours or more to get there from Johannesburg; something like 30 hours from Cape Town.
Flat, scrubby Ngala airstrip.
The flight delivered us to a solitary airstrip, no buildings, no other planes, just a troop of warthogs shnuffling around the edges, a few impala, and our guides, Rhett and Norman, waiting in a green converted land rover. The terrain was flat, scrubby, dotted with thickets of low trees and bisected by the seasonal Timbavati River, at this time of year a ribbon of sand that looked almost like a dirt road. There were open meadows here and there, golden brown with dry grasses, and there was the odd flat-topped tree looking strange and exotic. Mainly, however, the landscape looked featureless, a little bland. This was Ngala Private Game Reserve.
Ngala is big, I guess, depending on how you look at it. It’s about the size of San Francisco, to give an example that’s meaningful for Americans — Bayview to the Embarcadero, over to Golden Gate Park, down to the border with Daly City (I figured this out on my own with help from Google). Remarkably, about ten years ago, the wildlife managers at Ngala got together with wildlife managers at Kruger National Park as well as a few other private reserves, and agreed to take down the fences that had previously kept each park’s animals separate and enclosed. So it would be fair to say that the Kruger area is like the size of Wales plus San Francisco. That increase in habitat, coupled with other things like a system of artificial water holes, has helped wildlife — for example, the elephant population has almost doubled.
When you stay at Ngala, you get to drive all around the reserve on a network of dirt roads — but not into Kruger or the neighboring reserves. You might see five lions chasing a buffalo, but if they run across the boundary you just watch them go. On the other hand, within the confines of Ngala, you’re allowed to drive anywhere, even off-road, even if this means crushing bushes and small trees. (To be fair, the safari lodge adheres to standards set by an ecological auditor. They only go off-road for Big Five animals; they log all off-road excursions).
A rough idea of driving off-road in pursuit of a lion.
This raises a dilemma. Is it cool to go driving over streambeds, bushes, and small trees so that you can get all up in a buffalo’s face? (Buffalo: Big Five no. 3). Is it cool to pursue a female cheetah (Big Five no. 4), even if it means tailing her — literally tailing her, just 20 feet away — in a 1-ton land rover over field and stream for 45 minutes (we did both of these things)? For someone raised on the minimum impact ethic espoused by NOLS, the answer is clearly no. Absolutely no. Within the context of North American wilderness, it’s just so wrong that it’s a joke to even contemplate.
On the other hand, the safari business depends on getting clients up close with wildlife, and that business seems pretty good for South Africa. The And Beyond lodge at Ngala employs close to a hundred people from the nearby Shangaan community. One of the guides, a black man from Pretoria (not a local village), told us that each one of these workers from the community supported an average of 9 other people. Seems a little hard to believe, but after visiting one of the nearby villages, I’d say it’s probably accurate.
Also, the safari business seems like a force for good in terms of protecting wildlife. It gives conservation efforts a compelling voice in the government because it has real economic muscle. And the safari industry has its own interest in protecting wildlife independent of government efforts. The situation with rhinos is pretty fascinating.
The Sorry Fate of Rhinoceros
There’s a huge demand for rhino horns, mainly from Southeast Asia, which are believed to cure all sorts of ailments. South Africa’s government remonstrated with China, and we heard that it actually helped, a little. But supposedly the wife of Vietnam’s president says she beat cancer with a rhino horn treatment and despite Chinese steps, overall demand hasn’t declined at all. A single horn fetches hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
There were something like 900 rhinos poached last year in Africa out of a total worldwide population of just a few thousand, so there’s a certain desperation among the people who care about them. You see reminders of this everywhere, even off the reserve. Driving along the highway through a Zulu settlement, we saw what looked like a military cemetery, all white crosses. It turned out that each one marked a rhino killed this year.
Safari lodges can’t negotiate with Vietnam, but they can afford to police the reserves, employing anti-poaching teams that use aerial monitoring, hidden cameras, and frequent patrols. And they can do “wildlife management” as well: improving habitat by fostering native plants, ensuring adequate water, even preventing habitat loss through outright land purchases. Despite overall losses, the area we were in has seen rhinos do fairly well thanks to these efforts. The Phinda reserve has enough of a population that it’s begun donating mating pairs to Botswana to help that country’s conservation projects.
Tragedy: Anti-poaching often means shooting poachers on-site. These poachers are mainly very poor people from Mozambique who do the dirty work for little money so that others — we heard conspiratorial comments about South African politicians, but it may simply be regular-old criminals — profit. Apparently, they work in teams of water carriers and trackers who support a single gunman. The anti-poachers will shoot the gunman and then arrest the others, assuming they give themselves up. It was hard to get a clear picture on how this works, but it sounds like a sort of stand-your-ground ethic prevails: if you shoot someone you suspect of poaching, the police won’t really follow up.
The Phinda reservation had a clever idea, a harm-reduction type of approach. They removed horns from a group of rhinos, which isn’t great for the animals but isn’t terrible either. Poachers killed them anyway. Turns out that the poachers had their own clever idea: eliminate the hornless rhinos so as not to waste time tracking them again. Fool me once. The anti-poachers are trying a new tactic — they’re injecting toxins into the horns that won’t hurt the rhinos but will poison end consumers. Nice. Thanks for sharing.
Let me talk about something else.
The Safari Experience
Pointing out warthogs on the Ngala lodge grounds.
The lodges we visited were basically a collection of huts and communal buildings — like camp! — surrounded by high electric fencing that would keep out elephants but allow free access for other animals. For example, lions. We didn’t see lions on lodge property, thankfully, but we saw warthogs, wildebeest, and baboons. To manage associated risks, the lodges tell you not to go anywhere after dark without an escort, security guards who lead the way with a flashlight and slingshot. How effective are the slingshots, I have no idea, but there haven’t been any lion-related deaths since a woman was killed in the early nineties (before the use of slingshot-weilding escorts).
You’re also instructed to secure doors and windows with baboon-proof latches. One day Phebe and I got sloppy with our precautions and left a window open. Upon returning an hour or two later, we discovered that baboons had climbed in, unzipped our packs, opened our drawers, tossed clothing everywhere, rifled through our toilet kits, even emptied our trash basket onto the bathroom floor. Worse, they discovered our pharmaceutical supply. Antibiotics, malaria meds, altitude meds, all were scattered or missing. I found my wallet outside in the dust. Fortunately, the only medications we really needed were untouched. All’s well that ends well. (If you haven’t seen pictures).
Anyway, every morning began with an early wake-up at 5:30. We met for a quick coffee or hot chocolate (it was cold most mornings) and talked about the day. At 6:00, we walked to the land rover, and set off with our guides.
The Modern Safari Guide
I’ve been calling them guides, but they actually had specific roles. Norman was a tracker. Responsible for leading us to the animals we wanted to see, he was expert at identifying seemingly anything in seemingly fractions of a second. He’d sit on the front of the vehicle — literally, a custom seat bolted to the front of the hood —where he could keep an eye out for footprints or anything else. While driving at 25 mph he’d regularly signal us to stop and back-up, where he’d point out zebra tracks or some such craziness. How are zebra tracks distinct from the tracks of wildebeest or kudu or impala or one of like 10 other species of hooved creatures that live around there, especially when going 25 miles per hour? He was good. He was also genial, great with the kids. We liked him a lot.
Rhett was a ranger, a position that combined the roles of personal-concierge, backcountry guide, and professional driver. The rangers had to keep guests entertained and informed on three-hour game drives; attend to their various needs and desires (drinks, snacks, arranging special trips); and know their way around the San Francisco-sized park like a cab driver knows their city —except without road signs and in many cases without roads. We were very impressed with Rhett. He was only 23.
All of the rangers we encountered were young white men, although we heard about a woman who worked at one of the lodges. A lot of them started just after graduating college, and the few we spoke with had aspirations of going on to other things after two or three years. Certainly, a lot of them intended to work in related fields, like wildlife conservation or safari lodge management. Rhett thought he might like to be a brand and marketing director for And Beyond.
The trackers were all black, largely hired from the nearby Shangaan or Zulu villages, and they were older, maybe in their 30s or 40s. It was hard to get to know Norman as well as Rhett. Rhett was very much incorporated into our overall guest experience — he joined us for certain meals, interfaced with the lodge manager on our behalf — and of course we spoke with him throughout the drives. Norman, sitting on the front of the rover, was absorbed in looking for signs and wasn’t very involved in our conversation, unless we asked Rhett a wildlife question he couldn’t answer (Norman could usually help).
In our view, the two roles provided equal value, but And Beyond accorded the rangers higher esteem — and probably wages. The And Beyond guidebook in our room suggested tipping rangers 20 rand per day and trackers 15. At Ngala at least, they also live in different housing areas; rangers get private bathrooms.
The Game Drive
Moving on… These two guys, Rhett and Norman, asked us what we wanted to see and drove us around accordingly. If we wanted to see a lion, they went where they knew lions were likely to be. How’d they know? There were seven or eight other land rovers, all cruising around and staying in radio contact, sharing info about what was where, so they’d know that lions had last been seen over in one sector or another. Once there, Norman could usually find tracks or signs that would lead us to the animals.
I mentioned the Big Five, earlier, so I should explain what that means. The Big Five are the five species that hunters of old — I believe this means specifically Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway — considered most dangerous. These were the lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, and rhinoceros. Seeing the Big Five is a big deal for all of the safari companies because it’s what a lot of the guests are paying for.
At And Beyond, you sense how big of a deal it is in the way rangers handle the safari drives before you’ve seen all five compared with after. Before, they seem perfectly friendly and easy-going, just a little excitable. Like, if they hear word of a Big Five available for sighting, they drop everything and get the car going, even if you’re in the middle of a conversation or perfectly happy to be gazing at a gazelle. Sometimes they drive a little fast, given that someone is sitting on the hood, no seatbelt, bouncing over washerboard roads.
Cute little fellow.
Once we saw all five, however, things relaxed a bit. We had longer conversations while watching those gazelles (actually, there weren’t any gazelles; just impala and the like). We spent some quality time with a leopard family and their kill. We searched out non-Big-Five animals that were nonetheless appealing, animals like zebra, hippo, hyenas, giraffe. It was amazing how much we saw. I have to confess, I didn’t even really know that all of these species lived in the same place. I mean, I’ve seen the Lion King on Broadway, but I guess I thought Disney had taken more liberties than they really did.
It was hard not to wonder at the authenticity of it all. Were these animals really just living their lives in a wild state of nature? There were so many of them, so many big, distinct, unusual animals living close to one another, it was hard not to wonder. Is Kruger/Ngala wild like the Paleocene or is it controlled, like a zoo?
But of course it isn’t so simple. Five hundred years ago, you would have found people living here as well as wildlife. The Zulu have been tending cattle for a thousand years in this area. The animals are living in a state of nature, but it’s an artificial nature by the very fact of it’s being separate from humans. That, and the presence of big, green land rovers cruising past their stomping grounds on a daily basis. I don’t know why I get hung up on this, but I do.
In the end, I decided that it really was authentic and wild. The wildlife is living in its natural habitat; the animals are taking care of themselves. And it’s very moving to see them. One day, we saw a group of elephants eating leaves from a mopane (mo-pah-nee) tree. One female was using her tusk and trunk together, squeezing them around a branch to strip off the leaves in big bunches, and we all watched her, transfixed. What difference did it make whether I thought she was living a more or less authentically wild experience? It was awesome, and I’m glad I was there to see it.
P.S. If that’s not enough information for you, be sure to check out some of the photos on hellocroissant Esp, this cheetah story and this leopard story or check out the following post…
Rhymes with Lyric 