An eco-course makes for a unique break. By Chris Harvie
THE stillness of the bush is hard to listen to without a mild bout of panic. It’s a loud, deathly quiet. Then, in the distance, the piercing bawl of a nagapie breaks on the air, followed by the whooshing call of a Pel’s fishing owl and the earth seems to breathe again.
I don’t know what the time is — my watch has been confiscated — but it is still some hours before dawn, so I turn over and go back to sleep. The drums will sound when I have to report for duty at sunrise, ready for my next challenge …
When we arrived at the EcoTraining Camp in the Makuleke Concession, it was a few weeks since the northernmost reaches of the Kruger National Park had been swept bare by floods, leaving broad floodplains astride the banks of the Levubu and Limpopo rivers and clearing huge stretches of bush. South of the Levubu, the Pafuri picnic site had been washed away completely and the roads to the Pafuri border post no longer led anywhere.
The camp had been underwater only weeks earlier and head instructor Bruce Lawson and his wife Dee, who runs the camp, had kayaked in water 3m deep on the swollen Limpopo, more than 2km from the river’s normal course. With the tents perched up on stilted decks, operations had quickly returned to normal and we were there to assess the day-to-day goings-on as far as the trainees were concerned.
While most of the students are chasing field-guide certificates, many are mature students taking a break from their careers. Others are taking shorter courses to broaden their bush knowledge. The week-long courses are perfect for a different kind of bush break.
We had joined only for a few nights but it turned into so much more than an insight into student life. Sheltered under the nyala trees with no power, no cellphone signal, no television, no internet, deep in the silence, our souls settled into the daily sunrise-to-sunset routines of this remote spot.
Luxurious it isn’t, but it is comfortable and organised. The rules are the same for all students on any course. You sleep in a tent, shared with one other. There is an en-suite loo and hot shower. You bring your own lighting — torches and head lamps. You eat in a communal opensided dining room and the food is tasty and plentiful — just what you need to sustain you on days of hiking.
For that is what it is all about. Hiking; trekking; yomping. There are few roads on this corner of the Makuleke Concession, returned to its owners in 1998 after a successful land claim, which left them with one of the most beautiful stretches of our country, across the top of the Kruger from the Levubu to the border with Zimbabwe, and the lack of roads means walking. Lots of it. Sometimes 20km per day, through forests of fever trees and majestic baobabs, over boulder-strewn koppies, past rivers and streams and along the banks of pans.
Flanked by trainees armed with rifles and blanks, sometimes we would push south from the camp along the silt-strewn flood plain. At other times, we’d drive to a distant base from where we would follow the watercourses and wallow in the wildlife and the history of this distant outpost with its evocative landmarks: Lanner Gorge, Crooks’ Corner and, just across the river, the ruins of the great Thulamela, symbol of a people’s past glory.
The north of the Kruger has a reputation for poor game-viewing but this is untrue. Bruce said the game was only now beginning to return after the floods but it was certainly plentiful. Generous herds of impala mingled with nyala, zebra, wildebeest and kudu. Troops of raiding baboons strode through the scrub. We saw numerous elephants, giraffes, hippos, massive crocodiles and fresh leopard spoor. All on foot.
The area offers some of the best bird-watching in the park and we enjoyed incomparable sightings of the rattling cisticola and the wattleeyed flycatcher, as well as hordes of oxpeckers, both red and yellow. And, as the students learnt, so did we, about the host-specific nature of those oxpeckers, for example. It was as knowledge-broadening as it was thrilling.
Was it dangerous? Not really, although the need for the students to face a certain number of “dangerous game encounters” meant we probably got closer than most. And nothing can match the thrill of walking into a herd of buffalo, sending them into paroxysms of snorting, standing your ground — forgetting momentarily that most of your unqualified cohorts are armed only with blanks — and then watching those huge-bossed black beasts turn and run, kicking a cloud of dust in your face as they scatter through the undergrowth.
No longer silent like night, the bush is now filled with the crash of hooves; the alarm calls of numerous wild creatures float on the air.
It is thrilling to the core. —© Chris Harvie