Itala Game Reserve Fieldtrip

I tagged along on this fieldtrip as I thought it looked pretty intersting in relation to my honours next year on community based natural resource management. What I was told by a guy in the class (Andrew brandishing bone above) was that it was a visit to a game reserve run by the community. It turns out that its not really that at all. Ithala was a farm - a massive farm for the most part that was sold back to the government in 1972. The white farmers didn't actually live there but there were local African labour tenants who did and who worked on these farms. You can still see the rememants of their rondivilles which is an odd testimony to their forced removal - they weren't compensated like their white bosses. Eventually years later they won land rights, but for some reason kind of sold/traded them to the game reserve.

Staff at the reserve came and talked to us about their community projects/schemes. There is a development levy, where R2 (less than AUD$0.50) goes into the fund from every day visitor. Residents from the community (200-300 000 people) can apply for funding for projects. The staff proudly drove us nearly 2 hours each way to see the school and health clinic that they had built. And even through my barrage of questions about how the community actually benefit they gave me some pretty convincing answers - for example while they respect 'traditional' representative structures (ie through chiefs) they will accept ideas from anyone (esp women - i asked) in the community. So their rhetoric sounded decent, but we didn't spend enough time to see if they really benefit at all. Oh and they have a policy if a villager or their goat is skilled by a stay lepard or something. If its an 'introduced' species - like the black rhino they bought in to stock the game reserve they will compensate the people (but very little from what I heard) where as if its a 'local' species - lived in the area before the game park, like the lepards for example, they do nothing but get upset if the villagers kill the lepard. And there are no fences, so the lepards can go EVERYWHERE! No one else seemed as concerned as me that the lepards, massive and tempremental black rhino and elephants etc can go whereever - including on roads! And into a nearby game reserve where people can hunt game for a fee - apparantly they're negotiating about what do when someone shoots an animal from the reserve that protects them... another complicated issue.

Anyway, enough of the politics - here are some pretty pictures!

This is where we stayed

One the morning before we left we crammed 16 people into a landrover and headed out to see some rock art. On the way i saw 3 giraffes sitting down! It was awesome i really wanted to see them get back up again! it would have been amusing im' sure.

so as we were coming down from the mountain/hill we saw these black rhino really closeby. Black rhino are really territorial and dangerous apparantly - the white ones won't really bother you but the black ones are quite likely to attack, and they are HUGE! I couldn't belive how small they made the landrover look! So Paul, our tour guide and cook (who made gormet food to DIE FOR!) went down to try and scare them off. He stuck to the trees as rhino apparantly have a bad sense of sight (but good smell) then banged rocks and sticks to try and scare them. It did very little at first but eventually they moved a bit so that the landrover was between Paul and the rhinos, then Paul rather stupidly made a run for it and made it! He drove closer to us and made us kinda run back to the car - he was not impressed that I was taking photos of the rhinos but I think it was fine!


We also saw tortises where were awesome! Zebra, impala and a whole range of impala like animals, guinea fowl, eagles and other birds, waterbuck (which have this awesome perfectly round white circle on their butts - it looks like they sat on a toilet seat that has just been painted), hundreds of warthogs (looking much like Pumba from the Lion King), ostriches, monkeys, baboons, frogs and lizards, a rock dussy and wilderbeast! So i feel my safari is still lacking big cats, but maybe that can be ammended during my travels with the family!



Here are the last of the photos!