don't mention the elephants!

The Sanbona experience seems to have prompted philosophical musings - I think it's all the interesting shapes of the hills, and the way they fit the sky. Or, possibly, the quality of the light, which is clear and plangent and impersonal. Anyway. Things This Weekend Made Me Realise:

1. Despite a sort of ongoing vague sense that my perfectly happy existence as an urban Capetonian for twenty years means I don't really miss The Wilds Of Africa, actually I do. My maddened Zimbabwean childhood entailed a certain quotient of arbing around on Kariba Dam dodging hippopotami, wandering around Mana Pools dodging lion, and drifting about Hwange Game Park dodging elephant. I'd probably seen the Big Five before I was ten. A lot of that experience was camping, in the kinds of camps where elephants and hippos routinely wander through; I remember waking up to the sound of buffalo grazing about ten foot from my head on the other side of the canvas, and sticking my head out the tent to see the elephant standing over our friend's pup tent. Even now, after a long interval severely denuded of game viewing of all kinds, something basic and primitive in me responds with enchanted enthusiasm when someone suddenly gives the happy yodel indicative of game lurking in the undergrowth.


2. My childhood experiences were low-budget: camping rather than hotels, knowledgeable parents and relatives for guidance rather than game rangers, and viewing from the back seat of the family car rather than swanky hyper-designed safari vehicles. Despite all this, it was, I realise, an intensely privileged experience. The environments of the Zimbabwean national parks, the vegetation, water and sheer concentration of animals, were incredible - even now, after sociopolitical meltdown and FSM knows what in the way of poaching, they probably still are. Driving to Kariba was routinely interrupted by long waits while the herd of elephants got the hell out of the way. Various species of buck were so prolific that you could get all annoyed at the herd blocking your view of the interesting species. In Mana, even if you didn't see lion that day you'd see twelve sorts of buck, innumerable birds, warthog, elephants, zebra, and then the honey badgers would raid the dustbins in the camp that evening.
   
   Sanbona is in the Little Karoo. Basically, it's desert.
   
   
   
   It apparently can't support some species such as warthog, there isn't the grass for them, and the animals are few and far between because the carrying capacity of the land is so low. (I'd swear the ranger mentioned giraffe, but I seriously don't know what they eat; possibly they've fitted them with telescoping necks?) The landscape has absolutely its own beauty, the same implacable, self-contained starkness as the Karoo, which I adore, but it makes me realise, if only in retrospect, how fertile Zimbabwe is.


3. Somehow, this makes the wildlife spotting at Sanbona more, rather than less, exciting. Hwange and Mana Pools had the huge advantage of simply drawing a line around an ecosystem, calling it a "park" and, at least until recently, not messing with it. Sanbona has taken a 54 000-hectare tract of overgrazed farmland and proposes to restore it to the state it was when the San wandered the landscape. They are re-introducing absolutely everything they want to see there, at carefully-chosen intervals as the grazing is still recovering. Their lion and other big game wear locator collars so that the rangers can track their movements and hence responses to the environment (although I have to say this is also handy when your game ranger has a telemetry set and you know the lion are in that direction).
   
   This gives my bunny-hugging heart more of a thrill than simply admiring what Nature has wrought in the Zambezi valley. It's hopeful: it says that people are recognising the horrible depredations of human settlement and dedicating themselves to reverse them, and that such a reversal may, although long and difficult, be possible. Sanbona's pleasures are the more pleasurable because they're hard-won.