Lying in the heart of the Lowveld is a wildlife sanctuary like no other, its atmosphere so unique that it allows those who enter its vastness to immerse themselves in the unpredictability and endless wilderness that is the true quality of Africa.
The largest game reserve in South Africa, the Kruger National Park is larger than Israel. Nearly 2 million hectares of land that stretch for 352 kilometres (20 000 square kilometres) from north to south along the Mozambique border, is given over to an almost indescribable wildlife experience. Certainly, it ranks with the best in Africa and is the flagship of the country’s national parks – rated as the ultimate safari experience.
The Kruger National Park lies across the provinces of Mpumalanga and Limpopo in the north of South Africa, just south of Zimbabwe and west of Mozambique. It now forms part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park – a peace park that links Kruger National Park with game parks in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and fences are already coming down to allow game to freely roam in much the way it would have in the time before man’s intervention. When complete, the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park will extend across 35 000 square kilometres, 58% of it South African, 24% Mozambican and 18% Zimbabwean territory.
This is the land of baobabs, fever trees, knob thorns, marula and mopane trees underneath which lurk the Big Five, the Little Five (buffalo weaver, elephant shrew, leopard tortoise, ant lion and rhino beetle), the birding Big Six (ground hornbill, kori bustard, lappet-faced vulture, martial eagle, Pel’s fishing owl and saddle-bill stork) and more species of mammals than any other African Game Reserve.
The Kruger Park is a self-drive destination, although there are guided tour operators, with an excellent infrastructure that includes picnic sites, rest camps, waterholes and hides. The Kruger Park is a remarkable reserve offering an incredible experience of Africa at its most wild. (See Kruger Park Tours for overnight and package tours lasting from 1 night and 2 days to weeks long safaris or see Kruger Park Day Tours for single day guided trips into Kruger National Park.
Kruger Park’s different Zones and Regions
Very broadly speaking, the Kruger National Park is flat with a few gentle hills, and people tend to classify the bushveld of the Kruger as unvaried and dry, which is rather like saying South Africa is sunny – it conceals an amazingly rich diversity. The Kruger National Park is divided into no fewer than six ecosystems – baobab sandveld, Lebombo knobthorn-marula bushveld, mixed acacia thicket, combretum-silver cluster-leaf, woodland on granite, and riverine forest.
Four regions make it easier for you to select the type of experience you want from your time in the Kruger National Park:-
Encompassing only 30% of the Kruger park’s surface area, the central region supports nearly half the park’s lion population as well as numbers of leopard, hyena and cheetah. Possibly the main reason for this is the quantity of sweet grasses and abundant browsing trees found in this area that support a large group of antelope, giraffe, buffalo, zebra and wildebeest. But this does mean that it’s a popular region amongst tourists, and subsequently, there are a number of camps in this region. It’s understandable though, as the chance of sighting even one of the 60 prides of lion that make the central region their home is a huge drawcard.
This is a rather fascinating part of the Kruger National Park, not least because the ecozones here are noticeably different from other habitats in the Kruger. Sightings of rare birdlife and major areas of sand formed by river flood plains, combined with sandstone formations of the Mozambique coastal plain, make it attractive to visitors. There are also a number of tropical aspects as part of the region lies in a rain shadow and along the banks of the Luvuvhu River is a series of riverine forest. A picnic site on the river bank provides hours of splendid bird viewing.
What you can witness in this part of the Kruger National Park is extraordinary – the knocking sand frog, a collection of bats, the nocturnal bush pig and the rare Sharpe’s grysbok. There are samango monkeys, packs of endangered wild dog, and the major water pans across the Wambiya sandveld are a good place to sight tropical warm-water fish, such as the rainbow killifish, not found anywhere else in South Africa. The sandstone hills, just west of Punda Maria, is the only place where you can see the Natal red hare and dassie or yellow-spotted hyrax. What makes a visit to this remote part of the Kruger park so meaningful is the solitude.
North of the Orange River is a semi-arid region covering 7 000 square kilometres that sees very little rain. The vegetation here changes very little from the unvarying shrub mopane, which thrives in hot, low-lying valleys. However, across this great expanse of hot dryness, five rivers forge their way, providing narrow corridors along whose banks grow trees distinctly different from the mopane – the nyala, the sycamore fig, the tamboti and the tall apple leaf. The Letaba and Olifants rivers contain as much as 60% of the Kruger park’s hippo population, and bird life here abounds. There are plenty of bush pig in the undergrowth of the Luvuvhu River and on most of the river banks, you can hope to see sizeable herds of elephant (the Kruger National park’s latest estimate is as many as 9000 of these beautiful beasts), buffalo, bushbuck, impala and kudu concentrated near a water supply.
Bounded by the Crocodile River in the south and the Sabie River in the north, the southern region is also host to the jagged ridge of the Lebombo Mountains along the border with Mozambique, and the highest point in the park, Khandzalive, in the southwestern corner – almost in counterpoint to Pretoriuskop that lies in the west of the southern region of the Kruger National Park.
The valleys are home to trees rarely found in other parts of the Kruger park, such as the Cape chestnut, coral tree and lavender fever-berry; and granite lies beneath most of the region, producing distinctive smoothed koppies at irregular intervals, which are typically surrounded by rock figs and form ideal locations for rock dassies or hyrax, baboon and klipspringer, not to mention the odd leopard.
This is the region where you’re almost sure of seeing a white rhino as most of them occur here, particularly around Pretoriuskop, Mbyamiti River and south of Lower Sabie. On the whole, there is more game purported to exist in the southern part of the park, so if you don’t make it to the northern reaches of the Kruger National Park, you won’t miss out. This part of the Kruger Park is to some extent shrouded in history. Around Pretoriuskop, known for its profusion of trees, is Ship Mountain, its hull-shape the site of an old wagon trail that crosses a stream marking the birthplace of Jock of the Bushveld. The combretum woodlands, also part of this region, attract reasonable herds of kudu, impala, giraffe, buffalo, zebra, white rhino and elephant, and the scarcity of lion in this part of the park, makes way for the cheetah and wild dog.
On 19 October 1986, the aeroplane, in which President Samora Machel of Mozambique and his staff and prominent politicians were returning to Mozambique from a meeting in Zambia, crashed at Mbuzini in the Lebombo Mountains. President Samora Machel and 34 others perished in the crash. In commemoration of the tragic event, the circumstances of which are not yet resolved, a monument was designed by Mozambican architect, Jose Forjaz.
It consists of 35 steel tubes symbolising the number of lives lost in the air crash. The pillars cast long shadows over the base, and the wind causes permanent whisperings through incisions in the pillars. It was unveiled by President Nelson Mandela on 19 January 1999. As a tribute by the South African Government to an outstanding African leader, the memorial site was upgraded and a museum was officially opened on 19 October 2009.
In a bid to earn funding for their Uber-style startup — for consultants, not cars — Nomuntu Ndhlovu and her then business partner entered into a pact in 2016 to quit their well-paying Johannesburg jobs. Ndhlovu gave notice on Friday and heard nothing from her friend all weekend. “She called me on a Monday and said she was moving to London,” Ndhlovu says. The young entrepreneur, then 25, dealt with the shock by planning her own trip — only she was headed to the tiny village of Steenbok to see her parents, a place she never could’ve guessed would present her with a far better business opportunity.
In impoverished, rural Mpumalanga, Ndhlovu was reunited with a childhood acquaintance, Siyabonga Tshabalala, who asked if she’d tweak the business plan for his fledgling waste management and recycling business. She improved the plan so much that Tshabalala offered her 30 percent of the business, SiyaBuddy, eventually upping her stake to 40 percent “to make sure she stayed,” Tshabalala says.
Nomuntu Ndhlovu, left, and Siyabonga Tshabalala with some of the people who are now making a living thanks to SiyaBuddy. SOURCE DENVOR DE WEE
She did stay, and today SiyaBuddy is one of very few companies extracting value from waste in rural South Africa, where only 10 percent of trash is recycled, with the rest getting burned or buried. What’s more, the firm expects to add another income stream to what it earns from sorting and selling waste to firms in Pretoria and Johannesburg. In the next year or two, SiyaBuddy plans to start converting waste into electricity and biodiesel, thereby saving the government money, creating jobs and benefiting the environment.
Because Ndhlovu’s artisan dad and teacher mom were always running side businesses, there was “no such thing as a work-free weekend,” she recalls. Meanwhile, she excelled in school, and the family eventually moved to larger Malelane so she could attend a high school with “white teachers and access to computers.”
James Brown, a director at AIA, was struck by Ndhlovu’s natural confidence and ability to “dive into the details and add real value.” By the time she left in 2016, he recalls, she had been a team leader on numerous projects (oil and gas, public sector, engineering) and — as Tshabalala would soon find out — had mastered the art of writing a kick-ass proposal.
IN RURAL SOUTH AFRICA, RECYCLING IS VIRTUALLY UNHEARD OF DUE TO THE GREAT DISTANCES PEOPLE MUST TRAVEL TO REACH A BUYBACK CENTER.
At just 22 years old, in her first year at AIA, Ndhlovu was inspired by Rich Dad, Poor Dad (a book about the importance of financial independence) to purchase a rental apartment in Hillbrow. The property, she says, caused “a lot of headaches,” but she went on to buy two more apartments. In 2015, Ndhlovu spearheaded a bid with other investors to buy up an entire block. She’d done her homework on the property but neglected to check up on the selling agent. When he took off with their deposit, Ndhlovu had to sell two properties in order to pay back her fellow investors.
Fast-forward to 2016 and the beginning of her involvement at SiyaBuddy. “Almost as soon as Nomuntu came on board,” says Tshabalala, the company landed its first funding (some $380,000), from the government-owned Industrial Development Corp., and secured premises on a 49-acre landfill site on the outskirts of Steenbok. “What we’re doing is nothing new in the West,” says Ndhlovu. “We collect, sort, bale and sell.”
Some of the 521 independent collectors salvaging waste from the Steenbok landfill site. SOURCE SIYABUDDY
And SiyaBuddy hopes its plans deliver even greater benefits. The company has secured access to a second landfill site and is now focusing on “maximum beneficiation,” says Tshabalala. The company currently recoups value from just 60 of the 700 tons of waste that arrive at its site every month, but this is set to change when its plans to install a waste-to-energy plant bear fruit. In South Africa, the biggest challenge with turning waste into energy sources is access to waste, says Markus Esterhuyse, the founding director of renewable energy specialists NGR Resources. “But Siyabonga and Nomuntu already have that sewn up.”
The SiyaBuddy truck collects waste after a festival at the Elangeni Lodge in December 2017. SOURCE SIYABUDDY
If money isn’t the obstacle, SiyaBuddy’s remote location surely is. It costs around $1,000 to send a single load of waste to Johannesburg or Pretoria, where all of the beneficiations takes place. And Esterhuyse says they’ll have trouble selling electricity to the grid from their current site. Not surprisingly, Ndhlovu and Tshabalala have ideas to address both concerns. “We’re thinking about running our trucks on biodiesel,” says Ndhlovu, and they’re planning to set up their waste-to-energy facility in the (much larger) municipality of Mbombela.
In writing Ndhlovu’s final performance review, Brown pointed out just one weakness: a tendency to “let things slip if she’s not continuously challenged or engaged.” Judging by her ambitious plans for SiyaBuddy, it doesn’t sound like that’ll be an issue anytime soon.
Source: OZY.
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