A sustainable, locally run, and off-the-grid resort in South Africa; great for birding

All photos and text by Sally Kneidel, PhD, of sallykneidel.com

Children of the Hamakuya community. Community residents find employment at the small "green" resort of Tshulu Camp, bringing needed revenue into the village.

My husband Ken consulting his bird guide on our tent's deck in Tshulu Camp.

I've written a lot about supporting people in struggling nations who are trying to transition to sustainable livelihoods. One great example of local people choosing to conserve their own natural resources, and finding employment in doing so, is Tshulu Camp in northeastern South Africa. It's operated by the Tshulu Trust, also local.

We had the good fortune to stay at Tshulu Camp, a small nature resort, this past June. The camp is completely off the grid, depending solely on PV (photovoltaic) panels to operate the lights and recharge batteries for guests. PV panels also power the pump that carries water from the well or "borehole" to the kitchen and bathrooms.

We learned about Tshulu Camp, as well as our village homestay I wrote about earlier, through friends with the Organization for Tropical Studies, an educational consortium that offers ecology courses in Costa Rica and South Africa. The OTS friends directed us to Tshulu Trust Administrator Thuseni Sigwadi, an energetic and very friendly young man.

Thuseni Sigwadi, an administrator of the Tshulu Trust and its Tshulu Camp. His job includes arranging camp stays, as well as homestays in the adjacent village of Hamakuya. His contact info is below.

Thuseni arranged everything for us, gave us driving directions, and for the homestay, he met us at the turn off into the village. Later, he rode with us from the homestay to Tshulu Camp, to help us steer our tiny VW around the most difficult rocks. As much fun as the homestay was, Tshulu Camp was just as valuable in its own way. Thuseni suggested the camp for the birding opportunities and the quiet natural setting on the Mutale River. He said Fhatuwani Makuya could serve as our nature guide while we were there.

Fhatuwani Makuya, who served as our translator during our homestay, is also a nature & birding guide at Tshulu Camp. He's in training to be a game guard for national parks, a dangerous but fascinating job. Game guards protect wildlife from poachers. More about what we learned about poaching in a later post. You can see our previous post on rhino poaching here.

Tshulu Camp was beautiful, comfortable, quiet, and the perfect place to relax in privacy after the homestay. It has 5 guest tents, and a lovely outdoor covered dining area. The staff was so, so friendly.

The dining room at Tshulu Camp (above)

The dining room, above. We loved the "catering lady" Rosina Netshituni (in red). She fixed all our multi-course meals, which were more than scrumptious. She was happy to talk recipes with anyone who could speak a little Venda. We tried!

Much of the food prepared in the camp's kitchen comes from their organic vegetable garden. The garden not only supplies food for the camp kitchen, but also provides employment for villagers living nearby. The vegetable garden is irrigated from underground, which is a plus, as water shortage is a big issue in Africa. The camp uses their waste sustainably too - composting all the vegetable and garden waste to enrich the soil for the organic farm. So those tasty vegetables prepared by Rosina are organically grown on fertile, composted soil!

From the deck of the dining area (above), Ken and I looked for birds along the Mutale River

A dedicated birder, Ken spent most of his free time wandering around through the bush along the riverbank looking for birds, while I was socializing. We did see quite a few birds in the area of Tshulu Camp and Hamakuya, including the Namaqua Dove, Cut-throat Finch, Red-billed Quelea, Great Rufous Sparrow, White-throated Robin Chat, and Levaillant's Cisticola.

One thing I really appreciate is how the camp has retained the natural topography of the land and all its native plants. The spacious and luxurious tents where guests stay required no grading at all. When construction projects do grade land to make it level for roads or buildings or landscaping, the grading destroys topsoil, native plants, animal homes, and wreaks havoc with natural communities. Tshulu Camp has avoided that, which is one reason the bird life there is prolific.

There's also no pavement in the village or at Tshulu Camp. All walkways and roads are natural substrates, allowing natural water cycles to continue unaltered. Rainfall percolates through the ground everywhere, to recharge ground water, streams, and rivers.

The deck of our tent, immersed in native flora, overlooked the Mutale River (photos above and below).

We enjoyed hangin' out on the cool tent deck in the evenings, when not hiking, eating or schmoozing with fellow campers. What a view!

The inside of our private tent.

Our private bathroom with shower, inside our tent.

Housekeepers Gladys Tshinavhe and Phellinah Ntshauba

These PV or photovoltaic panels (below) power Tshulu Camp's lights and charged our camera batteries.

The PV panels below power the pump for the "bore-hole" (or well) that provides water for the camp.

Baobab trees were common in and around Tshulu Camp (below).


Student Erin Wilkus (below) from Reed College in the U.S was studying the baobabs at Tshulu Camp, for an academic project, while we were there.

Erin had already made friends with the children of Hamakuya and, on a short trip into the village, she stopped to play clapping games with them. Ben Zarov (in gray sweatshirt below) from Grinnell College was working at Tshulu Camp temporarily as a volunteer, doing odd jobs and helping maintain the grounds. The children loved Erin and Ben, who had both been at Tshulu Camp for a while and had learned a lot of the Venda language.

I highly recommend a stay at Tshulu Camp and a homestay at Hamakuya. If you want to go, e-mail Thuseni Sigwadi, Tshulu Trust Administrator, at tshulu@gmail.com. You can call Thuseni at 011 27 72 997 6669 (from the U.S.). He speaks excellent English. From South Africa, his number is 072 997 6669. He can arrange the whole thing for you.

When you choose to visit locally owned and operated nature resorts, and particularly homestays, you learn so much more about the people and their way of life than you would in a hotel chain, or a foreign operated resort. Plus, your dollars help to empower these communities to conserve their trees, their wildlife, their wild landscapes. Dollars from ecotourism replace dollars from logging or from sale of wildlife and wildlife parts. When you support locally owned "green" tourism, you're protecting irreplaceable natural resources for future generations.

The Tshulu Trust is working on a website that will be online shortly. I'll post a link here or in a later post when the site is up.

All photos and text by Sally Kneidel, PhD, of sallykneidel.com

Keywords: Tshulu Trust Tshulu Camp Hamakuya birding South Africa Thuseni Sigwadi ecotravel sustainability green resorts sustainable resorts local communities Venda

In the African village of Hamakuya, we learned about life with limited resources

The beautiful faces of Hamakuya

All photos and text by Sally Kneidel, PhD
Click on pics to enlarge them

I told a friend yesterday, the only time my brain gives me any peace is when I'm either workingon my blog, or I'm in a foreign place that's totally strange (and intriguing) to me. I like a place best when I have no idea what to expect and a lot to learn. That's one reason I yearned to go to the Venda village of Hamakuya, South Africa - a completely new place for me. It's in the Makuya region just west of northern Kruger National Park. Dr. Laurence Kruger, director of South Africa's Organization for Tropical Studies, had recommended Hamakuya - he sometimes takes students from his OTS ecology course to the village.

We'd already had a fantastic experience, twice, in the Shangaan village of Welverdiend, South Africa. I knew Hamakuya would be different. It's a different indigenous culture, with a different language. The Venda culture and language of Hamakuya are originally from Zambia, unlike South Africa's many other indigenous cultures and languages.

Ken and I weren't sure how to get to Hamakuya from Kruger Park; both options involved difficult roads unless you have a 4WD, preferably a truck. We were driving a small rental car, a VW Polo. But what the heck, we like a challenge.

Me and our hardy VW, which took everything we dished out

We decided to leave the Park via the northernmost gate, the Pafuri Gate, just a couple of miles south of Zambia and Mozambique. As soon as we left the Park, the pavement deteriorated. Women selling one or two fruits of baobab trees stood at intervals alongside the road. Presently the pavement gave way to a "natural" road of dirt and jolting rocks. We had to drive very slowly. Still, it only took about 2 hours from the Pafuri Gate to the little road that leads into the village of Hamakuya. We were in for a treat.

Hamakuya is a very small village, more like a small collection of rural homesteads. They do have a primary school and a food shop, but no other establishments that I saw, and almost no cars. Instead, we saw small donkey carts on the dirt roads, many of them driven by children. Our new friend Thuseni Sigwadi (tshulu@gmail.com), who manages the Tshulu Trust and lives in Hamakuya, met us at the turn-off into the village. Thuseni had arranged for us to do an overnight homestay with the family of Rosina Tshinavhe, a widow with several children.

Rosina's family compound. Standing are our translator Fhatuwani and Rosina's daughter Violet.

Rosina has three grown sons who work in Pietersburg, Jo'burg, and the nearby coal mine. Two grown daughters, Sarah and Violet, live with her, as well as a teenage son, Salani. Sarah and Violet each have a baby, and Rosina has some primary-school children, but there were so many village children on hand to welcome us, I couldn't tell which ones were Rosina's. Almost no one except the teenage son Sarani spoke English, or if they did, they kept it to themselves. We did learn a tiny bit of Venda, but not enough to ask about family connections.

Thuseni had arranged for Makuya Fhatuwani to serve as our translator during our homestay. Fhatuwani works with Thuseni, as a nature and bird guide for the Tshulu Trust. Fhatuwani is also training for a job to track poachers for South Africa National Parks. He had a lot to say about that, which will be in a later post.

Makuya Fhatuwani and Thuseni Sigwadi

The Tshulu Trust not only arranges homestays as a way to bolster the income of Hamakuyu families who need it most, but also operates a small nonprofit resort (Tshulu Camp) on the Mutale River, on the outskirts of the village. The Camp features baobab trees, ironwood groves, mopane woodland, and lots of bird species. It attracts birders, students, scientists, and tourists, and is often used for meetings or retreats, employing local people as caterers and housekeepers. More about the camp in a later post.

Husband Ken, Fhatuwani, and Salani under a baobab tree in the village. Salani was able to reach a sweet fruit for us to sample.

It so happened that the day we arrived in Hamakuya was a national holiday to honor Hector Pieterson, a martyr of the struggle against apartheid. Holidays mean traditional dancing, which was already underway when we arrived. I didn't realize at first that it was a holiday; I thought the dancing was all for us! I was a little relieved to find that was not the case. The dancing was different from Welverdiend's dancing - probably because the main dance troupe was young girls, maybe 8 to 14 years old. They had an incredible amount of energy and danced to drumbeats for a long time, wearing colorful skirts, waving orange scarves in unison, with rattles tied to their lower legs. I was entranced by the dancing.

A break in the dancing

The girl who led the line of dancing, holding her leg rattles

The leading girl wore a headdress of black bird feathers and blew the dance rhythms on a plastic police whistle. I happened to have a shiny new metal police whistle, which I gave her. She collapsed at my feet when I did (which alarmed me), until I learned that collapse is the Venda way of saying "thank you".

The homestay was everything we hoped it might be. The buildings of Rosina's home were lovely. The family lives in several small clustered buildings; most are the single-room round earthen rondavels with thatched roofs that you see all over South Africa.

Another shot of Rosina's family compound. Standing are our translator Fhatuwani, Rosina's daughter Sarah, and Rosina. The cooking pit with kettles and pots is in the center foreground.

The rondavel where Ken and I slept had a handsome black pattern painted around the base (below).

We slept on homemade mats on the rondavel floor (below), although foam mats are available for homestay guests. Floors were of dried and compacted cow dung and mud, pleasant to the feet and odor-free.

Between the buildings was an immaculate and perfectly smooth courtyard also of mud and cow dung. Below, one of Rosina's children and Rosina in the courtyard.

The cooking area (below) was a small shallow hole in the courtyard, with a tripod over a small fire.

Above, daughter Violet stirs the pap (made of corn meal or maize meal and water) constantly to prevent lumps. Rosina is wearing yellow, behind the pot.

Below, family and friends gather around the cookfire for conversation and food. Rosina's grown daughter Violet is in the brown shirt.

Below, one of Rosina's youngsters washes the family dishes. The cooking pit and its pots are in the foreground.


As homestay guests, Ken and I were brought our meals inside our rondavel. Fhatuwani and Salani often ate with us. First, Salani poured a gourd of water over our hands to clean them (Ken and Salani, below).

We ate wild greens similar to spinach, white pap (like congealed grits), and mopane worms (caterpillars) in sauce. See below.

Below, a mopane worm ready for munching, on a wad of pap in my hand. The worms were surprisingly edible, maybe even tasty. The guts had been squeezed out and they had been dried for storage, then rehydrated with the sauce.

The family's daily tasks include gathering wood for cooking - which was no big deal in Hamakuya. They have not yet run out of wood as some communities have. Ken and I went with Sarah to collect wood, and we didn't have to walk far to find the red bush willow they prefer for the cookfire (its smoke smells sweet). With a machete and an axe, she removed enough dead branches from the trees to make a substantial bundle in just a few minutes. Cutting only the dead branches maintains a healthy stock of trees, without depleting the number of living trees and branches.

Above, Sarah chopped and bundled the wood. She then coiled a towel on top of her head, and carried the bundle home in ten minutes on the top of her head - no hands!! She even doubled over laughing at Salani's jokes on the way back, and still didn't use her hands to steady the bundle!

We learned that Rosina, the head of the household, generates income by making and selling brooms and sleeping mats, as well as by hosting homestays.

Rosina making a broom.

A finished handmade broom.

Rosina's daughters Violet and Sarah made brooms too.

We all collapsed in laughter over one of my social gaffes.

Below: Rosina's mats, woven on a handmade loom, were amazing. She used aluminum cans of sand as weights during the weaving process.

Rosina at work on her handmade loom, weaving mats to sell.

A mat under construction on the loom. The foil is snack wrappers, woven into the stiff reeds for decoration.

In addition to the brooms and mats, Rosina's family also owns a few cattle and chickens, which they can sell if times are tough. Rosina's sons presumably send her a portion of their income, and I'm guessing the family receives some money from the government for the young children. It's a meager existence by Western standards. But no less joyful than my own, and in some ways probably more so. The family spends almost all their time outside, almost all their time together, almost always moving around. They cook and eat every meal together, outdoors. That alone might be enough to make me a happy camper. The living quarters, what I saw of it, was impeccably neat and clean. The only bathroom was a "long-drop" (an outhouse) across a rocky field from the house, but that didn't seem to bother anyone. The only running water was a single spigot shared with other families, 100 meters up the road. That didn't seem to bother anyone either. They had no electricity. I don't remember if they had kerosene lamps, I don't think so. We had flashlights, so wouldn't have used them anyway. We slept on a grass mat on the cow-dung floor, like everyone else, which was not a problem. I went with Rosina and others to fetch water - she carried several gallons on top of her head (no hands). I couldn't manage more than a couple of quarts without pain.

Even the kids could carry more water than I could. Me at left, Rosina at right.

I've mentioned the good things about their lifestyle, yet I could see that Rosina felt the burden of her responsibility as head of household. Among the daughters and younger children, laughter was plentiful, even though the grown daughters spend much of the day cooking pap, gathering wood, tending the livestock, gathering wild plants to eat, making brooms, taking care of babies. Yet, as a mother myself, I'm sure Rosina worries about health care, secondary schooling for her children, drought, diminishing resources, low wages, difficulty in finding work for all of them. I never saw her at rest; she was always cooking, cleaning, weaving, tending children....working.

Neither Rosina nor the daughters were much inclined to talk to us, even through the interpreter Fhatuwani. Most of what we learned was from Fhatuwani directly or from Rosina's teenage son Sarani, who attends an internet technology school and is well-acquainted with Western culture. I'm not sure why, but in Welverdiend too we found that the men were much more interested in talking to us than women were (in general, there were exceptions). I would like to understand that better. Do the men go to school longer? Know English better? Do they feel more comfortable discussing the sustainability issues that interested us? Do cultural expectations keep women quiet?

I want to go back, right now. To Hamukuya and to Welverdiend.

But that will have to wait.

If you're interested in visiting Hamakuya or a stay at Tshulu Camp, as a family or a school group or tour group, you can contact me at sally.kneidel@gmail.com or contact Thuseni Sigwadi at tshulu@gmail.com. Thuseni's phone is 072 977 6669 within South Africa; from the U.S. it's 011 27 72 977 6669. If you do go there, you're supporting a proactive community that very much needs and deserves support. Drought and a rapidly changing world have impacted their lifestyle dramatically. They need a bigger share of the world's resources, and as Westerners, we can give our travel dollars to them directly, rather than to international hotel chains.

Vha Tshimbila zwavudi (go well, good-bye in Venda)

All photos and text by Sally Kneidel, PhD

Rosina's daughters Violet and Sarah and their baby sons

Other sources of information on Hamakuya, Tshulu Trust, and Tshulu Camp:

Northwestern University in South Africa blog: Hamakuya and Kruger National Park

IHRE Orientation Program, Tshulu Camp, Hamakuya Village, Limpopo Province (a document from an organization that had a retreat at Tshulu Camp)

A blog post from one of Laurence Kruger's OTS students who visited Hamakuya

Kundalini Yoga Weekend at Tshulu Eco Retreat (a document from an organization that had a retreat at Tshulu Camp)

Key words:: Hamakuya Makuya Tshulu Trust Tshulu Camp Venda homestay Africa Kruger National Park cultural village tour South Africa