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

Peru's desert coast surprises us: Paracas and Islas Ballestas

A make-shift home on Peru's Pacific coast (click on any pic to enlarge it)

I was leery of the "desert coast" south of Lima. What kind of place to live could that be, with no plants of any kind? What kind of wildlife could we see? It sounded like a moonscape! Bleak!

I live close to the Carolina coast with its maritime forests, or what's left of them - Palmetto trees, gnarly oaks draped with Spanish moss, Southern bayberries sheered by ocean winds. I love the stalky "sea oats" that anchor our white dunes.

What would a barren seashore look like? I imagined a dull and empty gray beach stretching on and on....

As it turns out, I was all wrong. Parts of Peru's southern coast are devoid of plants, but the lack of rainfall doesn't affect life in the ocean. In fact, the marine life offshore is unusually rich and diverse. That's because of Humboldt currents in the area that bring nutrients up from the ocean floor. Plankton feed on the nutrients, fish eat the plankton, and hundreds of oceanic and coastal birds and marine mammals feed on the fish. We knew there would be coastal birds, but were pleasantly surprised by the diversity of birds and mammals. Even Andean Condors venture to this coast during the sea-lion birthing season. As scavengers, the condors feed on the afterbirth left on the beaches.

Below: a Peruvian Pelican,
flourishing on the abundant fish offshore

Once we'd decided to check it out, our first challenge was how to get there safely?? We'd planned to take a bus south along the PanAmerican highway from Lima to Paracas, but then heard that these buses are often stopped by bandits, and that the Paracas bus stations are hot-spots for baggage theft. We were advised to hire a driver instead.

On the recommendation of Dr. Devon Graham, director of Project Amazonas, we hired Miguel Quevedo of Lima to drive us. Miguel proved to be a great choice. He drove at a reasonable speed, he was careful, he couldn't have been more attentive to our needs. When we made pit stops, he found out where the bathroom hole was, if any, and whether there were any snacks or drinks to be had. He stopped when we saw birds to identify, or Tyson-style chicken "farms" to gape at, or photos to shoot. When we left the car to track down a bird, he stayed with the car to guard our stuff. He drove us down muffler-scraping rural tracks without complaint, and prevented many potential problems by thinking ahead. To call him from the U.S.: 011.511.9664.1254. Or email our travel agent in Peru, Rosa Vasquez, at reservas@pascana.com; she can call him from Peru for you.

Above: a clean bathroom along the way

The 5 hour drive from Lima to Paracas turned out to be illuminating. About half of Peru's population live in poverty, many in extreme poverty. Political and economic chaos and guerilla activity of the 1980s, during the presidency of Alan Garcia, fueled an exodus from the Andes into the cities, especially Lima. A lack of adequate space and services has created outlying informal settlements known as pueblos jovenes (young towns). We passed dozens of such settlements on the road to Paracas, many of which lack sanitation and electricity. Some are more solidly constructed than others.

Below: informal settlements along the road to Paracas (click on photos to enlarge)

As we drew close to Paracas, we passed through small towns that had been devastated by a major earthquake in 2007. We saw collapsed walls and lingering piles of rubble alongside rebuilt structures. Reconstruction is progressing, but slowly. The earthquake spawned a tidal surge that flooded buildings close to shore, and those left standing bore the evidence - paint was peeling up to 3 or 4 feet on most older buildings.

Our primary destination was Reserva Nacional de Paracas, and the offshore islands Islas Ballestas, which support thousands of breeding oceanic birds. Our friend and travel agent Rosa Vasquez in Iquitos booked 2 rooms for us in the town of Paracas. The rooms were perfect. The little inn is quiet, small, simple, and inexpensive - we were the only guests of proprietor Isabel Coello, who was extremely helpful. The inn (called Paracas Bay) is also her family's home. It is located on Paracas Bay and right around the corner from the wharf where tour boats take off for Islas Ballestas. It's also across the street from a grocery store, and a 5 minute walk from several affordable and good restaurants. For rates and reservations, contact Isabel at bird002@hotmail.com or call 011.56.545082 from the U.S. Our rooms worked out to about $9.25 per person per night. While staying with Isabel, we met her friend Jorge Ibanez Vignolo, an energetic Peruvian birder who lived in California for 10 years, and now runs a kiteboarding business in Paracas Bay. His website is www.kiteboardingparacas.com; his e-mail is jorgeibanezbsc@yahoo.com; phone 011.511.440-2265 from the U.S.

Isabel Coello and her lovely inn, Paracas Bay. Behind the broom you can see the high-water marks from the flooding following the recent earthquake.

Isabel booked our boat tour for us (roughly $10 per person) and the next morning Ken, Alan, and I took off for Islas Ballestas. The tour took about 2.5 or 3 hours, most of which was spent on the boat journey outward and back. Sadie had traveler's digestive distress and stayed behind at the inn with Miguel and Isabel.

Below are shots taken from the boat. We spent an hour cruising around the rocky islands' arches and caves, watching sea lions sprawled on the rocks and thousands of birds: Humboldt Penguins, Neotropical Cormorants, Inca Terns, Peruvian Pelicans, Peruvian Boobies, Oystercatchers, Red-legged and Guanay Cormorants, Surf Cynclodes, and more.

Alan Kneidel searches for rare birds like the Surf Cynclodes from the tour boat.

Pic below: Peruvian Pelicans and Peruvian Boobies perched on ledges.


Above, Peruvian Pelicans.

Below, Humboldt Penguins on Islas Ballestas.

Below, sea lions lounging and socializing on the rocks.

Below: our tour boat approaching a cave on Islas Ballestas

Below: An Inca Tern in one of the caves Photo below: After we returned from the boat tour, Isabel hooked us up with a professional bird guide, Edgardo Aguilar. He normally charges $80 for a full day of birding, but gave us a reduced rate since we used him for only about 3 hours. His email address is edgardoaguilarh@yahoo.com.

Edgardo (left) showing Alan and Ken the Slender-billed Finch,
in farmland a mile or so back from the water's edge

Edgardo speaks excellent English, is very friendly, and knows his birds. Even better, he's very good at describing exactly where a tiny bird is hidden in the foliage. (Yes, there were plants after we drove a mile or so inland.) I highly recommend Edgardo if you're birding in the Paracas area. He lives in one of the nearby towns - Ica or Pisco - and knows the area intimately. He took us through an offroad agricultural area where we saw Vermillion Flycatchers (my first), Slender-billed Finch, Coastal Miner, Common Nighthawk, Peruvian Meadowlark, etc. and best of all - a colony of Burrowing Owls!


Left,
the
owls'
burrows



























Above: a burrowing owl near Paracas


Below: A child saw us looking at the owls and ran out from her home to see if she could help. She pointed out another couple of burrows to Sadie.

Below, the owls and a lot of the other birds
Edgardo showed us were near irrigated plots
of paprika peppers

After an early afternoon with Edgardo, we dropped him off at home and tooled away in Miguel's car toward Reserva Nacional de Paracas, just a few miles down the road from the town of Paracas.

The reserve is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen - with absolutely no plants in sight.

Pics below: Reserva Nacional de Paracas, on Peru's southern coast

Above: a turkey vulture dines on a seal carcass washed ashore
Below: more shots of the Paracas reserve

Below: Miguel, Miguel's car, and Sadie at the Paracas reserve

Below, Alan peers over Ken's shoulder at pelagic birds offshore

What do you think, beautiful or bleak? I loved the Humboldt penguins on Islas Ballestas - my first penguins. I loved Isabel and Edgardo, I loved the burrowing owls and the little girl who showed us more. I loved Miguel, I loved the stark and haunting coast - the colorful cliffs and hungry birds.

I understand that the area is experiencing a boom in tourism. I'm glad the reserve does actually seem to be protected, and hope the coming development of the adjacent areas can proceed mindfully. The residents could really benefit from more tourist dollars from industrialized nations - mainly, the U.S.

Sadie, Alan, Ken and Sally Kneidel at Reservas Nacional de Paracas

All photos and text by Sally Kneidel

Keywords: Paracas Humboldt penguin Islas Ballestas birding Peru Rosa Vasquez Los Zarcillos birding South America Reserva Nacional de Paracas

Other recent posts about our travels in Peru:

Deep in the Amazon: the wildlife delivery crew

Careening through the Andes

Roasted guinea pig: trekking at 12,000 ft

Rainforest in need: here's how to help