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

Ecotourism can buffer the effects of poverty

a wild Vervet Monkey, common in South Africa (photo by Sally Kneidel)
 

Travelers from the United States spend 12 billion dollars each year in Africa. Some of that money goes to foreign owners of hotel chains and safari lodges. But not all of it. When destinations are chosen mindfully, travel dollars can go directly into the pockets of villagers who desperately need the money to support their families. Supporting impoverished families also reduces the overharvesting of natural resources such as trees and endangered wildlife. When families are struggling to find food just for today, they can't afford to think about the long-term environmental consequences of their actions.

So what can we do? What can Americans do who don't have big bucks to spend abroad?

My husband Ken and I have a modest income; we've both been educators our whole adult lives, and I make a tiny bit writing (2 cents an hour, to be exact). As a rule, we don't buy anything we don't absolutely have to have. When we do buy, we almost always buy secondhand. But our one area of "splurging" is green and culturally-sensitive travel.

We plan all of our trips from scratch, by ourselves. No packages, no big hotels, no cruises. We cut out the middleman and as much as possible, we avoid foreign-owned lodging. We do our best to funnel our dollars directly to local people.

In South Africa, we visited the village of Welverdiend, just outside the Orpen Gate of Kruger National Park. The villagers here rely heavily on natural resources to provide their basic needs: fuel, housing, food. They use wood from local trees for home-construction, cooking, fencing, livestock corrals, furniture, etc.

a Welverdiend family's kitchen made of local wood (photo by Sally Kneidel)

The Welverdiend villagers also harvest local plants, insects, and wildlife for food. They make bricks for some of their housing, using sand from the nearby river. Their relationship with these resources was the fascinating focus of the tour. But all of these resources are diminishing rapidly due to earlier population growth, unsustainable harvesting by "outsiders" who sell the resources, and climate change. For example, the area gets less rain now due to climate change, so river volume is reduced, less sand is deposited on the banks, and the villagers don't have enough sand to make bricks. Also vegetation patterns are changing due to changing rainfall. Consequently, villages across Africa are looking for new ways to provide their families' basic needs of housing, food, and fuel. The villagers of Welverdiend are trying to generate income by offering village tours, and they're doing a good job of it. When we visited there, all of our payment went directly into the villagers' pockets. Supporting their tours helps the villagers in the short run, and also gives them an incentive to preserve their culture and to preserve a sustainable relationship with their natural resources.

We went to Peru this past summer, and stayed in a remote research facility on a tributary of the Amazon River owned by a nonprofit, Project Amazonas. The mission of Project Amazonas is to promote conservation, conservation education, and the health of impoverished villages in remote areas of Amazonia. Project Amazonas has just gotten funding for a medical boat that will move from village to village providing basic health care for impoverished families. All the money we spent along the Amazon went directly to support the projects of Project Amazonas, or directly into the hands of remote villages we visited along the Rio Orosa: Santa Ursula, Comandancia, Santa Thomas. We donated money also to ACDA-Peru, a nonprofit working along a different tributary of the Amazon, for their September health fair to provide medical services and family planning options to families along the river (organized by Rosa Vasquez of Hospedaje La Pascana). When families have access to medical care, family planning, and education, birth rates go down, which in turn helps families use rainforest products (including trees and wildlife) at a more sustainable rate. All of the support people we employed on the trip - our cook, our boatman, our driver, our guide on the desert coast and in the Amazon - were all native Peruvians.

My son Alan, our excellent bird guide Edgardo Aguilar (edgardoaguilarh@yahoo.com), and husband Ken on the coast of Peru

With one exception, all of the hostels where we stayed, in the Andes and elsewhere, were owned and operated 100% by local people. Our only exception was Llanganuco Lodge, a Mount Huascaran eco-lodge owned by a transplanted Brit, who donates money to support the local Quechua community and employs local Quechuans.

A Quechuan family cooking lunch to sell to tourists in Huascaran National Park in the Peruvian Andes (photo by Sally Kneidel)


My family (Sadie, Alan, and Ken) birding at Llanganuco Lodge in the Cordillera Blanca of the Peruvian Andes

A trip to Thailand and Viet Nam is in the works. I'm going with two friends this time, not my family. I'm booking places right now via the internet. I'm trying to choose places that promote conservation and that are owned by local people. It takes a lot more time to do the research required to screen providers and to book places myself, rather than through a travel agency. But it's fun. When I get back from trips, I try to maintain contact with villagers, with local providers, and with conservation groups we've met during the trip. I post their contact info on my blog, and promote their fundraisers on my blog. My goal is to get American travel dollars into the hands of people in developing nations who are struggling toward sustainable livelihoods. By doing so, I hope to help them live more comfortably, to give them additional incentive to maintain their rich traditions and way of life, and to reduce the overharvesting of natural resources. When I get back, I'll post contact info for the local providers and organizations we met in Asia.

Text & photos by Sally Kneidel, PhD

Keywords:: green travel ecotravel Thailand Asia Viet Nam Peru South Africa Welverdiend Edgardo Aguilar Rosa Vasquez Project Amazonas