Tembe Elephant Park

Zulu dancers from the village performed one evening

We left the Durban airport and headed northeast to Tembe Elephant Park, a 5 hour drive from Durban. There are 500 km of sugarcane plantation along the coast. We saw swaying green rolling hills interlaced with a network of narrow and wide sandy brown paths. There were clusters of cane cutters cottages along the way. At harvest time the fields are burned to clear out snakes and vermin and then the cutters start. Raw brown sugar is extracted for export and the 'waste' is made into paper.
The sugar cane gave way to eucalyptus plantations - very tall, straight and narrow trees with little foliage. Another export.

(Click on to enlarge, back space to return)

I thought we were going to the jungle but Tembe turned out to be a sand forest, a former ocean bed. The lodge operates sort of like a private public partnership, the public being the Tembe tribe, one of the Zulu tribes united by King Shaka back in the day. The Tembe tribe and the Tembe land are very poor. There are very few opportunities and young people leave for the cities. A familiar story.


Every evening the staff gathered on the dining deck to greet us and announce the evening's menu. They expressed sincere gratitude to the guests for travelling so far to come to Tembe to support their community.  Our tent was far from "roughing it" with flush toilet and hot shower...








Ian made a video. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmfnvMYjvOA



Some things we heard from our guide Carlos:

Impala and wildebeest give birth midday when their predators are resting. The newborn can run as quickly as their mothers 30 minutes after birth.

When giraffes begin to browse (nibble) on acacia trees the roots react and send a scent up to the leaves which is repellant to the giraffes. The giraffes, not to be out smarted, start browsing upwind so that the trees downwind don't know they are coming!!

The green warty skin of a toad fruit can be scratched to release a poisonous white sap. A few drops in a pan of milk will curdle the milk to make a nourishing snack. Carlos said when he was a herd boy out all day with the cattle he would milk a cow and make himself curd to eat.


Elephants can sense the vibration of other elephants' feet 10 km away. Apparently elephants in the vicinity of the big tsunamis are rarely injured or lost because they sense the approach and head to high ground.

One evening as we were heading back to the lodge Carlos slowed the truck and said "Leopard ... in that tree." We thought he was teasing because, though the park has several leopards, they are rarely seen. It scampered down the tree and ran off into the tall grass. I asked Carlos how he knew there was a leopard in the tree. He spotted its ears from about 30 meters away!

We didn't see any lions though a truck about 10 minutes ahead of us saw a large group - male, females, cubs, the whole shebang. I'm happy to know they are there and they are safe.

When we were in Cape Town we saw an international wildlife photography exhibition. The images are awesome (in the true sense of the word). A small exhibit of 6 photos depicted the despicable practice of rhino horn poaching. The word poaching is too gentle (think of an egg). Massacre, slaughter, butchery are more apt.

An interesting Canadian connection: A man in Bowser BC somehow operates the webcam at one of the hides in Tembe Park. Another mystery of technology - mysterious to me anyway!

Tembe Park has had no poaching and they credit that in part to the introduction of lions. If poaching is life threatening to the poachers and not only to the rhino it decreases. Doh.

An aside about the photo exhibit: Some of the photos made me think that photography could be deemed an extreme sport. One photographer submerged himself through an ice hole into antarctic water  in order to photograph Emperor penguins ascending from the depths out through the ice hole. It wasn't 'on cue' so who knows how long he was in that frigid water.

And yet ... another photographer stumbled across a Kermode bear in the lush green moss of a BC forest gorging herself on a salmon. He shot it (the photo!) from about 3 metres away.

Photos from the exhibit can be viewed at
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/onlineGallery.do