Mahikeng - Context is everything to a destination. Ask anyone who has done national service – or been to boarding school.
Here’s a new one: bosberaads, those unspeakably awful team-building or strategy sessions designed to bring people together, but often do the exact opposite.
Invited to review the Legacy Group’s Bakubung Bush Lodge on the edge of the Pilanesberg just past Sun City, that’s all I could think of. I’d been there about 15 years ago. I hadn’t been overly impressed by anything because we had been at it morning, noon and night, strategising, back-stabbing, self-aggrandising and then socialising.
Fast forward to now and there is simply no comparison. The food is outstanding. The rooms are exceptionally comfortable and very well appointed, particularly when you think that this is a bush lodge whose sole purpose in life is to let you rest, refuel and refresh between game drives. The hotel is divided into two-storey blocks, flanked by time-share chalets, all in thatch. The hotel rooms have another unique feature, allowing you to open the louvred doors to watch the sunset – or sunrise – while bathing.
On my arrival, the star attraction was a group of bachelor elephants – in musth, trumpeting, mock-wrestling and bum-barging each other – right next to the 10 000-volt fence that separates the hotel from the waterhole. The four young bachelors, ranging in age from 15 to nine, drew a sizeable crowd of hotel guests and time-share residents as they messed about until the sun went down. The next night it was a herd of wildebeest, coming for the salt licks and to roll in the sand.
The real attraction, though, lies beyond the fence in the Pilanesberg itself. Bakubung offers two three-hour game drives a day, the first at 8am and the other at 3.15pm. There are also walking safaris for those who like their nature up close and personal.
Lizzie Pilane, our guide, was another revelation. For a start, there were blankets for each guest and the game-viewing truck had protected canvas sides and top – a first for me. It was cold, as game drives often are, but it soon warmed up.
Guided game drives are a great introduction for the uninitiated – it’s a lot like watching rugby on TV with a commentator or watching the game yourself. If you do it with an expert, you start sounding like an expert, with all their choice factoids; from sexing a giraffe to the difference between a white and a black rhino, lodging in your brain to bore your friends with later – or triumph at trivial pursuit.
Lizzie was no exception. “One of the ways to tell a white rhino and a black rhino apart is to watch their offspring. A white rhino calf normally walks in front, like the way white people push their kids in prams, while a black rhino calf normally walks behind, just like us who strap our babies to our backs.”
Pilanesberg is incredibly beautiful. Savannah, thickets, fascinating rocky outcrops, hills, lakes – an entire world in the crater of the extinct volcano that gave birth to it. There’s also an incredible quantity of game. The Big Five are there in numbers: 50 lion, 30 leopard, 220 elephant, 220 buffalo and an undeclared number of rhino, black and white. There are also 3 000 impala, 1 800 blue wildebeest, 1 700 zebra, 600 kudu, 300 warthog and 170 giraffe.
That’s without counting the monkeys, birds, snakes and other reptiles.
You can see all of these from the comfort of the game drive, but as Lizzie pointed out to our mostly foreign group of tourists: “This is a game park, we don’t feed the animals, they’re on their own. Sometimes we’re lucky and we’ll see them, sometimes we won’t, but we’ll definitely try our best.”
Lizzie didn’t do too badly at all, managing to show us all the large mammals and two Big Five kills – a pride of lions on a zebra and two cheetahs on an impala – all in three and a half hours.
The mark of a good guide is to inspire you to do it yourself. That afternoon I ventured into the park for lunch at the Pilanesberg Centre, the old magistrate’s court right in the centre of the park, which has shops and a restaurant.
You don’t have to go any further. There’s a natural waterhole there with salt licks. Giraffe, warthog, impala, all close enough to photograph with your cellphone, while a range of exotic birds land on the railings around the complex. A vervet monkey lay in ambush and made off, in a grey blur, with an entire hamburger.
Idling back down the tarred road, I drove down the Hippo Loop to the Mankwe Dam. There wasn’t a hippo in sight, but a treasure trove of plains game, framed by the blue of the water and the deep blue of the winter sky on a bed of yellow savannah.
Returning to Bakubung, Setswana for the People of the Hippo, I found two in a little dam. People were starting to look at me a little strangely every time I rubbed the ears of the huge wooden hippo outside reception – the only thing I remembered from 15 years before. I didn’t have to any more, the ghosts of the past had finally been exorcised.
Just as it was in 1836
Pilanesberg was established in 1979 and declared a national park in 1984, as part of the old apartheid Bantustan of Bophuthatswana.
It was the first park to be established not only for ecological reasons, but to benefit the communities who had been moved from the area.
To create the park, rangers had to pull down all the homesteads and remove all the telephone lines, windmills, cattle kraals and drinking troughs.
The only building that was allowed to remain was the magistrate’s court (built in 1936), which was converted into a rest stop and tourist centre. The police station and officers’ accommodation alongside it were demolished.
Six thousand animals, representing 22 species, were introduced in Operation Genesis, with lions and other predators being introduced later to create natural balances. The park, now run by the North West Parks and Tourism Board, boasts as much game as in 1836, when Victorian explorer and hunter William Cornwallis Harris visited the area and wrote about it.
Saturday Star