22 June 2024  

I had a week's orientation to field base before the other volunteer staff arrived. The volunteer staff sleep 2, 3, or 4 to a room in the bedrooms inside, so we are quite comfortable. The internet service is reliable but low capacity, so even with more than a few of us on work or personal laptops it slows dramatically. When the venturers arrive, they will likely all have their cell phones connecting to it, and we are warned, don't expect  any good service. They DON'T take their phones to the three project sites, where they spend 19 days away from field base   

I'm writing this from a coffee shop in nearby Hoedspruit.  It's about 15 minute drive from field base, and will be a regular destination for me in my logistics role – buying food and supplies to keep field base running.  Hoedspruit is a wealthy town on the edge of Kruger National Park, and built to serve the tourists who come to it.  It's winter here and an ideal time to vist because its the dry season – it hasn't rained since I arrived three weeks ago.  Day time temps are usually 25-30C but mornings are cool and most nights reach a dew point. Many days at field base we see no clouds at all. But I have seen almost no tourist presence in town.

The highlight of the house is the large paved area outside, the looks directly onto the Drakensburg mountain range, a granite escarpment that marks the boundary between the low veld (where we and the Kruger lie), and the high veld that runs all the way to Johannesburg, about 7 hours drive away. .  The sun's rise lights the Drakensburg's slowly, and the hue changes as it travels through the day, which must be a landscape painter's delight. Occasionally the air is dusty and it obscures a clear few, so they appear more like a sketch drawing. The highlight for me though, is when the sun sets behind them, and the ridge lines are cut sharply against it's light. 

I won't bore you with a description of our training days, a mix of practical hands-on skill and content briefings – needless to say the hand's on stuff suits most of us better. The energetic peak was our dawn dip fully clothed in the nearby river, so we could learn how to prevent hypothermia – stripping off to dry the skin, then redressing in dry clothes, and then – here's the kicker – back into the wet clothes on the assumption you'd need to keep hiking to your destination and that would generate the heat (along with the sun) to keep hypothermia away (and in camp when activity stops, your dry clothes are available again).  My personal learning was enhanced by my error in forgetting to wring out my wet clothes before i put them back on... as I jogged back to field base in them I could feel my body re-freezing.  "Let those errors happen so the lesson is well learned!"

We had three days involving overnight stays at our three projects:  

a) environment project, clearing invasive species to rewild the grasslands on a piece of land near Kruger NP 

b) community project, developing an after-school program site that feeds, educates, and exercises primary age children and c) the adventure project, a 19 day 205km trek along the Drakensburgs (we trekked to camp 1) .  

These three days will live long in the memory of the staff who undertook them. They'll be the subject of my next blog, which I can hopefully complete before the venturers arrive in two days time.  

Teasers for you (from just one day):

1. A late night visit from the hippos

2. A troop of baboons running across our path 

3. An elephant blocking our arrival to the environment project

4. The crocodile tracking a hippo as it moved between water holes

5. The giraffe waiting nearby when we returned from a two hour drive hoping to find giraffes

6. The aging, annoyed water buffalo defying us, as he must do for all the predators around him

7. The leopard coughs, as we slept, and the tracks it had left at our camp site

8. Our African guides who understand all the risks and possible outcomes of all the above encounters

We will also use our day off today to go on a nature drive at a private game park, and I may have more to add after this.

June 3, 2024

"You have to go. It's your heritage." With these 7 words my wife cut to an essential truth.

37 years ago my progressive company sent me on a 3-month youth development project called Operation Raleigh - designed to be a 4-year traverse of the globe stopping in multiple countries for a "phase". The New Zealand expedition was Phase 8. 

I joined 135 people from around the world in remote Fiordland National Park where we hiked, mapped, tracked, dived, schooled, surveyed, searched and survived multiple wildlife and wilderness projects. For example, a group of us stayed on an uninhabited small island off the coast called Breaksea for a month building a series of circular tracks around the island later used for "the largest rat eradication project in history" that is now a model for how to re-establish NZ's endangered ground dwelling bird population. All of us spent another 2 weeks doing a shift building a walking trail called the Kepler Track which is now famous and a tourist attraction that a whole sector of the local economy depends on.

Raleigh worked so well it became permanent - sending young people like me to projects every year all around the world. Shuttered by COVID in 2020 and then reconsistuted, I saw a call for alumni to staff the "new" Raleigh, and the timing was just right for me. My three children had all finished college and started their careers. My 20-year soccer coaching career was starting to wind down. I had the money and the time, and the sudden realization that here was a chance to give backfor what had been a seminal experience in my life. Kruger National Park in South Africa was the offering, poetically parallel to NZ's Fjordland. After the hiring process ended I was told that the staff "enjoyed hearing my stories" and I accepted their offer to join the 2024 South Africa project.

Then I got cold feet. I deferred for six months because the local school system denied me leave withOUT pay (my NZ employer in 1987 had sent me on full pay!). I started wondering if I really could pull off another 3 months' worth of tents, sleeping bags and rations, living in a wilderness far from friends and family. One day my son, still living at home, announced he was off ona trip to Asia - four months away, overlapping my Raleigh plans. I'd now be leaving my wife alone with a big property to keep and no immediate help. Her only company would be our cat and they did not even get along much on a good day. I told her "I can't go. I just can't do that to you."

But she knew something else and conveyed it in those 7 words. And there was something else about me and about this African continent that I have never set foot in.

Growing up in NZ, apartheid era South Africa was a seeming constant reference point for me.  Sporting contests – especially rugby – between Britain's former colonies were part of our national identity.  NZ's "All Blacks" and South Africa's "Springboks" were consistently among the best teams in the world but only played every six years or so.  Yet those series were always epics.  My father attended the 1956 Springbok game were our local provincial team (Waikato) defeated the might South Africans. Twenty years later as a 13 year-old I dutifully set an alarm clock for late night live TV coverage of NZ's rugby tour of their country. I was prompted out of my ignorance of South Africa's apartheid system by new coverage of the Soweto riots that took place the same time as the rugby team played its games.  I was shocked to find out that many African nations were going to boycott the 1976 Olympics is NZ participated in them, as protest against our continued sporting contacts with South Africa,.  Our Prime Minister ruled the airwaves pledging "no government interference" with individual sporting decisions, no trace of irony when the South African "teams" were for whites' only because of their government's total interference. He had come to office the previous year replacing a one-term Labour governments whose leader had the temerity to call off an earlier proposed rugby tour   Emergency meeting of the Bristish Commonwealth leaders were dominated by the question of South African contacts, almost exclusively because of NZ's contrary stance. Leaders of other African states regularly appeared on our news shows, appealing directly to the NZ people to change this aspect of our national life.

In 1978, I entered my high-schools speech contest with a argument against sporting contacts with South Africa.  My small rural conservative town was the arch-type for supporters of the other side of the argument viz "pro-tour" .  A brave judge awarded me first prize; I was the first winner from the junior classes anyone could remember and dutifully booked to give my winning speech to the local Rotary Club who sponsored the competition; whose members were a distillation of pro-tour influencers of my town.  Thankfully I was too young to really take in what must have been quizzical looks at the "young kid spouting liberal nonsense"  (My father, to his credit., said not a word to dissuade me from my course, despite him then coaching at the local rugby club as well!) 

And worse was to come.  In 1981, under the same conservative and contrarian government the South African rugby team actually arrived on NZ's shores.  They were here to play, and NZ was an international pariah to many for hosting them. Every stop along the way thousands of Kiwi's came out to meet, make speeches, march and protest at their presence.  Thousands of police and even parts of the military were deployed to keep order, if not the peace, as these protests were meet by active counter actions, mostly in various forms of social ostracizing, and national division over the issue.  Game two of the tour was in Hamilton, at the same Rugby Park my father had been at in 1956.  A quester century later, I walked and yelled slogans near the head of a street march that went right up to the fence at Rugby Park. A chain link fence got peeled off its posts, people poured through the gap into the park and onto the field. I went too.  We, some 500 protestors, occupied the center of the field, surrounded by 20'000 screaming ruby fans in the stands.  The police deployed, but they could not move us quickly, thanks to linked arms and passive resistance.  There was pitched battle outside the ground, blood on the streets, and eventually a cancellation of the game...

...which was to have been the first rugby match televised live to the domestic audience in South Africa.  The people there tuned in over breakfast to see NZ apparently turning its back on them at last.  Nelson Madela, incarcerated in Robben Island wrote in his memoir that when his guards told him the Rugby Park match had been called off, it was a like a ray of sunshine on a dreary day for him.  It was dreary for me, too as I do not like confrontation and I haven't struck a violent blow since being a kid of 13 or 14; but like most things I decide to do, once in I am fully committed. I escaped Rugby Park un-arrested and unbruised, suffered little other than the immediately acquired moniker of "Protestor" as my local sports club.  From that day on no one called me by my name , just "Protestor", which over the next few years I hope became more a mark of grudging respect than castigation.  

Now I will be visiting the land I fought in my own small way to help keep isolated until the apartheid era was ended.  I have been travelling for more than 40 years.  I am genuinely excited to step onto my outward flight to Jo'burg.  Stange as this may be, I have to go, it's my heritage

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/sites/default/files/videos/original/hamilton-cancelled.mp4