http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africaandindianocean/southafrica/8462776/South-Africa-safari-Crisis-in-Kruger-National-Park.html

South Africa safari: Crisis in Kruger National Park

South Africa’s vast game reserves are known for their wildlife yet, as Graham Boynton discovers, its most famous national park is facing serious problems with a surge in rhino poaching, tourist development and an elephant population explosion.

It takes about 48 hours for the African bush to reclaim me. As with many Western travellers I arrive wound up as tight as a tourniquet and in no state of mind to relax and go with the flow.

On my first few drives into the bushveld I find myself sitting upright in the Land Rover, bottom-clenched, purse-lipped and all but demanding that the animals we pass by or stop to watch just get on with it. Hunt! Attack! Kill… anything! The impala, the buffalo, the elephant, even the pride of lions we encounter, all ignore my imprecations and carry on as if I were not there. Which is as it should be.

By the second morning I start to notice that Wilson Masiya, my tracker, who is perched right out on the front of the vehicle, is making almost imperceptible hand gestures, to which my guide and driver, the venerated Juan Pinto, is responding by changing the direction of the vehicle, slowing down, speeding up, or whatever is required.

Slowly the scales fall away and I begin to hear distant bird calls I was deaf to the previous day – the “tink tink tink” of a blacksmith plover and the dismissive call of a go-away bird. Then I pick up the fleeting movements of a female leopard in the thick undergrowth, camouflage on the move.

And now I begin working out Wilson’s minimalist semaphore as he points out fresh lion spoor here, broken branches that signify rhino passing there, and the faint smell of an elephant on the morning breeze.

I am on the borders of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, not usually my first choice for a spell in the bush. I’m here by default, really, as my intended destination was Zimbabwe, where I had been assured of “fast-track press accreditation” by the country’s minister of tourism late last year.

As it turned out, the promised government stamp of approval had not arrived the day before I was due to depart – some five months after the initial offer was made – so I abandoned the Zimbabwe trip and hastily planned five days in South Africa instead. I am to spend three nights at Royal Malewane in the central Kruger area and two nights farther south at Leopard Hills in the Sabi Sands area.

Many of my safari friends and companions regard Kruger and these private reserves on its border as “cabbage patch” conservancies, and one has even suggested that it is not that different from driving through Longleat in a BMW.

Well, that’s a bit harsh, and in Kruger’s defence, this 7,300sq mile area of wilderness is bigger than Wales and contains 147 mammal and 450 bird species. I agree, it does not have the splendour of Botswana or the Zambezi Valley, but equally it doesn’t have the tourist concentrations of the Maasai Mara or Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater. And for first-time safari-goers with a short time to spend in the bush and the need for hot-and-cold running Wi-Fi, there is nothing like it.

This trip was, however, much more than a substitute idyll in the bush, as I needed to find out what was going on in South African wildlife conservation.

South Africa, in particular the Kruger, is facing serious problems.

First, there is a wave of rhino poaching, the likes of which we have not seen since the Africa-wide pandemic of the Eighties. Last year 333 rhinos were killed illegally for their horn; this year 73 had been shot by early March. That’s a rhino a day lost to poachers.

Then, there is a controversy surrounding the proposed building of two 120-room conference hotels, bang in the middle of this pristine wilderness reserve. Accusations abound of politicians taking backhanders and of conservationists’ advice being wilfully ignored – and the date for the opening of the new hotels was recently announced as 2013.

Last, there is the ongoing problem of Kruger’s overpopulation of elephant – it currently has 15,000 in a space that scientists say should be carrying no more than 7,500. The debate about wilderness and its carrying capacity has been at the forefront of the African wilderness agenda for decades, but it remains unresolved. Recent attempts to move some of Kruger’s elephants into neighbouring Mozambique have failed spectacularly.

“The elephants are usually back in the Kruger before the trucks that took them out to Mozambique have returned,” says Andre Kotze, who runs Elephant Whispers, a training and rehabilitation centre near the Sabi Sands private reserves.

However, in my first 48 hours of bush acclimatisation at Royal Malewane, there is no evidence of these raging problems, as Juan Pinto, Wilson Masiya and your humble author potter around the 22,000-hectare conservancy that is shared by a number of small luxury lodges, such as Royal Malewane.

Royal Malewane is a favourite luxury bush retreat for the likes of Elton John and David Furnish, Bono and Mrs Bono, Richard Gere, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and Mrs Sarkozy, the Microsoft gazillionaire Paul Allen, and so on.

What they ask for is privacy, wildlife expertise and fine dining, all of which they get at Royal Malewane in spades. It is the creation of Liz and Phil Biden, owners of the award-winning La Residence luxury retreat in Franschhoek. Here the same standards of exotic design, generous space, attentive staff and haute cuisine make Royal Malewane a kind of Versailles in the bush.

What appeals to me most, however, is neither the cuisine nor the design, but the expertise, and Juan Pinto and Wilson Masiya provide that. Pinto was born in Johannesburg but from an early age knew that he wanted to be in the bush. The day he matriculated from Jeppe High School he packed his bags and headed for Kruger, and within three years he was head ranger of the Thornybush reserve.

He helped Liz and Phil Biden build Royal Malewane – they opened it in November 1999 – and as a director he has led the guiding of the lodge’s procession of the world’s rich and famous clientele and, at the same time, run the training programmes that bring on the young guides under him.

Pinto’s partnership with Wilson Masiya, a 60-year-old Mozambiquan from the Shangaan tribe, goes back 16 years and as I observed on my first drive with them, the two communicate as if linked by some invisible cosmic thread. What makes Wilson rather special is that he is a master tracker, the highest rank a wildlife tracker in southern Africa can achieve.

There have only ever been five master trackers and the two most famous — Vet Piet Kleinman from the Kalahari Gemsbok and Oom Dawid Bester from the West Coast National Park — have died. This makes time with Wilson Masiya in the bush even more precious.

So, here we are, Juan, Wilson and me, trundling through the bush in the soft evening light when we come upon a group of white rhino. The smell of turpentine grass wafts through the air as the feeding rhino work their way towards a huge termite mound, where the grass is tastier thanks to the nutrients provided by the termites.

The sight of the rhinos – a large matriarch, a younger male and two calves – prompts Juan into an impassioned monologue on rhino poaching. “The situation was quite good until the last two years. We were losing maybe 15 animals a year, and that was bearable.

“Then poaching went crazy – last year we were losing almost an animal a day in the country – and a lot of it was happening up here in the north-east.”

It’s organised, sophisticated poaching, using helicopters, night-vision equipment and drugs to dart the rhino. The trigger appears to be the growing belief in Thailand, Vietnam and China that powdered rhino horn can cure cancer and several other serious diseases; a shift from the previous and equally preposterous belief that powdered horn serves as a reliable aphrodisiac.

The Chinese government, rather than debunking these myths, is funding studies and proposals that advocate the breeding of “endangered medicinal-use animals”, thereby stoking the fires of the new poaching epidemic. Both Zimbabwe and Kenya have reported a recent surge in rhino deaths, but South Africa, with the largest rhino population, has been hit the hardest.

“In this area we have formed a rhino watch group,” says Juan, “and the police have called a meeting for all landowners and concerned parties at the end of the month. We have to stamp on this hard.”

The following day I leave Royal Malewane by helicopter and an hour later I’m dropped into another conservation conversation that will doubtless rage into the distant future. The question is what to do with the elephants; the answers I get from Andre Kotze, from Elephant Whispers, a facility that allows tourists to interact with six elephants that have been saved from culling, and tamed and trained, is as ambiguous as those expressed by most African conservationists.

“Here in the Sabi Sands there should be 250 elephant and at the moment there are between 1,200 and 1,400. But culling is the worst thing you have ever seen in your life – rivers of blood and the rest. And if you work with elephants, as we do here, the thought of shooting them, well, you can’t even imagine it.”

The last major cull in Kruger was in 1994. Despite pressure from wildlife management lobbyists, neither the South African government nor national parks officials can bring themselves to order the destruction of significant herds of elephants.

Kotze points out that Kruger “is a nature reserve and not an elephant reserve”, but then immediately begins celebrating the magnificent animals he has been working so closely with at Elephant Whispers. He tells the story of Sir Ian Botham visiting the facility some years back.

“We introduced him to one of our elephants as Beefy and he fed the elephant and spent a bit of time around him. Then when Botham came back 18 months later we asked him to join a semicircle of people around the same elephant. We dropped a hat in the middle and asked the elephant to pick it up and give it to Beefy. He passed up and down the line and then without hesitation gave the hat to Beefy. It’s very difficult to talk about culling when you have this relationship with elephants.”

Kotze believes that elephants can be put to use in landmine-clearing operations — they are apparently far more efficient than dogs at sniffing out buried explosives — and on anti-poaching patrols.

After Elephant Whispers it is a short hop to Leopard Hills, a 16-bed luxury lodge where the aforementioned Sir Ian celebrated his 50th birthday and where many of his fellow sportsmen have spent time tracking animals. The lodge is set on a kopje that affords it a wonderful view of a great swathe of Sabi Sands bushveld.

During this brief visit I find myself among a large pride of lions, a ferocious pack of wild dogs tearing apart an impala kill, and a large breeding herd of elephant. Sitting in an open vehicle with a herd of elephant socialising around you is a rare treat. As an enormous female glowers down at us, seemingly weighing up whether to charge us or not, it occurs to me that this is a long way indeed from Longleat.

As I have said, Kruger and its attendant private conservancies have never been my first choice of African wildlife experience, but there is a lot to be said for a well-organised, well-maintained, affordable and easily accessible wildlife reserve, and Kruger is all of those things.

South Africa basics

Graham Boynton travelled to South Africa with Africa Travel (0845 450 1535; www.africatravel.co.uk), which arranges tailor-made holidays to southern and east Africa, and which guarantees it will never be beaten on price on any like-for-like itinerary.

A three-night break to Royal Malewane, including British Airways flights, all meals, safari activities and transfers costs from £3,695 per person. Leopard Hills costs from £685 per person per night (includes meals and activities).

Extensions can be arranged to other areas of southern Africa.