Ithala Game Reserve has been described as a “hidden gem”. The small game reserve on the Pongola River in a secluded and beguiling corner of KwaZulu-Natal is still a gem, but no longer so much hidden as forgotten.
The place used to pump, says chief conservation officer Gary Bawden. “It was really, really popular in the old days. You used to get two group buses coming here.” Now there are few visitors, “way too few”, he says.
It’s not that Ithala has little to offer; it has a lot, including leopards and three more of the big five. But what’s putting off tourists is out of the park’s hands: Ithala has become a victim of one of the worst roads in SA.
The R69 from Vryheid to Louwsburg, the main route to Ithala, is a minefield of potholes, so bad that it can take an hour or more to drive the 60km. That road has become the middle section of a detour taken by coal trucks. These heavy lorries, on the way to Richards Bay from the Mpumalanga coalfields, leave the N2 to avoid the troublesome stretch between Mkhondo (once Piet Retief) and the town of Pongola, which skirts the Eswatini border.
Local protests, blockades, frequent accidents and stop-go repair sections along that part of the N2 can keep the trucks waiting for hours. So they duck south to Paulpietersburg, on to Vryheid, where they take a left turn to Pongola to get back on the national road before heading south again to the coal terminal at Richards Bay. It may be about 140km longer, but often it’s a lot quicker. Meanwhile the road to Louwsburg, fragile to begin with because it’s not designed for such heavy loads, suffers. And Ithala suffers too.
The people who run Ithala put on a brave face, fixing their own roads, fighting fires, herding stray elephants and getting down to making sure Ntshondwe, the snug rest camp at the foot of the Ngotshe Mountains, is ready when the tourists do come. Those people also have a unanimous vote from Tripadvisor commentators as the friendliest they’ve come across.
Musa Mntambo of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife urges visitors not to be put off by the R69 and denies that Ithala could be closed. “Most of our facilities are remote,” he says of the KwaZulu-Natal parks. “Our market is for those who are looking for a natural experience that is different from what they are used to. The road to Sun City is not great, but people still go there for the experience. As long as we can ensure that the tourists who visit Ithala are given an unforgettable experience, that will make them our ambassadors when they go back.”
One of the recent priorities for the Ithala people has been getting their roads shipshape, unlike those responsible for the Vryheid-Louwsburg ordeal. Mntambo says the roads in the park were damaged by the rains that affected the entire province, “but we have been working hard to improve them”.
Bawden says: “You must understand, the terrain of Ithala is not the same as you’re going to find in Kruger [National Park] where you’re driving on these gravel, flat roads that are easily maintained. [Ithala’s] roads have steep gradients with shallow bedrock, so in places you’ll get a lot of wash-off when there are downpours. And maintaining the roads is extremely expensive and extremely time consuming.”
Nevertheless, tourists brave enough to take on the Vryheid-Louwsburg horrors should not expect smooth driving in the park. It’s advisable to come in vehicles that have a high clearance, says Bawden. “Don’t come here in your little Kia Picanto,” he warns.
So much for the downside and being off the beaten track. Ithala will reward the tourist with sightings of four of the big five: black and white rhino, peacefully co-existing and fortunately not in the crosshairs of poachers, buffalo, elephant and a lot of leopards. Sorry, no lions, but that means you can walk about in reasonable safety with rangers.
It’s not only that the presence of leopards is intriguing, but also their number. At the last count by the global Panthera project, which monitors the world’s 40 wildcat species and visits Ithala each year, there were 44 individual leopards, eight of which roam in and out of the park. The rest are permanent residents.
Ithala does not figure on a list of the top five African game reserves for leopards; those belong to South Luangwa in Zambia, Moremi in Botswana, Kruger, Serengeti in Tanzania and Masai Mara in Kenya. It’s probably because of Ithala’s relatively small size — 290km2 — but it might also make it one of the little park’s biggest secrets. A visitor’s chances of seeing a leopard are good.
“It’s an ideal habitat for them, the rocky mountains, and there’s water all over the place,” says Bawden. Just how ideal is clear when you travel along one of those steep roads from Ntshondwe to a delightful picnic spot on the Pongola River: the route is through steep ravines and kloofs, just the kind of places where leopards like to lurk.
The Pongola River on the northern edge of Ithala is the only part of the park that is not fenced and it has turned out to be an appealing “trip to the shops” for the elephants. “The river means nothing to them,” says Bawden. “They don’t know that the park ends at this line, so in the summer months, when they have annihilated the trees inside the park and there are nice ones on the outside — across the river — fruiting and flowering, they go and fetch their ‘ice cream’ and ‘sweets’.”
It’s tribal land on the other side of the river, so the elephants are not exactly welcome, but the locals are understandably wary of herding them back to the park. That’s when Bawden and his team call in a helicopter that the park has on contract. The elephants are “very responsive. They know the drill,” he says. “As soon as they hear the chopper, they’ve got their ears up and they’re already on their way back [to the park], often before it even gets there.”
The herd began life in Ithala as orphans from Kruger and at first “these little guys” stuck to the Ngubu Basin, an ancient crater in an area of the park surrounded by the Ngotshe Mountains and in front of the Ntshondwe camp. But that was years ago; as they grew in confidence, they began to explore — hence their river crossings.
Like most parks in Africa with elephants, their numbers are growing too fast and culling has long been regarded as abhorrent. So how to contain the herds? Once again the helicopter is called in and the cows are darted annually with a contraceptive drug that seems to work. “It’s sort of like taking the pill, almost,” says Bawden. One or two cows might be missed.
It’s not only elephants that Ithala has received from Kruger, birds are another gift. Oxpeckers were once in danger of becoming extinct in parts of the country where they fed off cattle that had been dipped in pesticides deadly to the birds. In the late 1990s, these birds were captured in their thousands in Kruger and released into areas where they had died out (and where farmers had switched to more benign pesticides). Ithala was one of the many beneficiaries, and 175 birds were released there. Today these red-billed birds are flourishing, perching as they do on the backs of buffalo, elephants, giraffe, zebras and antelope. They are part of what Bawden says are “probably close to 300 bird species” in the park.
Part of the reason for the thriving bird life is the diverse habitat at Ithala. With a 1,000m elevation difference, from grassland higher up in the park near the entrance and on the Ngubu Basin to mixed bushveld in the middle and thornveld closer to the river, the soils and climate are variable. “Some places create their own mini-climates,” says Bawden. “Hence the variety of birds.”
It’s the same with plants. One of Ithala’s prized plants is the Protea comptonii, also known as the saddleback sugarbush, with its big yellow flower. It’s endangered, says Bawden, but in Ithala there are bushes that appear to be in peak health.
Accommodation in Ithala has been criticised on some websites, but Mntambo says it’s being revamped. “We are using the local community to rethatch chalets that needed rethatching. We would not be doing all those renovations if we planned to close it down. We had 13 chalets that were offline and three are now back on line as we continue to renovate the other 10,” he says.
The idea of Ithala began in the 1970s when Horace Rall, the chair of the Natal Parks Board (forerunner to Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife), stood on the edge of the Louwsburg escarpment, looking down the Ngotshe Mountains to the Ngubu Basin below. He convinced the board to begin buying farms in the area to establish the park.
Today a bench marks the spot where Rall stood when the inspiration struck him. The spot is a short distance from the Louwsburg cemetery just outside the town and close to what was once a radar station with giant dishes connecting others at Umhlanga and Mariepskop, one of the highest peaks in the northern Drakensberg and the highest point in the Blyde River Canyon. It was probably also used to eavesdrop on the Frelimo government in Mozambique and their guests at the time, the ANC.
Louwsburg, the village that is the gateway to Ithala, is one of the least-known places in SA. Ask anyone if they can place it on a map or have even heard of the place and you will most likely get a shake of the head. In the past it could be described as quaint, but has it fallen on hard times. Nagmaal, once well attended at the local Ned Geref church, no longer draws big congregations and local farmers no longer send their children to the local school hostel. All this has led to a downturn in the local economy, and the village could also do with an injection of tourism.
The post office, which also served as a bank, no longer exists (no surprise there), the municipal offices were burnt down in a service delivery protest and the rugby field — in a previous life the home ground to a team punching above its weight and whose matches were well attended — is a mess. The Geluk Kontant Butchery, famous for its boerewors and once owned by Eric Tustin, a venerable member of a clan who virtually ran the place, owning shops and the hotel, has been long closed down. Best to buy your braai meat in Vryheid.
Visitors to Ithala can’t avoid the village, however. The road to the game reserve runs through Louwsburg and is the result of some pork-barrel politics. There was an easier route off the R69 but it would have bypassed the village, so it never happened. To some old-timers, the road through Louwsburg to the entrance of Ithala is still known as a politieke pad. It took a lot of expensive road engineering at the time, down the little plateau to the farms beyond — and to a gold mine, secreted among the rolling hills. No-one ever knew whether it was profitable, but it was closed down only when the animals of Ithala were given the run of the veld.
Today the gold is above ground and it’s not just the animals. For anyone who is willing to drive that harsh stretch of road from Vryheid, Ithala offers more than just the fauna and flora. You will feel like you own a little piece of veld heaven, especially if there are no others willing to make the journey and you have it all to yourself. That is, before others get similar ideas.
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