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SKUKUZA — Lounging peacefully on the terrace, watching the elephants, leopards and antelopes gather at the watering hole.

That's how hundreds of football fans will relax in South Africa's Kruger National Park on "soccer safaris", after taking in World Cup matches in the nearby city of Nelspruit.



With 100,000 people, Nelspruit is among the smaller of the host cities and doesn't have enough accommodation for the fans expected to arrive here in June 2010.
So organisers are tapping resources in the tourist magnet of Kruger game park, less than a two-hour drive away.

"Any person who comes so close to Kruger would definitely come to see the game. You cannot miss it if you're that close to it, especially coming from Europe or Asia," said Stephen Nel, a manager at the Berg-en-Dal rest camp.

About 1.3 million tourists each year visit the park, which is about half the size of the Netherlands and has a highly developed network to accommodate guests.

During the World Cup, the camps of Skukuza, Berg-en-Dal and Pretoriuskop will host nearly 2,000 fans in search of South Africa's "Big Five" - elephants, buffalo, leopard, lions and rhinos.

FIFA partner responsible for accommodation, Match, is offering packages that include lodging, transport and safaris, which could mean pre-dawn drives to catch the animals at sun-up, twilight hikes, or dinner in the bush.

To allow the guests to see the football matches, Kruger is reworking its rules. The park currently closes at 18h00, and some games at Nelspruit's Mbombela stadium will only kick off two hours later.



Armed rangers will escort the fans back to their lodges and tents, "to protect them from lions, elephants and other dangerous animals," according to South African National Parks.

"They'll probably change the opening times of the restaurants as most of our guests would be for the World Cup," Nel added.

He said that the camp had welcomed guests from the Rugby World Cup in 1995, but that was on a smaller scale that what organisers expect in 2010.

The World Cup will be the biggest event ever held in this rural province, with Nelspuit building a 46,000-seat stadium for the occasion.



"Initially, there was a shortage of accomodation," said FS Siboza, operations manager for the city.

But he said the new guesthouses have opened in the city, and two other towns are helping to ensure enough beds are available during the tournament, he said.
The city expects new hotels will be built, while some homeowners plan to leave on vacation and to rent out their homes to the tourists.

Organisers are even considering creating tented campsites for visitors, spread around a 200-kilometre (125-mile) radius, including in neighbouring Swaziland and Mozambique.

FIFA wants to ensure that 55,000 rooms are available across the country during the World Cup. Right now there are 34,000, making Kruger's model an appealing option that could be expanded to other national parks.

The only requirement for the "soccer safaris" is that guests can actually see the matches. At Berg-en-Dal, they will be housed in simple cottages built in 1985, without televisions.

The camp is thinking about setting up a TV in a conference room so the fans can watch games in other towns... if they find generators to keep the electricity running.

Labels: berg en dal, nelspruit, skukuza, world cup

BERG-EN-DAL- Conservationists, scientists and animal-rights campaigners from around Southern Africa gathered on Wednesday at the start of a three-day conference to discuss ways of controlling the region's expanding elephant population.

Most countries in the continent's southern region, home to more than half of Africa's elephants, downscaled or halted their elephant culling programmes in the mid-1990s amid pressure from animal-rights groups and in the wake of a worldwide ban on the sale of ivory and strict controls against poaching.

As a result, elephant numbers have increased rapidly and to the point, some scientists insist, where the mighty animals have become a threat to their environment, the people they must share it with and ultimately themselves.

"The elephant population south of the Zambezi river has grown from 5,000 to over 200,000 in the last 100 years. With growth at around 5% per annum not slowing down, in the next 15 to 20 years we could have as many as 400 000 elephants," said Dr Dave Cumming of the University of Zimbabwe.

"This, when in 1900 people feared for the future of these animals. Now we are looking back at 100 years of successful recovery," he added.

Debate around the elephants has been characterised by sharply conflicting views and high emotion, particularly on the issue of culling.

The "Great Elephant Indaba", as the three-day event has been dubbed, is intended to provide a platform for the study of possible solutions.

But animal-rights groups have expressed concern that the outcome of the conference is predetermined and that the "mass killing" of elephants will prevail as the ultimate answer to one of the region's thorniest conservation issues.

The increase in the human population has brought about increasing conflict with elephants.

"As people take up more land, elephants are left with less and less," Cumming explained.

"Conservation managers and scientists started this morning to examine one of the various options. We have heard a recommendation for elephant meta-population management where individual elephant populations can be linked up between countries," he said.

The recommendation, he said, appears feasible in light of the implementation of a plan to establish three large transfrontier parks in the region.

Park managers have, however, noted that initial costly efforts to translocate elephant across borders -- for instance between South Africa's Kruger National Park and Mozambique -- have been hampered by, among other things, the fact that most of the elephants have simply returned.

The conference is also expected to take another look at contraceptive and sterilisation programmes as a means of controlling the population. Some scientists who have argued that tampering with the fertility of the creatures would stabilise rather than reduce the size of the population attended the meeting on Wednesday.

"The Kruger is just one example of a large park where for 26 years it was able to keep and manage an elephant population of between 6,000 and 8,000, but today it has nearly 12,000 elephants," Cumming said of the facility hosting the conference, organised by South African National Parks.

The two million hectare, internationally renowned Kruger Park is home to most of South Africa's 17,000 elephants.

The elephant population in neighbouring Zimbabwe had reached an estimated 100,000, about 28 times more than the population at the turn of the century, he said.

Although the impact of the large elephant populations on woodlands in places such as the Kruger Park is well documented- elephants have been blamed for the destruction of many indigenous trees- the exact impact of their presence in large numbers on biodiversity has yet to be determined.

Labels: berg en dal, elephants