Our stay in Knysna also provided the first opportunity for real up-close interaction with one of the major animals of South Africa – the elephant – at the Kynsna Elephant Park. As this was told to us, the park is a refuge for juvenile elephants who are taken as orphans in the wild and “rescued” here. And that may or may not be true.
I tend to generally trust Road Scholar’s ethics in regard to tourism. In both international trips we have taken with them, the tour involved interaction with and small (and appropriate) assistance to communities in need. For example, in India, we visited a school in the country of Rajasthan were we had been encouraged to bring school supplies. The school was just two concrete rooms with a number of children and several teachers. Many of the most basic of school supplies were missing and the fairly modest materials our group brought would be well used.
In our southern Africa trip, there were several times when we were directly involved in assistance to local needs. Along the Garden Route there is a group that is engaged in replanting of plants in the fybos community and we had given a donation to permit the purchase of and planting of a tree (see a future post). And in Zimbabwe we visited a village with no electricity (save for two solar panels) and a small two-room concrete structure that was the preschool for those under 8. (After that the children went to a more distant school – some 10+ miles away – and they walked both ways.) The building had been expanded from one to two rooms recently and the Road Scholar organization had donated the corrugated metal roof. In addition, by bringing us to the village, they exposed us to the products of craftspeople in the village, where we were able to buy items directly from the person who made them (or at least I hope that is what occurred).
The ethics of Road Scholar are also shown in the educational materials that are provided or recommended prior to the trip. For example, before our Africa trip, Road Scholar recommended and I read, (1) Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, (2) a history of the colonization and decolonization of Africa that was written by an English academician and was very critical of just about every European who ever set foot in Africa, and (3) a discussion of the issue of “culling” of elephants by someone very much opposed. (This last issue will be discussed in a later post when we visit the wild animal areas of South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. In addition, unlike many tourism providers, Road Scholar (and its parent company Elderhostel) is a non-profit organization, and provides travel to places that would not be approved by some of the more narrow of our fellow citizens (think Iran and Cuba).
That said, the Knysna Elephant Park still troubles me. It seems that there is some dispute as to whether there are in fact true “orphan” elephants or whether an orphaned elephant will be adopted by another member of the herd. And I admit that I am not clear about whether culling of elephants is appropriate (there appear to be good arguments on both sides and I am glad I don’t have to decide this). I should note that when I spoke with the tour organizer about events in Zimbabwe, she urged me away from one optional program I had discovered involving so-called orphan juvenile lions by saying that the people involved in that program are reputed to have been involved in “helping” the lions become orphans.
The other argument concerning the Knysna Elephant Park involves how the elephants there are treated. If you want to read an article that I wish I had read before going there, go here: http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/The-guilt-of-the-Knysna-Elephant-Park-20140604. This article came out less than 3 months before our visit there but I did not see it until just a few days ago. I can say that I did not see anything involving mistreatment of elephants. They generally roamed free in the large park although they congregated when feeding was to be provided. And it was not a real “wild” experience as the elephants had been acclimatized to human interaction. It was a part of the trip so let’s take a look at it.
One of the aspects of the park that contributed to my unease with it involved the commercialization of it as a wedding destination.
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| Wedding Destination |
\Now I have to admit that I’m clearly out of my culture here, but something about this aspect of the park did not sit well with me. On the other hand, except for this sign there was no indication during our visit that this was a major part of the reason for the park. But still ….
When you enter the park, you first go into a main building in which there is a small amount of educational information about elephants and some skeletal parts you can handle. The jaw appeared as you might expect on any large mammal but elephant teeth are different. During their life, they go through six sets of teeth that start at the rear of the jaw and gradually move to the front as they wear. Then they fall out and are replaced by the teeth behind. Each set is larger than the previous one. The problem is that even though they have six sets of teeth, some elephants outlive all sets and then even though they seek out much softer food (in wet marshes), they eventually die of malnutrition or starvation.
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| Elephant Jaw |
The skull of an elephant is honeycombed as you can see in this photo. This means that the weight of the head is considerably less than it would be if it had a more solid skull. The skull starts out more solid but develops the honeycomb structure when the elephant is between three and four years old.
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| Elephant Skull |
As I noted, the area for the elephant park is quite large and the elephants appear to roam freely in the area.
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| Elephants Roaming |
There are also some zebras there, although no one was able to tell me why.
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| Zebras in an Elephant Park? |
By the way, you can tell the sex of a zebra by its stripes – the males have dark stripes and a white body while the females have white stripes and a dark body, or is it the other way around. (Joke alert).
Each of us gets a bucket filled with some fruit and vegetables and we are then driven out in jeeps to the main area. The elephants are very well accustomed to the arrival of fresh food (the fruits and vegetables, not us – elephants are vegetarians) and the hungry ones gather behind a low green metal structure.
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| Elephants Behind the Feeding Structure |
Each of the elephants then reach out with their trunks to suck up the food which you’ve placed in the palm of your hand and then put it in their mouth.
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| Elephant Taking Food |
After we’ve fed the animals, one of the game keepers shows us a bit more about an elephant. They can bend their trunks into a variety of shapes, and it does serve as a sort of hand as we saw when feeding them.
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| Elephant and Its Trunk |
The tail of an elephant is also very well designed and the wiry strands on the end are very good for swatting away insects.
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| Elephant Tail |
And no trip to the park would be complete without the photo with our new friend. The elephant had even bathed in our honor, as you can see from the mud that is still caked on it.
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| Out New Friend |
Knysna was once the home for a large number of elephants which inhabited the forest that constitutes much of the Garden Route National Park -- the Tsitsikamma Forest. In the early part of this century, there was an open question whether there were any elephants remaining in the area, although sources vary was to whether one or five females existed. The best evidence now seems to be that there are no more true Knysna elephants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knysna_elephants
The elephants in the Knysna Elephant Park are from away from Knysna and are typical African elephants. (There is a debate about whether there are one or two species of African elephants. If you’re interested, you can learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant. The debate about one or two species consists of whether bush and forest elephants are the same species or not. But the difference is not whether an elephant lives in the bush or a forest as both elephants live in both places. The distinction, if it is real, is principally based on size.)
Before we leave Knysna (which will be tomorrow morning), we got a chance to see another animal that is reputed to inhabit the Knysna Lagoon – the Cape or Knysna seahorse. This is an endangered animal in large part because it is found in only three areas along the southern coast of South Africa, including the Knysna Lagoon. We didn’t see the seahorse in the lagoon itself but in a tank in a restaurant where we ate dinner.
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| Cape of Knysna Seahorse |
As I noted, tomorrow morning we leave Knysna. Our destination will be an ostrich farm, but before that we will pass through Mossel Bay where Bartolomeu Dias landed after being the first European to sail around what is now known as the Cape of Good Hope.
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