End Of Term Trip to Mokala National Park

As the last several months have flown past in an interesting and fun blur of P&C work in the parks, the end of term trip to Mokala National Park in the Northern Cape was eagerly anticipated by all the current GVI’s. We came from all over the country to gather in the newest National Park in South Africa to catch up after several months of working apart. This trip is put in place to review our experiences and to feed them back to GVI and to the Regional P&C Managers from SANParks, who were also at Mokala that week.

We also had a visit to one of the local communities near the park to see how their garden project was going. We visited some of the rural settlement houses and saw how people with no hope and ambition in life became keen gardeners. They are very proud of their greens, even if it is a slow process trying to grow vegetables in dry red desert sand! But it is proving worth it!

The reason for this getogether is for SANParks interns to give presentations about their time in their parks, give feedback about the internship and to catch up with co-GVI interns. The feedback sessions were greatly useful, and are a credit to both GVI and SANParks as they use it to continually improve the program, but the best part of the week was getting back together again, eating too much, and playing endless games of pool. Not to mention staggeringly beautiful landscapes and sunsets, gorgeous evening game drives (black rhino and sable antelope, buffaloes, tsessebe), a delicious bush braai, and a childishly amusing trip to Kimberly to see the Big Hole (it’s an old diamond mine people).

All in all, a lekker week.

Written by: Andy Quick (GVI intern at Golden Gate National Park) and Joné Fick (Program Coordinator)

End Of Term Trip to Mokala National Park