June 2017| 71
Weird and wonderful characters...
(by Charlie)
The next few days have been uite different. or a start,
we began to cycle downhill for the first time, ’m therefore
spending far less time toiling at the back of the group,
coming up with elaborate excuses as to why my bike is
definitely twice the weight of everyone else’s.
More importantly, we have started the documentary in
earnest, and it really feels like what could easily be seen
as a fool’s errand might actually come together to create
something special.
I am currently sitting at the top of a hill in Balule Nature
Reserve, the home of the Black Mambas all-female anti-
poaching unit; one of the most important locations we
will film on this tri . will get to them in a minute, but
what strikes me most is that the stories and characters
we have come across on the journey here are just as
significant and relevant in the conservation story as
what we are learning on the reserve. The first of these
characters is Paul.
We stumbled upon Paul in the Lamb and Ale pub, where
we were replenishing our bodies and brains after a
relatively long day’s ride from Mishishing. It was quite
an eventful one, not least because of our first otential
robbery that ended in us choosing the latter of the ‘fight
and flight’ instincts. Secondly, we had forgotten to eat
lunch… again, and were recovering from the mother of
all sugar comedowns. Anyway, Paul stepped into our
lives for a short while and taught us a lot about one of
South Africa’s favoured approaches to conservation;
trophy hunting. Paul has been around the block, and,
in comparison to a large number of the white South
Africans who we have met along the way, is extremely
open-minded. Paul was an ex-Ranger, with years of
experience in conservation, thus his support of trophy
hunting came as something of a surprise to us. However,
it was later backed up by the majority of people we asked
on our route for the following few days. I would not go as
far to say that we were persuaded by him, but it certainly
made it clear that there are hugely varying views on
conservation that can all be persuasive in one way or
another, and this journey is exposing us to people on
every level of that spectrum.
We met Paul in Ohrigstad, a town that ended up
becoming a base for a couple of days due to political
unrest up the road that would have resulted in us being
‘set on fire’, according to some relatively racially biased
Afrikaners. Not only did Ohrigstad provide us with
stimulating content for the documentary in the shape
of Paul, but we also stumbled upon Delia and Pieter
who became our parents-in-residence for a couple of
days, letting us pitch camp in the garden of Delia’s bar
and taking us on a day trip to see the world’s second
largest canyon and a number of epic tourist spots. Pieter