Sometimes, Tourism is Okay: South Africa Days 6 and 7

My overarching rule for travel, under which all the previous rules fall, is: Don't be a tourist. Don't go where the tourists go, don't act like tourists act, don't buy what the tourists buy. Do your research and find local places you can eat at and buy from and support. Sure, when in Paris, go to the Champs de Mars, see the Eiffel Tower, take a picture or two. But don't let that be your only experience of Paris, hopping on and off a tour bus and buying kitsch souvenirs from vendors who set themselves up in places so that they can take advantage of loud rich lost Americans. I have found that if you travel as the tourists do, you miss everything important about being in another country.

But sometimes, it's good to be a tourist.

The Kwalata Game Lodge is on a Big 5 (elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino, leopard) game reserve where you stay in thatched roof cabins, participate in group activities, and go on game drives, which are basically what you think of when you think of a safari. We went on three of them, including one that left around 6:15 in the morning, so that we could see with our own eyes (and binoculars and cameras) free-ranging animals that in America you can only see in the zoo.

We saw cheetahs and ostrich and wildebeest and giraffes and hippos and a turtle and got caught in wicked beautiful storm, but the question is, why are we doing this astoundingly touristy things?

Well, Kwalata lodge was founded by a local teacher who took his kids out into the bush to give them a new experience and then grew from there. Kwalata helps support the local artist who owns this shop:

It supports this preschool:

They call traffic lights robots here. It's one of my favorite things. 

It supports a greenhouse and pottery shop:

It supports this dance troupe, which we saw before we ate lunch at this local restaurant, also supported by the game lodge:

And it marries together tourism with preservation, so that we can see all of these animals:

Ostrich: bigger than you think.

Giraffe: bigger than you think.

Zebra: bigger than you think.

Wildebeest: bigger than you think, but also definitely big enough to kill Mufasa.

Impala: not a car. 

Hippo: not what you want for Christmas. This one was angry at us. 

Find the Pumbaa and her babies! 

No animals, because there was a wicked storm.

There is a complicated relationship between the tourism industry and the local economy, always. If you've never thought about that connection in the US, I recommend The Florida Project for a wonderful story well told focusing around the children living in extended stay hotels outside of Disney. But South Africa has the infrastructure to bring in tourists and here at Kwalata, at least, that's feeding back into the local economy and also enabling students to imagine a different future than what they might imagine in the townships. And if they can go away and be successful, they might come back and help where they came from live better.

If tourism helps that, I guess I can be a tourist.