THE TULI BLOCK
Extending along the northern banks of the Limpopo River for about 350 kilometres, the Tuli Block is about 10 to 20 kilometres deep, and all of it is privately owned commercial farming or ranch land. The area is hot and dry with very variable rainfall. As a result many landowners have decided to capitalise on the magnificent scenery and remnant game populations, and band together in a wildlife conservancy. From Martin’s Drift in the south to the Zimbabwean border at the confluence of the Limpopo with the Shashe River, the Tuli Block forms a vast privately owned wildlife area with variety of accommodation, ranging from small guest cottages and tented camps to luxury lodges.
The landscape is rugged and striking. The riverine fringe along the Limpopo seems almost hemmed in by rocky outcrops, and if you are very lucky, it is possible to see crocodile and klipspringer with a turn of the head. There is a variety of habitats, from riverine woodland to dry ridges of Commiphora and baobab, from dense mopane scrub to savannah grasslands. It is an area of lion-coloured grass and elephant grey rocks, of dramatic floods of swirling green water, or a wide bleached river of sand. A place of bushman paintings and dinosaur fossils. A wilderness littered with the discarded stone tools of early man. (All artefacts, incidentally, are the property of the people of Botswana and custody lies with the National Museum). At night you may hear the leopard cough, or still your breathing to listen to the birdlike triple call of a zebra in the distance, or wonder if the grass being cropped in the darkness is a midnight meal for impala or hippo. Listening in the velvet dark you will hear the fluting notes of water dikkop, perhaps even the deep haunted sound of Pel’s fishing owl.
Around the mid 1880’s Chief Khama of the Bamangwato tribe in Botswana – then the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland – became concerned about the threat of invasion by the land-hungry boers from the Transvaal. The chief ceded the area north of the Limpopo to private ownership to form a buffer zone, and the Tuli Block came into being. The land was portioned into individual farms, and remains one of the few areas of freehold land in Botswana. Across the border in Zimbabwe is the Tuli Circle, the name being derived from the Tuli River, which is a tributary of the Shashe. Fort Tuli was built by Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company as a firm base for the colonisation of Zimbabwe by the BSA Company in the 1890’s.
As tourism and conservation proved to be better a land use option than farming or cattle ranching, it become possible to apply uniform management policies to the area. It was at this stage that the Mashatu Reserve was established, a commercial tourism and conservation enterprise, incorporating more than 50 000 ha. Tuli Safari Lodge is another. Both provide luxury accommodation. From comfortable game viewing vehicles, one may see elephant, kudu, impala, wildebeest, giraffe, lion, zebra and leopard.
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