Lions of Sabi Sands

[Wyld@Heart]

(03-13-2022, 05:59 AM)SpinoRex Wrote: Isnt Sabi Sands and Kruger the same basically? Kruger was back then Sabi Sands Game Reserve.... means the state owns the huge area now

For the wildlife and the ecosystem it is the same. There are no fences and the wildlife is free to come and go as they please. For humans, no. The Sabi Sands is a conglomerate of individual, and private landowners that have a use agreement that forms the Sabi Sands in which you have individual privately owned land that forms part of the whole. These landowners for the most part have exclusive lodges with traverse agreements with some of the neighbouring properties (but not all the neighbors all of the time. What's a neighborhood without a dispute here and there, eh?). This arrangement is now common with the Timbavati and Klaserie and others bordering the Kruger. As a whole, this is now the Greater Kruger, including the Manyaleti, as we know it with the Kruger National Park proper being the National Park, the Manyaleti being the Provincial Reserve and the others being privately owned and operated as described above.

The land described as the original Sabi Game Reserve by Paul Kruger and the Sabi Sands Game Reserve is not the same. The original Sabi Game Reserve was basically the southern Kruger as this encompassed the area between the Crocodile and Sabi Rivers. This was then merged with the Shingwedzi Game Reserve in 1926 to form the Kruger. Over the years additional land was donated by farm owners such as Eileen Orpen and land added by displacement of the indigenous population (as was the formation of the Sabi Game Reserve) to make up the Kruger as we know it today.

The Sabi Sands was much longer in the making with the original Varteys starting their ownership in the 20's or 30's, if I recall and gradually the area was changed from ranching and hunting to an official wildlife reserve in the 60's. Even then it took another 30 years for the fences between the Kruger and Sabi Sands (and the others) to come down to create the continuous ecosystem we see today. Reply