Back up at Makuleke Camp, Rufus Cottrell is medium build with a prominent personality. From Kent in the UK, he has a wicked sense of humour and an unshakeable spirit of adventure. Rufus recently completed the one-year Professional Field Guide course, but he has plans beyond that. “I want to guide in Kenya, but if not, somewhere wild like Rwanda or Zambia.” And there’s little doubt he will do just that.
Prof of Wildlife Biology and Ecology at Texas State University, Sarah Fritts, was a student of Prof John Carroll in 2003 while at the University of Georgia. That year, with the help of Prof Carroll, she figured out how to get to Africa on a research project, studying traditional healers in the Makuleke culture. Nineteen years later, back in Makuleke Camp with Prof Carroll, investigating how to bring her students to learn in Africa.
Prof John Carroll has been coming to Africa and bringing university students to do EcoTraining courses for over 20 years. He’s the Director of the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and his ‘ out-of-the-box thinking during Covid enabled some of his students to incorporate EcoTraining’s Online Field Guiding course into their university degree.
Being off the grid, Makuleke Camp runs on solar power and gas, with backup generator power for days like today. It’s heavily overcast and drizzling today, so the generator is buzzing reassuringly in the background. The camp is in a beautifully remote northern Kruger National Park, unfenced and off the cellphone reception grid. It’s a world of its own.
German backup Felix Hesse finished high school in 2021 and wasn’t clear about what he wanted to study. It was his parents who suggested he do a course with EcoTraining. Felix went camping with his parents in France. Other than that, he hadn’t done much in the great outdoors. Everything quickly changed when he arrived in South Africa in September of last year to do the 1-year Field Guide course.
Life as a backup at Pridelands couldn’t be more different than the one Jule Friehs was living in Germany just a year ago. Jule was working as a biological laboratory assistant. Then she came to South Africa on a volunteering trip, which changed everything for her.
Before arriving in remote northern Kruger National Park at Makuleke Camp, first-year student Bella Villaveva had never left the state of Nebraska. “Everything is exciting here,” she says with resounding enthusiasm, “because I had only ever been in the mid-west. I was a little scared as I didn’t know anything about what I was coming to, but it wasn’t for long because the instructors created a base for us, and our common interests united us.
Katie Campbell – study abroad student from the University of Nebraska Lincoln and completed the online Field Guide course via Zoom in August 2021. Now she’s happily on the ground at the remote Makuleke Camp.
“TK is simpler for foreigners to pronounce,” smiles Pridelands’ cook, Tsakani Masango. She’s happily been with EcoTraining since 2012 and is the permanent cook at Selati camp, but she also travels between camps when needed. “I love the bush, I love nature,” says vibrant TK, “and I love meeting people from so many different places in the world. It is very amazing.”
In this third blog in our series, we are following David Ullmann, from Germany, who is embarking on his dream of becoming a field guide. From deciding to become a field guide to touching down in South Africa to start with EcoTraining.
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Located on the banks of the Mara river,
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