The past 17 months have been challenging to say the very least. The impact of COVID-19 on the years 2020 & 21 has been unprecedented. It has truly been a time of re-invent, adapt and focus on the here and now. We are very thankful to our shareholders for the manner they have supported the Kuzuko family as well as our South African guests visiting us from the moment we could re-open in August 2020 until we decided to close for winter in May 2021. We had high hopes of opening for the school holiday in July 2021 however covid and the command council had other plans and thus we remained closed.

However, Spring is coming and we look forward to much better seasons ahead once we open on the 3rd of September 2021 So you may be asking yourself what have the skeleton team, tasked with keeping our special place of glory safe, been keeping themselves busy with. Except of course counting the days to welcome you our special guests back.

Well keep reading…..

As most of you may know by now Kuzuko’s Story is one of Love, Conservation and Community. In keeping with this, and with the financial support of public funders and our holding company Inqo Investments, underpinned by being part of the Legacy Hotels and Resorts family, we undertook several initiatives.

For the Love of Conservation

During the second week of lockdown in 2020, we travelled to Gauteng to deliver an injured female to a Vet Clinic, and from there down to Cape Town to collect two captive born-and-raised males, with the purpose of bonding them into a coalition at Kuzuko and to wild them for introduction into the CMP. Needless to say, we went through six roadblocks and with all our relevant paperwork and transporting permits in place, we sailed through these as the law enforcement officers were quite taken with our cargo and helped us quickly with smiling faces to get going with our precious cargo. Sylvester was recollared with a satellite collar and the lionesses also received their dose of contraception. The four cubs which were born grew up and with the large coalition males starting to put pressure on them to leave their mothers and go off on their own we were fortunate that we could find a home for them and they were successfully moved to Magic Hill Private Collection near Jansenville in the Eastern Cape. As we are experiencing a severe drought, the lions are ‘slightly’ overweight as the prey animals are weak and easy to catch.

Apart from our cheetah & lion conservation efforts we still have to maintain our reserve and kept up with the monitoring of our perimeter fence, water retention, key species and their impact on our Kuzuko landscape. We continued with our Spekboom planting trials in association with NMU and C4 Solutions and so far, the results are looking very positive. Read more at www.kuzukoproject.co.za.

We also used this time to get all the adult elephant cows back onto contraception and the follow-up boosters were also completed. An additional adult cow was collared to ease the tracking and monitoring of the herd who often split up into smaller groups. This is an important step for us until we can fully understand the utilisation and impact of the Ellies on our landscape.

For the love of you, our dear guests, supporters and extended family.

We did everything we could to be ready for the long-anticipated opening in September. We kept the grass green, the baboons from lounging at the pool and the birds coming to the A Rocha Bird Hide. We painted and snag proofed the chalet interiors and completed a limited soft refurb, fortunately pre-paid before lockdown. We have ensured all health and safety requirements are kept up to standard and we continued our Cathseta funded training program in Food & Beverage and Rooms.