#Parks

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the central section of the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve. Most of you know I visit the Koppies often, but this walk was special.

The Melville Koppies reserve is divided into three sections: East, Central, and West. The East and West sections are open to the public, and I usually walk in the East section. The Central section is normally closed to the public except for guided tours, due to its rare biodiversity and archeological sites. (There is a well-preserved Iron Age furnace in the Central section.)

When the pandemic first hit and South Africa locked down, the closure of Emmarentia Dam and the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens (two parks that are essentially one – I will refer to the whole thing as “Emmarentia” going forward) was one of my greatest sources of sadness. Emmarentia is my favorite park to run and walk in, and while several other Joburg parks (Delta Park, the Melville Koppies, James and Ethel Gray) remained unofficially open during Level 4 and Level 3, Emmarentia was firmly closed.

MTN Walk the Talk with 702 (that’s the official name but I’ll call it Walk the Talk for short) is an annual Joburg tradition in which 50,000 (!) people get up early on the fourth Sunday morning in July and walk around Joburg. The main purpose of the walk is to bring people together, but participants can also work as teams to raise money for charitable causes. (Read more here.) This year will be the 18th annual Walk the Talk.

I recently went to the Dinokeng Game Reserve for a quick, one-night media visit. Dinokeng opened officially in 2011 – pieced together from a bunch of private farms – and is the only free-roaming Big 5 game reserve in Gauteng province. (The Big 5 are lion, elephant, leopard, buffalo, and rhino.)