Addo Elephant National Park: Tap water currently unsafe to drink! [update]

update (07 November 2022): SANParks continues to recommend purchasing drinking water!

South African National Parks (SANParks) has announced that the tap water in the whole Sundays River Valley Local Municipality, which encompasses the Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape, is currently unsafe to drink. SANParks is urging travellers planning to visit Addo Elephant National Park to purchase drinking water prior to entering or at the National Park. We'll keep you posted!

Photo by Andres Siimon on Unsplash

The Sundays River Valley Local Municipality is a local municipality in the Sarah Baartman District Municipality in South Africa's Eastern Cape. Addo Elephant National Park is country's third largest National Park in size after Kruger National Park and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. The National Park is home to more than 600 elephants, 400 Cape buffaloes and over 48 (?) endangered black rhinos. Lion and spotted hyena have also recently been re-introduced to the Addo Elephant National Park. The largest remaining population of the flightless dung beetle is located within the National Park.

Botswana to ban imports of bottled natural and mineral water!

Botswana's Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry has imposed restrictions on the importation of bottled natural and mineral water through the country's Control of Goods, Prices and Other Charges Act. As of 01 August 2018, the importation of water packed in bottles of less than 10 litres in to Botswana will be prohibited. The implementation of the regulations aims at promoting the competitiveness and sustainability of Botswana's domestic water bottling sector. The Statutory Instrument No. 44 of 2018 was published in the Government Gazette dated 06 April 2018.

Today is World Toilet Day (19 Nov 2010)

World Toilet Day is a global day to raise awareness of the global sanitation crisis. 4,000 children die every day from diarrhoea caused by dirty water and poor sanitation. About 2.6 billion people worldwide are without access to proper sanitation, which risks their health, strips their dignity, and kills 1.8 million people, mostly children, a year.



World Toilet Day has been created by the WTO (World Toilet Organisation) as an annual celebration of toilets and sanitation and their vital contribution to public health, personal dignity and environmental sustainability.

Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought

I just stumbled over a very interesting book titled Heart of Dryness, which discusses how the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert can teach us what we need to know about how to live in dry climates, something we're all increasingly finding ourselves in as we drill ourselves further into a global water crisis.



The dramatic story of the Bushmen of the Kalahari is a cautionary tale about water in the twenty-first century—and offers unexpected solutions for our time.
“We don’t govern water. Water governs us,” writes James G. Workman. In Heart of Dryness, he chronicles the memorable saga of the famed Bushmen of the Kalahari — remnants of one of the world’s most successful civilizations, today at the exact epicenter of Africa’s drought—in their widely publicized recent battle with the government of Botswana, in the process of exploring the larger story of what many feel has become the primary resource battleground of the twenty-first century: the supply of water.
The Bushmen’s story could well prefigure our own. In the United States, even the most upbeat optimists concede we now face an unprecedented water crisis. Reservoirs behind large dams on the Colorado River, which serve thirty million in many states, will be dry in thirteen years. Southeastern drought recently cut Tennessee Valley Authority hydropower in half, exposed Lake Okeechobee’s floor, dried up thousands of acres of Georgia’s crops, and left Atlanta with sixty days of water. Cities east and west are drying up. As reservoirs and aquifers fail, officials ration water, neighbors snitch on one another, corporations move in, and states fight states to control shared rivers.
Each year, around the world, inadequate water kills more humans than AIDS, malaria, and all wars combined. Global leaders pray for rain. Bushmen tap more pragmatic solutions. James G . Workman illuminates the present and coming tensions we will all face over water and shows how, from the remoteness of the Kalahari, an ancient and resilient people is showing the world a viable path through the encroaching Dry Age. (src.: amazon.com)

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