Ride for Rhino

Feel up to a real Challenge and help raise funds for African Conservation? Get involved with Challenge4aCause and support rhino anti poaching.

We’d like to invite you to support a once in a lifetime mountain biking challenge that aims at changing the lives of many threatened and endangered African animals, where 20 cyclists will brave 4 days of 50km per day through the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana.

Challenge4aCause is a fund raising initiative that supports the conservation of Africa’s endangered animal species. All funds raised in the Mashatu Challenge will go to the Wildlife ACT Fund and the Chipembere Rhino Foundation.

Cycle Mashatu Challenge4aCause Dates:
22 – 26 Aug 2011
4 days, 5 nights
50 km per day
20 cyclists

Details of the events can be found on the Challenge4aCause Facebook page.

All funds raised will be split between 2 organisations:

Chipembere Rhino Foundation
Is a privately run, non-profit organisation committed to protecting and conserving Africa’s rhino. The Foundation was established in November 2010 after the Amakhala Game Reserve lost 2 rhinos in one week to poaching. Both were breeding bulls and thus it was a devastating blow. Funds raised by the challenge will go towards anti-poaching efforts and rhino conservation initiatives in the Eastern Cape and beyond.

Wildlife ACT Fund
The Wildlife ACT Fund is a non profit company and requires funds for the development of new anti-poaching technologies, the implementation of long-term monitoring programs for threatened and endangered species, as well as community outreach initiatives.

How Can You Help?

Join the fight to save the Rhino and other animals from extinction and stand a chance to win a dream island holiday.
Support Challenge4aCause as we cycle through the Mashatu Reserve in Botswana to raise funds for the plight of endangered animals in South Africa and stand a chance to win:

1st Prize:
5 night stay for two at Belle Mare Plage Mauritius (dinner bed & breakfast) incl all flights and transfers ex JHB.

2nd Prize:
2 night stay at Hlosi Lodge on Amakhala Game Reserve for a family of 4 (all meals, teas and game drives included).

3rd Prize:
2 night stay at Robberg Beach Lodge Plettenberg Bay for a family of four (bed & breakfast).

4th Prize:
A Canon digital camera

The prize draw takes place on the 2nd September 2011 and by buying a ticket for R100,not only are you entering the draw but you are making a donation to a very worthy cause! Buy 5 tickets (1 book) and you automatically get the 6th ticket for free!


Mashatu, ‘Land of Giants’ takes its name from the locally-sacrosanct Mashatu tree and the giants that roam its terrain. As one of the largest private game reserve in southern Africa, Mashatu is, at 25 000 hectares, a fitting setting for the world’s largest land mammal - the elephant. It is a huge wilderness area in eastern Botswana at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers.

Mashatu Game Reserve is where herds of elephant, giraffe, wildebeest and zebra have roamed the dramatic landscape for thousands of years. Ancient elephant paths provide the perfect single track to cycle which interlace a mosaic of savannah, forest, rocky outcrops and wooded floodplains.

It all started in the Eastern Cape

Whether you are Bill Gates, Lady Gaga or Julius Malema, chances are that your forefathers came from the Eastern Cape – according to research by Curtis Marean, a professor at the Arizona State University, in the US.
Curtis has just received funding of R10-million from the world’s leading funding organisation, the National Science Foundation, to prove his theory that the Pinnacle Point golf estate did not produce only 2010 British Open winner Louis Oosthuizen, but the world’s entire population.
Evidence from Curtis’s massive inter-disciplinary research of the past 11 years was used to convince the notoriously prudent foundation to fund his work, which he does in co-operation with researchers at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Frank Silberbauer sharing information at a burial site in the Sand River.
A Nelson Mandela botanist, Professor Richard Cowling, one of the principal investigators on the team, said the evidence included the remains of shellfish and scales of edible bulbs piled in prehistoric “kitchen refuse sites”.
Among the finds were bone fish hooks, stone tools and an alikreukel [periwinkle] shell decoration thought to have been used to brighten a cave.
Marean’s hypothesis is that, between 120000 and 190000 years ago, Earth was hit by a brutal ice age.
With many parts of the planet already too dry or too cold to support life, the global population of early Stone Age hominids was reduced from 10000 to only 600 breeding individuals – a figure revealed by the latest population genetics research.
These last survivors of our forebears survived because they lived on the Aghulhas plain, a coastal area stretching from the Southern Cape into Eastern Cape and up to Port Elizabeth.
Today, this plain is covered by coastal waters, but during that era, with much more water bound up in ice, the sea level was much lower and the plain was exposed.
The theory is that three factors allowed this small band to sneak through the grim evolutionary bottleneck of that period while the rest of their kind, across the planet, died.
The first factor was the warming effect of the Agulhas ocean current, which flowed along the edge of the Aghulhas plain.
Secondly, there was a great diversity and density of edible shellfish such as mussels, alikreukel and limpets, as well as fish and other marine organisms that our forefathers could eat.
“The third factor was the amazing edible bulbs, an excellent source of quality carbohydrates, in the surrounding fynbos. We now know the fynbos biome is the richest in the world in terms of range and density of bulbs, tubers and corms,” said Cowling.
The early Stone Age hominids had to get smart quickly to learn how to access this food by fishing and digging with sticks.
Their daily battle to survive and the innovation it encouraged honed their evolution and they became the first modern humans.
They were excavating silcrete rock and heating it to make fine cutting tools – the first example of mining and engineering – and they were apparently co-ordinating their foraging trips to the coast from their inland communities with the help of a lunar calendar.
The direct descendants of these original modern humans were the San of Southern Africa, but they also colonised the rest of the world, Cowling explained.
“So everybody alive today comes from this coast. That’s the theory – and all the evidence so far supports it.”

Article by Guy Rodgers, www.timeslive.co.za August 10, 2011