Volunteering

On the 27th of April every year South Africans celebrate freedom day. This is in commemoration of the first post-apartheid elections held in South Africa in 1994, which saw Nelson Mandela become South Africa's first freely elected president. Here in the Crags on the Garden Route of South Africa, Birds of Eden, the biggest free flight Aviary in the world, celebrated both Freedom Day and the coming of the 2010 World Cup Soccer with the release of 32 new bird species to the existing 280 into the aviary. This brought the total bird count up to over 3000 birds!

The idea behind the 32 species is to represent the 32 countries competing in the 2010 soccer world cup. The bird releases were carried out by underpriviliged children, various NGO's and tourism bodies, releasing birds every five to ten minutes. Early morning the SABC crew were there, providing a LIVE feed for the Morning Live show, for the rest of South Africa to see.

It is nice to see that a backpackers does more than just have a party every night.  At Starling Backpackers, Vicky has started a community project, that aims to help underprivileged kids buy school uniforms.  

They have a unique idea of using old plastic bags collected from the streets, and re-using them to make cool bags, ideal for almost any casual purpose. 

This not only gives back to the community, but also empowers them buy teaching skills and creating more jobs, that are desperately needed. 

But this is not the only community project started at a backpackers.  It is becoming more and more common to see backpackers getting into community work, like projects in Chintsa in the Eastern Cape and another very interesting backpackers project in Soweto.

About 2 kilometres from the Robberg Peninsula in Plettenberg Bay, you'll find Starling Backpackers on a country smallholding just off the Plettenberg Bay Airport Road. Starling is owned and run in part ownership by Matt and Vikki Rowe.

Matt and Vikki started the backpackers in 2005 from scratch, building it up out of recycled material during the day, whilst waitering at night in Plettenberg Bay's restaurants to earn money. Vikki runs a community project that knits beach bags, hammocks, pillows and shower curtains out of recycled plastic bags. This is soon to become a full fledged community project to support disadvantaged community members.

Their personaliies are well reflected in everything in the backpackers. The backpackers has a type of  'retro' country feel to it with words like bar, barn, saloon and homestead all coming together as one word, something like "barnstead" perhaps, with horses and dogs adding to the flavour of Starling Village.

The backpackers has a lively bar, complete with a dancing pole, pool table, fussball, lots of board games and table tennis. There are good mountainbiking trails in the Harkerville forest nearby, a beautiful hike around the Robberg Peninsula, good surfing, an airfield across the road for skydiving and many adventure activities and wild animal sanctuaries nearby.