Lost and Naked

One of life’s ultimate treats is to spend a day out in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, travelling the waterways in a traditional dug-out mokoro with a private guide who will pole you in gentle solitude and then take you for a game walk on the animal-rich islands while pointing out signs of the wild.…

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Elephants on a bad day

It is one hell of a thing. Gail Mattson lived in Minnesota USA for 79 years and I am sure that during her long life she never suspected that it would be ended in a remote wilderness area in far-flung Zambia at the hands of a raging bull elephant. Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxvwEuRPHso Elephants…

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Vic’s Italians

I bumped into my friend and fellow safari guide, Vic – a tall, gaunt, phlegmatic, and bearded man, in a campsite pub in Rundu, a small town on the Kavango river in northern Namibia. I was near the start of a three-week safari through Namibia with four English folk. A carefully planned and exciting itinerary…

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Today’s Hunter

Hunting fired his soul as with his father and every forebear before Lean and fit spear in hand and dogs at foot, newly a man he went off to hunt But subtle changes separate modern man from revered ancestors Where his father hunted meat for the family to eat He with eyes aflame, could hunt…

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The Main Attraction

Endless toil and penned abuse has elevated me to valued use: the president dines with me tonight to talk of dolphins' and others' plight. I plan to report of the hypocrisy towards our fellow creatures that exists in our `democracy': denied the universal right to assert their will it is for them I devote my…

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The Baron

My wife, Salome, and I had a group of guests on safari in Namibia and we were going to spend the day exploring the Lunar Landscape just outside the town of Swakopmund. We set off into this magnificent, but potentially dangerous, stretch of land, on a road that wound through rocky hills which were mostly…

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Is that kosher?

Who washes their lettuce in dishwashing liquid? Orthodox Jews, I learnt to my surprise when I set up camp for a family from New York in Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana over the Sabath. Rabi Barry had booked to spend a Sabath in a mobile camp with a Jewish American family, so that they could,…

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