TRAVELERS’ AND GUIDES’ IMAGES OF GREAT PLAINS
This week the world celebrated another international day, World Tourism Day. So while we may broadly be included in that sector, it is worth pointing out some fundamental differences we live by at Great Plains. Tourists generally travel in groups and are fed information (seldom adsorbing it), much of which is in the tourist guidebook anyway.
Our guests are ‘Traveler’ people, to whom the journey is everything, not the arrival, the guidebook or the checklist. They come armed with a hunger to be inspired and soak up the experience, not leave with a memento. Our guests are encouraged to look up, smell, breathe deeply, meditate, and enrich their lives while they are with us. They set aside their phones in the bush, use our cameras, and learn new techniques from our expert guides and rangers. They choose us to take them deeper and be that safe pair of hands and take them to the edge of where new adventures lie, where they can see things for the first time.
This week we assembled just a few of the video clips from our guests or guides. Often raw and handheld, but all moments caught in action because these last few months of wildlife sightings and experiences have been so exceptional.
Cheetahs arrived in Botswana’s Duba Plains for the first time in 16 years, and we also had other cheetah crossing the Selinda Spillway.
Painted dogs blasted through Selinda as they very often do, and last week chased an impala into camp, through the lounge of one room and into the pool. The dog left one way with one of the impala’s ears… and the impala her life. Pangolin sightings are up again in Duba Plains, and the ol Donyo Lodge waterhole is now at standing room only status.
Elephants walk right past the Zarafa front deck, a regular path for them. A young bull fed from the breakfast table in Duba Explorers Camp.
This month, one of my favourite images is of a young male lion at Tembo Plains contemplating the might Zambezi River. We have African wild cat kittens in Duba Explorers Camp, two sets of leopard cubs in our Mara camps. A pride of 26 lions in Mara Nyika… Wow! Could it be better?
Yes, it could.
You could be here with us.
Tourism, or the travel industry at large, is responsible for around $50 Billion a year that trickles down into local economies, communities and conservation, all of which keeps amazing encounters like these alive.