The Great Plains Insider
I always believe that if you have nothing to say, you should say nothing. But that is not the case looking back at Great Plains this past year, and as I think about this, it is once again those elephants I take guidance from.
Elephants have developed this amazing infrasonic sound, a form of communication where much of what they ‘say’ is below our audible range, but it is there. It is constant. It is a comforting reassurance that the family is together, that each is fine, safe and happy.
Our regular communications to you and the safari industry follow the same pattern, with the same intentions.
Great Plains is here. Each of our camps are open. The staff and our family are doing well. As we move through the swamplands of Botswana’s Okavango, it is a rumble about just how extraordinary the wildlife is right now, spectacular in every direction you look. At Duba Plains, the arrival, and breeding, of wild dogs has enhanced the nature of the experience there. Walking in Kenya’s Chyulu Hills from ol Donyo Lodge, with Graham McKittrick, a qualified and experienced walking guide, has enhanced that experience there too. It all needs reporting on! How waiting quietly at the river for millions of wildebeest to launch themselves into life or death crossings or the opening of the new wine cellar at the award-winning Mara Plains ensures your safari with us is life-changing.
People often ask Beverly and me what it means to be a National Geographic Explorer. I sometimes say (I try to change it up sometimes) that it is about embracing the unknown, going out there, and testing what we think we know, but it is also about coming back to home base to report on it. Livingstone, Stanley, Earhart, Hillary, Shackleton, Scott… and you. Each of us has that explorers’ gene in us. It is why we have named a brand inside of Great Plains, our Explorers Collection of camps, and it is why you come to stay at Great Plains.
I come across so many people who don’t know why we named a Botswana Réserve Collection camp, Zarafa. It is an understandably impossible name for many to wrap their minds around, especially until they understand the origin of the word Giraffe and then learn of the story of a giraffe that sailed down the Nile across the Mediterranean before being taken to Paris.
The design of Selinda often comes up, and how it follows the loose flow of the wind, but along the strict layout of five essential elements – Metal, Water, Air, Earth, Fire.
So many of our stories are left untold or forgotten.
So, unlike the elephants, where each updating rumble fades away over an average of nearly 20 kilometers, we have decided to introduce a new communication effort to you, our interested and loyal Great Plains followers and supporters.
We are excited to launch our brand new biannual Great Plains Insider Magazine that shares our stories with you, including articles with the same kind of depth that you may expect in the great magazines on newsstands across the world. Insights into why we do what we do and how. This is not a brochure. It is a magazine, and ours being a digital version.
So, today I’d like to introduce you to our online version of Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Great Plains Insider Magazine.
