They came from Manchester, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Uitenhage and the open sea. What brought them all to the same place – and to the finals of Safari Guide of the Year 2026 – is anything but a straight road.
EcoTraining, Africa’s pioneer in field guide and wildlife education, scooped the Innovation Award at Africa’s Travel Indaba in Durban last week.
Dina and Ernst Marais drove into the Pafuri on a Sunday morning to do what all of us come here to do. By Friday, fellow tourists had found their bodies floating in the Levubu River at Crooks Corner – stabbed to death, their green Ford Ranger gone. Their killers remain free. The South African state, as best as can be established, was somewhere else entirely.
The Kruger to Canyons Biosphere doesn’t make much noise. It doesn’t need to. After 25 years of steady, unglamorous work across one of southern Africa’s most complex landscapes, the numbers in its latest impact report speak clearly enough.
Men’s sexual and reproductive health may be awkward to talk about, but there’s a need to do so. For example, about one-sixth of all couples worldwide have difficulty conceiving children, and in half the cases the man’s fertility is part of the problem. In South Africa, nearly 65% of men attending primary healthcare facilities report some level of erectile dysfunction, as do 57.4% of men in Nigeria.
The successful completion of the Artemis II mission marked another defining moment in modern spaceflight. For the first time since the Apollo era, humans once again travelled beyond low Earth orbit, circled the Moon, and returned safely.
Lion hunt differently all the time. No two stalks are identical; few kills unfold the same way. In different regions they may specialise in particular prey species, and certain ways of taking them down, but they don’t perfect a single technique that applies to all hunts – they adapt and adjust to the opportunity presented. This isn’t inefficiency; it’s mastery. In the language of resilience, this is variability: the capacity to function across a range of conditions rather than optimising for a single set of circumstances.
Trails guide, conservationist, gentleman. Gary walked the bush with a quiet authority. Over many decades he guided thousands of clients and friends through wilderness that he understood deeply and loved unconditionally. To those who walked with him, he gave more than knowledge – he gave perspective.
On decades of trails through the African wilderness, I’ve observed systems that have perfected the art of survival through millions of years of trial, error, and adaptation.
There are viewpoints along the Panorama Route … and then there’s the Graskop Gorge Lift. This is not a “stop, take a photo, and leave” kind of place. It’s a bucket-list experience – one that quite literally takes you off the edge of the escarpment and into the heart of a living forest.
