The countdown is over as Safari Guide of the Year (SGOTY) 2026 prepares to welcome South Africa’s top field guides to the Greater Kruger for one of the most anticipated events on the safari industry calendar.
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.
Let me be direct. No diplomatic softening. No “we reached out to the municipality for comment” preamble that lets officials off the hook before the first paragraph is done. Just the facts ‚ and the facts are an indictment.
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.
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.
Jupiter is currently visible in our night sky as a steady, golden point of light that outshines almost every star around it. To the naked eye, it looks calm and unchanging. But aim a simple pair of binoculars at it, and something remarkable happens. Four tiny pinpricks of light appear alongside the planet. These are Jupiter’s four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. They shift position from night to night, quietly orbiting their giant host in a celestial dance, first noticed by Galileo over 400 years ago.
In today’s highly competitive hospitality market, standing out is no longer just about plush bedding or complimentary breakfast. Business and leisure travellers alike are prioritising wellness – and that increasingly includes access to a well-equipped, thoughtfully designed fitness space.
