I know, this sounds a bit like a British pub, but that’s what our guests saw yesterday, amongst many other animals and nature curiosities of course.
Somehow (I curse a cheap marketer 4 decades ago), a lot of guests seem obsessed about “Big 5”, but only rarely can anyone actually name all constituents of the “Big 5”. Fact is, Big 5 is a term invented by hunters, so for today’s conservation-based safaris, it has no meaning whatsoever, yet many tourist marketers keep on pushing the term, as if it was the all that counts. But it counts for quite little actually.
Point in case is a fact that the giraffe is NOT part of the Big 5″, but it is much bigger (and certainly taller) than most within that Big 5 group. And it is also one of the favorite animals our guests see, and they never cease to amaze. It is their sheer size, ancestral shape, and ultimately elegant way of moving that makes these animals both as African and as unique as it gets. There is most certainly no animal like a giraffe to be found anywhere else in the world.
It is one thing to see them on TV, but when a 4-5m towering giraffe is standing next to the game driver, it is an utmostly impressive animal.
We have several hundreds of them on our reserve, so our guests see them quasi every day. Sometimes you see them as loners, and sometimes in a … journey (that’s what a group of giraffes is called). Socially they form lose bands, changing groups all the time, and going from solitary to social and back again all the time, with quasi no social bonds to be observed.
Yesterday closed with one of the most stunning sunsets imaginable, the kind that you only seen here in South Africa. It makes on ponder life …
