What have elephants got to do with football and martial arts?  Well more than you might think!

Thailand has long been a hot spot for the illegal ivory trade, which is why the Let Elephants Be Elephants team targeted this country for the next phase of our campaign.  We have seen some stronger measures in Thailand in the last year, including changes to the legislation around ivory and a public ivory stockpile destruction by the government, but there is still much to be done to raise awareness of the issue in Thailand.

Years ago when I first moved to Namibia to start my PhD on the black-faced impala at the age of about 21, a couple of Aussies and a German who were working there at the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia adopted me and helped me find my feet in this unique desert land where I didn't know a soul.  The war vet invasions had just started in Zimbabwe, and, well, if you've read my first book "Dry Water" you'll know the rest of the story!  Over a decade later, two of my early rescuers, fellow Aussie Dr Julian Fennessy and his wife, German Steph Fennessy, are living in Windhoek and raising their two kids in Namibia whilst also working on giraffe conservation across the continent.  Together Julian and Steph started and run the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, the world's first and only organisation dedicated to giraffe conservation in the wild.

There are some parts of Africa that remove you so completely from reality that you start to wonder whether all that stuff that fills your life with worries in the 'outside' world really matters much.  Serra Cafema Camp, in the Marienfluss Conservancy, is such a place, where traditional Himba people still live a life that is much like what it was several hundred years ago, where a river teeming with crocodiles slices through gothic mountains surrounded by sand dunes, where you can really find yourself by losing yourself in landscapes so primitive you can't help but feel humbled.  There's no phone range or wifi up here so you can leave all that behind.  And you know what - you probably won't miss it one bit.  It's all about disconnecting to reconnect, as Wilderness Safaris puts it.  This is the ultimate escape and a huge adventure.

How does one summarise a week in Namibia's rugged Kunene region, one of the wildest parts of Africa?  It was just one wow moment after another!  There was the cheetah mother with two cubs who killed a springbok male in the dry Hoanib River bed, the chameleon laying eggs at the Skeleton Coast, the drive through the dunes to the violent Atlantic Ocean where hundreds of seals frolicked in the crashing waves, meeting the traditional Himbas in Marienfluss Conservancy and of course, the desert lions (with cubs!) and desert-dwelling elephants....  And then there is those epic landscapes, so huge and awe-inspiring that you feel so small and incredibly humbled by it all.

It's been a while coming, but much goes on behind the scenes when it comes to developing awareness programs for species like elephants and rhinos in Asia.  Those of you who know me personally know that the awareness raising never stops when it comes to elephants and the ivory trade.  Last week, my conservation safari group of Singaporeans, British and Aussies talked at length about conservation and what still needs to be done while deep in the desert dunes of the Skeleton Coast, inspired by the arid-adapted wildlife of Namibia and those magnificent desert-dwelling elephants.  Next week I'll be in Brisbane talking to about 200 Queensland business women at the Australian Women in Leadership symposium about what we can learn from elephants about leadership (and of course, how we can help the elephants too).  Even though we've made good headway lately, we can't afford to lose momentum and we need you to keep spreading the word too.

My 2016 and 2017 safaris are filling up fast!  But it's not too late to grab a last minute place if you get in quick.

ZIMBABWE 2016 - ONLY ONE ROOM LEFT!

My last post about the state of African elephant poaching discussed the latest CITES report showing that less elephants are now being poached now than during the poaching peak in 2007, but also highlighted the fact that while some countries are doing better in terms of poaching (e.g. Kenya), others are still in big trouble and it's no time to be complacent.  Overall, there are still more elephants being poached than there are being born.  Tanzania's elephant population has taken a big hit and remains under serious threat for the ivory trade.

CITES' latest report on the results of the MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) programme has some good news in it for elephant populations and some not so good.  The overall number of elephants being killed for ivory has stabilised, after a peak in 2011, but there are still more elephants killed every year than are born (see BBC story).

I posted an article on my Facebook page from National Geographic last week about young gorillas seen dismantling poachers' snares for the first time.   It suggests that the youngsters knew how dangerous the traps were and researchers said they may have done it before, given how quickly they dismantled it.  For a critically endangered species with less than 900 left in the wild, this is a good sign because with such low numbers we really can't afford to lose any wild gorillas, especially the next generation.

Happy new year and here's hoping your year has lots of inspiration and adventures of the African kind in it!