By Philip Sheldon CEO
I step out from my One & Only Cape Town private bungalow onto my lagoon-side deck and look up – there is Table Mountain – right there – it is no longer just a photo. And in an hour I’ll be on top, gazing out at the rugged shoreline and Cape Town’s skyline below (and going from sun to heavy rain to sun in less than 10 minutes)!
In the evening, I accompany two of our Cape Town-resident clients and enjoy an evening of world-class ballet.
Our safari jeep comes around a bend and a tuft of ground moves – wow, that’s not dirt but the head of a leopard that is hiding momentarily before it slowly emerges to stalk an African wildcat. A few minutes later we see their encounter – the much smaller African wildcat hisses ferociously as it stands its ground – and wins as the leopard decides it’s too much work to confront the wildcat, and walks away.
I open the curtain of my safari lodge terrace and there is a long-tailed civet cat staring back at me – we both decide to avoid any more personal an encounter than this.
As I sit in my open truck looking at a giraffe eating leaves from the top of a tree, an elephant flapping its ears while pulling a sapling out of the ground, a rhino grazing next to an eland (I didn’t even know what an eland was until now) – I realize that WE in this vehicle are the ones caged in the “zoo” while the animals roam freely in this vast protected landscape.
These are some of the images that still bring smiles to my face as I recall my visit to South Africa last May. I felt so welcomed by the open-armed hospitality of our South African friends that we are offering both a heritage tour and a soft adventure tour there in 2014. Please consider joining one of our tours to this enchanting land!