If you love animals and are thinking of heading out on a safari, you must first read Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, by Peter Allison (Lyons Press).
It is a collection of laugh-out-loud hysterically funny tales from Allison’s experiences in Africa. Allison, an Australian-born safari guide who led wildlife-viewing and eco-tourism trips in Botswana and South Africa for years, got his start in the bush at the age of 19. He mines laughs at the expense of some of his safari guests, but one could easily say that they well deserve it.
Now with Natural Selection, an inbound safari operator that will set up camps in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, Allison and the Natural Selection team strongly believe that tourism is essential to conservation. “If you can save the land, you can save species,” he says.
In his book, he writes: “It’s daunting to tackle the pressure on Africa’s wild places and the animals within them, but there is something wonderful happening. More and more visitors are coming to see the amazing places that animals live in, and by doing so they will tell African governments that the animals are worth more than minerals in the ground or crops, and certainly worth most when alive.”
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