Back Story

My First Memories of the Sea and TV

We would go to Swanage for our children’s holidays and I can remember as a 2-3 year old stepping onto the beach and watching with fascinated horror, excitement as the sea tried to grab my little toes and curled and tickled my little feet. The power of the moon caused these gentle ripples and I find that as wondrous now as I did as a little boy.

Swanage in Dorset was a wonderful place for my summer holidays as was Peter Tavy in Devon and I have wonderful memories of holidays in the south and south west of England. This was the 1960’s and it was a wonderful time to come into the earth. We could travel by car and visit faraway places as a family and I loved my sisters and my extended family of cousins both older and younger than me. Above us all we had my grandmother the finest woman I have ever met a great and patient and compassionate leader. She caused us to go to Sunday school and built within us great moral values.

We had wonderful Christmases but my only other really early memory is the day we got our first TV. It was 1968 and Dad had decided that there were important events to share and we got a small black and white TV and put it pride of place in the living room. That evening (it was Christmas eve) the flickering TV revealed a great adventure happening live across the world. We saw that there were astronauts travelling around the moon it was 1968 and then we saw images of that dead other world or the moon with its grey mountains. Then as if by magic there was a light arriving above the darkness no it was not the sun but an image of half the earth rising above the cold and deathly moon. This was earthrise and it happened 50 years ago now. It was like watching a new earth being born and I found it wonderfully inspiring. The astronauts quoted genesis and I found the experience profoundly memorable. It was Apollo 8 and those astronauts had done the most brave endeavour by travelling around the dark side of the moon. One of the astronauts was the famous Jim Lovell from Apollo 13 fame but the first to speak was Bill Anders and this was the message “ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light and it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness…..”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vvNxhlP1jA

Witnessing that wonderful adventure at such a young age had a profound effect on me I can remember learning about the water cycle being a leader in my kindergarten in drawing clouds and writing a story about us having to leave earth as the sun became a red giant. I wrote that story when I was about 8 or ten but by then I was getting less interested in being an astronaut and more about helping to save wildlife. In the 1970’s the WWF had campaigns to save the Panda the Tiger and other big animals and I remember collecting badges and reading nature books. This took me to become interested in the nature adventures of Willard Price and a pair of children who went around the world collecting animals for zoos. I loved the sketchy drawing of all these wonderful places around the world from the south seas to the rainforests of the Amazon and the Ruwenzori’s.

I took a particular interest in amphibians and reptiles and one day I saw a sign on my local pet shop for the Cheshire herpetological society. Being an avid reader I knew what this was and wanted to join in. Luckily my father recognised my enthusiasm and once a month we drove to Macclesfield to meet fellow enthusiasts. One evening Chris the president of the society took us to his house and showed us his collection he had a mangrove snake a beautiful black and yellow snake which was back fanged meaning it was slightly poisonous. We also saw in his spare room a large tank taking the place of what would fit a set of bunk beds. Here he had a 20 foot python and he brought it out to show us. We were taking it out all sharing parts of this massive and writhing serpent. We finally got it out and I was amazed at this animal only to notice it was raising its tail.

“Quick quick” said Chris, I wondered what was worrying him as snakes don’t have dangerous tails. “get it back in the tank and we all danced a slow writhing rhythm trying to get the snake back into its tank. “Too late it decided to spray us all with its liquid feaces and I can only thank my dad that we continued to go to the society for the monthly evening events (which were held in smokey pubs) where different people would bring in their reptiles and we would share our knowledge and interests.

Chris had many pets and the story goes that when him and his girlfriend left the terrace they lived in they packed up all the animals and got ready to move. One of their pets was a 2 foot long Tokay Gecko with giant cat like eyes and when moving it managed to escape. They tried to catch it but to no avail and the myth is that when the next residents moved in the Tokay Gecko was still at large in the house. I have visions of a young couple waking up in bed one night only to look up to the ceiling and seeing a large pair of dragon like eyes looking down at them. For whatever reason that terrace was never occupied for too long.

During those early years I had only kept tadpoles but took great pleasure in watching them transform into little frogs but also witness how a 1000 little tadpoles become only a few final frogs and often if I didn’t get them out of the tank quickly enough they would drown and be eaten by their less fully formed brothers and sisters.

The amazing world of nature was my consistent source of inspiration and also of tragedy. I loved watching the lives of these little animals and also the horrible nature of animals devouring one another. For a long time I could not understand why death was such a companion to an animal lover and over my formative years I killed a great many pets which I loved but might accidentally kill because I would forget some vital need of theirs or leave their tank unsecured etc.

I carry it with me as an army of dead friends, I did for a while keep the animals carcasses in our family freezer until one day they were found and were summarily disposed of.

By the time I was 13 I was in secondary school and busy surviving my teenage years. I had been a supporter of Manchester city as my primary school friends mostly supported Man City. I collected football cards and we would trade them and throw them to the school wall with the nearest to the wall winning the other cards in the game. At secondary school I left all my primary school friends and lost a great security I had as I was very popular with all my class mates enjoying writing funny stories and being one of the clever ones in school.

I met a great rock for my teens Tim Smith a talented and funny friend who was always smiling at life. He followed me in caring about nature and we shared some wonderful holidays in Devon and also school camp in the Lake District. We also shared a support for Manchester United the red devils and I went to matches during the 1970’s at the time when supporters would through darts across the ground to hurt opposing fans and when I would run into no mans land collecting all the coins they would throw at each other. At school for some reason others in our year didn’t like Tim Smith, maybe they were jealous of him. For me he will always be a shining light, totally crazy but with a heart of gold. I think even now with him living in the United States with a young family he retains his childlike innocence and reverence for nature. He left our school to go to a private school for his A levels and I became a loner again. He introduced me to my first girlfriend a beautiful half Jamaican princess called Rosie I was 16 and it lasted around 1 month. I didn’t know how to be a good boyfriend and it’s a shame but she was always way ahead of me.

At 16 I decided to keep the most challenging of reptiles Jacksons Chameleons. At that time managing to keep them alive for anything more than a year was considered to be a real achievement. But then I like a challenge. I read books on the temperatures in the places where they lived and broke convention by letting them be cool over the night and ensuring that during the winter I kept them dryer and regularly sprayed their tank with water over the summer when my room was warmest. This was to mirror the wet and dry seasons somewhat.

Another friend Keith Winstanley helped me build a terrarium and so one weekend we went to the local hardware store and bought glass and wooden boards and got busy. After much noise and a few hammered fingers we created the largest vivarium which was about 5ft square and sat on my clothes drawer.

Feeding chameleons can be a challenge. I was quite a long way from any reptile shops so could only buy mealworms and crickets infrequently. Also I surmised that I would not want to eat the same food every day so I considered what I could feed them. Mum was and always has been a great gardener and one of her prides was a rockery and some little walls around the garden to help with raised beds etc. It was great for me too as below these stones I would find swarms of woodlice and spiders and slugs. This was a great diet and my 2 chameleons (Frank and Betty) devoured them with relish they loved white slugs particularly. I negotiated with Mum not to put out slug pellets (a new poison being marketed in garden centres) and let me collect them for my animals.

They were eating well and enjoyed the network of branches and plants I kept in the tank which allowed them to find their ideal temperature and humidity. Every morning before school I would get mums flower spray and put a fine mist into their tank and they would open their mouths to take the mist and drink. I loved and still love chameleons they seem to be wise and wonderful reptiles which are so very charismatic.

After a year or so my female chameleon betty was getting fat. She was pregnant and I was getting very excited but beginning to deplete our garden of woodlice and needed a more regular supply of food for the winter. So I decided to go to our local fishing shop and I bought a bag of casters and put them in a tank. They were quite cheap so a £1 bought around a kilo of the pupae somewhat around 1000. For the first few days nothing happened and I was beginning to doubt they were alive. After a week I tried the tank which was top opening and managed to find one or two badly deformed houseflies. Their wing cases hadn’t formed correctly but that made them easy to catch. I collected them and after a quizzical look the chameleons ate them happily.

The next day there were around a dozen flies and most of these were perfectly formed. With quick hand and eye contact I caught them and I thought I had found the answer to my feeding needs. I released them into the tank and my chameleons took great pleasure in spotting the flies on the foliage creeping up to them and then testing and releasing their sticky long tongues and relishing a housefly.

And so the next morning I got up early and eagerly went to the shed to collect some flies only to hear a hum coming from the shed. When I got into the tiny shed. The humming became a great woofing buzz as around 1000 houseflies tried to fly from one side of the tank to the other to escape this large predator that I symbolised. Ok I thought to myself I could use around 30 so Ill collect them and the rest I can feed and collect daily over the next few weeks. I gingerly opened glass slider of the tank and stuck my hand into this swarming mass. The flies decided to fly as one and next minute I had around 1000 flies swarming around me in the little shed. I screamed as I was blinded by buzzing chaos and waved my arms around not to be covered. Houseflies don’t bite or sting but they are pretty ugly and I lost my bottle and struggled with the hoes and rakes to get out of the tiny shed. As I escaped a funnel of flies came out of the shed with me. Over the next few days there were flies all over the garden so much so that the neighbours made comment.

I chose to keep silent on the matter and my parents told me that my days of growing maggots should be over.

As a result I went to mail order. The pet shop in Littleborough near Rochdale where I got the chameleons also supplied mail order crickets. Wonderful and so I made an order for them.

Three days later I got a call from Cheadle post office to come down and discuss a mysterious package they had received. It seems the box had broken apart and there were house crickets throughout the shop. They didn’t shout at me or otherwise get angry but I could see they were somewhat dissappointed and for the next few months till winter got severe whenever we would go to the post office we would hear the gentle chirping crickets making love in the skirting boards and under the floor boards.

By this time Betty was doing well and very gravid. Frank looked like a nervous father to be often looking at me with his independently moving eyes like “who me?” “Nothing to do with me!”

Betty was always a mottled green and black colour and I took that to be her presiding mood. Black is the colour of a moody chameleon in general. If they get angry or disturbed they put on a black colour and sometimes even open their mouths to scare you off. Frank liked me putting a mirror from time to time in his tank so he could scare off his reflection but Betty tended to ignore both Frank and her own reflection.

One morning I went to spray the animals and saw Betty hanging by her 2 arms onto a branch. I quickly helped her back onto the branch but I was concerned how long she might have been hanging there.

I chose not to go to school and watch her and see how she was as she was very heavily pregnant by this time. Over the next 2 hours she gave birth to over 40 little chameleons. Most were still born but around 6 were born alive and I watched them nervously hoping they would survive.

I called my herpetologist friends and one pet shop owner from Manchester came to visit with fruit flies and an expert in Sheffield offered an incubator. Chester zoo also offered to help if they could as they were the first chameleons born in captivity.

Unfortunately over the next 12 hours the little chameleons died and by the next morning Betty had also given up. The birth and the trauma of the birth were too much for her. “I loved her and she died and it was my fault”. I know now that chameleons should be separated and that I should have been sensible enough to put her in another vivarium once I could see she was pregnant. I carry the guilt still. Frank lived for a few more years but one day he got a mouth infection and even with the best antibiotics I could give him he also gave up and died. From then on I decided my reptile keeping days were numbered. It was a wonderful time a distraction from much of the teenage angst which included beatings, gangs, sexual depravity and excessive verbal abuse.

Much as though I loved nature and the stories of Gerald Durrell I didn’t have the green fingers of my mother and couldn’t stop killing the animals I loved and so I decided that I needed a new path to help nature.

Now I look back on all the lives I have seen and loved and I consider those words that I first witnessed in 1968 from genesis and the earthrise. I see this world with new eyes and these words came to me:

Truth is the voice of peace
Peace is the face of love
Love is the heart of life
And life is the soul of the earth

I carry these words with me just as I carry my dead friends from my Grandmother who was my rock to all the animals and people who have shown me such love. It was tough being a sensitive teenager but nature always inspired me and I decided I needed to know it better and followed the life sciences.

As I completed my A levels and struggled to get good grades I ended up studying a modular course on environmental biology at Oxford Polytechnic. It was a great course and I made lots of friends even becoming society president in my second year. But then that’s another story….

My African Story

Our Last chance to See

20 years ago in 1988, after a degree in environmental science I decided to learn about life through Tourism by taking a year off (well it ended up being only 6 months) and travelling across Africa. I joined an expedition with Exodus. I started my journey as an extreme tourist. A journey I continue to this day, always searching out the less travelled path as Robert Frost would say.

It was a wonderful adventure that first holiday on my own and I met some amazing and wonderful people many of whom I only really appreciate now so many years later.

Imagine struggling across the deserts of Morocco and the lonely desert mountains like Toubkal the mountain of ghosts, struggling on pirogues to Mopti climbing the Bandigara escarpment to the Dogons. Further still being held at border posts and dancing with a one legged man to tears for fears, watching poor malnourished children look on as I ate my salad lunch being searched and facing bribes in Chad. Then singing as we entered Togo as the workers off the field waved their machetes at us in mock revolution. What a wonderful band we were and we found paths few ever followed, found Mobuto’s wealthy village home and took that riverboat circus up the Congo only to end up trudging a long and lonely hill. That hill was the long hill at Rumangabo, Zaire and there I entered what was to be my restaurant at the end of the universe, it was a small hut and I met two unlikely hero’s Douglas and Mark with their laptops.

Of all my adventures this must have rated as one of my greatest surprises far far away in the deepest parts of central Africa there was Douglas Adams a great man and author tapping on his pc writing his notes from the Last chance to See.

He and Mark Carwardine were preparing their radio show highlighting the plight of the rarest animals at that time, travelling the world recording the places, people and the animals living on the brink.

It was 1989 and the hut our restaurant was the accommodation for tourists visiting one of the friendly families of mountain gorillas which live in the area and which were down to just 400 animals. That night he told me their real reason for coming to the Congo… to see the Northern White Rhino…. a tremendously rare creature, almost mythological in its ability to survive at the very brink of civilisation and which were down to less than 30 individuals.

It was a wonderful opportunity to talk to two great adventurers, to speak to man who I realise had such profound knowledge.

We spoke late into the evening sharing our stories, where Douglas explained twig technology and human arrogance. I explained how I was going through a spiritual awakening and my green degree. When it came to God Douglas had some great insight into our human arrogance and how we are using all life on the planet and if it isn’t useful to us how we destroy it. In fact the picture on the cover shows how we value a rhino horn above its life to make knife handles and fake medicines and how future generations will judge us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiZGWno2R7Y

I was extremely blessed to have had this chance meeting and this adventure and to be able to look back on it 25 years later.

Thanks to Jonathan, an American trailblazer who now spends time protecting his forests in Iowa and a motley crew of Danish, Icelandic, British, New Zealand, Australian and American people we travelled through Africa’s wonderful landscapes and had already found this enchanted national park with the rarest of rhinos and seen them (and nearly been surprised on foot by lions in the process). Yet what took us there and allowed an opportunity for me to spend a night in a hut with Douglas Adams and to know his work was an amazing collection of twig technologies. What purpose of chance allowed these circumstances to come together to culminate in this story and you the reader observing this adventure and connecting with it too goes beyond puddles, twigs and the arrogance of man. This is the chance in the last chance to see,

Standing between the known world and the oblivions of the central African rainforest, and the great Sudanese plains was the jewel which was Garamba National Park. There lived people both Black and White Africans who stood in the eye of the hurricane preserving the greatest treasures on earth despite the greed and ignorance of our societies.

As I returned from the mountain gorillas I succumbed to cerebral malaria but once again the chance of being close to Goma and their good African doctors and having a nurse in our group saved me. The support of the motley crew pulled me through my depression and less than a month later I was standing on the top of Mount Kenya after a six month odyssey.

So my experiences taught me not to be so arrogant and so I was changed and chance took me to become a ranger in a local country park and from that to Shetland where I started my Environmental Company with yet more committed and talented people from Greenpeace from Shetland and Scotland.

I kept in touch with the park over the years and 5 years later decided I had to return.

Extreme tourism calls for extreme measures and I had met a lion of Africa David Macallister a Zaire born Irish man who was committed to helping the area. He ran the Central African part of the Christian Blind Mission International, he offered to help this crazy Shetland man to visit Garamba and investigate extreme tourism as a business idea.

Of course Christmas 1994 was not a great time for this part of Africa the borders were closed and me, and my tourist friends, had to be almost smuggled into the country. At this time the Rwanda genocide was being planned and tribal violence had already started. Mobuto the then president of Congo was losing control of the gold fields which are to be found in Eastern Zaire and David had an encounter with Mobutos personal bodyguards as they tried to steal the gold back to Kinshasa.

Only missionaries remained holding together the communities of Kivu through their traditional networks. Flying via Arua and Aru and witnessing by air the refugee camps near the mission station on the Ugandan Sudan border (and meeting yet more fabulous people) we entered not Zaire or Congo but the newly created country of Kivu province.

This was a none country, no currency and only natural laws, still it was safe and we stayed in Nyankunde a mission and hospital near Bunia. In order to help the mission I took photos of the various Blind Mission projects, eye operations and the use of Ivermectin in river blindness treatment. Once again an incredible connection because in my work I knew Ivermectin had been banned in salmon farming because even small traces in the flesh of the fish were considered toxic to people. Yet here in the Congo it was considered a suitable trial to test children. Since then it has been shown that companies deliberately used insecticides in Africa in order to create human trials and monitor the consequences. I told my missionary contacts of my concerns and lets hope it helped to make a difference. Maybe it did or maybe this chance did not make the correct connections and the ignorance continued. Either way it remains a testament to how faith, chance and honesty can lead to change and greater understanding.

We flew over the gold mining camps and I saw the mercury mud mining operations which were affecting the Ituri rainforest. Once again causing pollution to the bush meat trade in the area because mercury bio-accumulates and ends up in the food supply. I warned my missionary friends and we prayed together.

Still despite the hardship and the generosity I saw I still was less generous a man as I should have been and it is remembering these lessons and obligations which hold me to a truer course these days.

Landing near Faradje in the part of Africa most distant from the sea we met Steve and Debbie Woolcott a real Swiss family Robinson there we stayed in a solar powered housing complex and spent Christmas with their children watching Peter Pan and

travelled up to Garamba National Park together as a new year surprise. What a wonderful place to see in 1995 but what a sad year for this part of Africa.

It was wonderful to visit this area but almost as soon as we returned to the UK the genocide was being reported and the wars in Congo raged and we knew that the difficulties were even beyond extreme tourists and my business ideas.

And so till today the situation has been difficult and I have been concentrating on developing the tourism and environmental activities from a base in the UK. I have helped establish the Green Tourism Business Scheme and we have built good relations with initiatives throughout the world. Not long after I learned of the problems in 2004 in Garamba National Park I met the tourism chief of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation I was able to ask him about protecting Garamba national park (a United Nations World Heritage Site) from the poachers and amazingly the United Nations sent peacekeepers to protect the animals some even losing their lives in their battles with the Lords resistance Army and the Janja weed rebels. Once again a chance connection having a potentially profound effect.

In 2005 we had the world trade meetings in Gleneagles one of our green tourism businesses, where African poverty was top of the agenda and later I attended the green meetings industry council only to make contacts with their co-ordinator who was born in the Congo and met an intern who joined national geographic weeks later, where they covered a range of stories on the situation in the Congo, the rhino’s, the gold fields, the use of coltan and how it affects gorillas. This was the most popular national geographic magazine issue ever. Once again chance encounters and a sign that Africa is in many peoples hearts.

However I also began to suffer personally I was overwhelmed by the news of climate change and our inability to deal with this issue as a society and my personal failures to make enough of a difference. I ended up in hospital with a breakdown (which brought out all this poetry) and I left behind plans to go back to Africa.

These days it is difficult to know if the Rhinos in Garamba are still safe. They are protected but still in extreme danger and only 10 are expected to be clinging to survival. In 2007 some of the Gorillas in Rumangabo were killed as part of a corruption case possibly linked to private collectors or even basic commodities such as charcoal. One day I hope to meet those brave rangers who protect such precious animals.

Recently in 2008 I visited London Zoo as part of the Green tourism award and there were some photos of the gorilla family I met all those years ago when I met Douglas Adams. Another chance and a circle closes and another last chance to see. Maybe it is time I followed in Douglas Adams footsteps and returned to the places which moved me to travel on this journey 25 years ago.

This week another chance encounter links with this story as I became chair of a 2020 climate change subgroup for tourism with the objective of achieving a 42% saving in carbon as part of the Scottish Governments targets based in the hitch hikers guide to the Galaxies magical number of 42 and an indication that we can weave wonderful stories together if we can share a common dream.

So let us remember our various travels and the heroes we meet along the way. Let it inspire us to greater things, we must accept that chance walks with us every day and that every day is a last chance and a first chance and that we have an amazing journey ahead of us. One where we can create such a beautiful space and hope. We only have to have the will to see it through.

I hope you like this story its all true and its quite incredible that this can happen by chance. Remember I am just the same as you and so if it can happen to me then who knows how much more incredible your journey might be.

Lets remember one of my favourite authors and one who lived in my home country and what he said about travel and friendship. “We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend” – Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894

Thank you for reading my personal African Story and please pass on the goodwill we share and I hope we can receive again a chance to see the treasures of our natural earth and renew our willpower to protect it. Certainly if there is a GOD then they surely it lives in the hearts of those heroes who give so much of themselves to preserve peace and beauty.

Original prepared in December 2004

A Plastic Elephant and the Elefence Project 2018-19

UPDATE 2019:

The Elefence was built and manned to stop elephants eating the plastic and general refuse. Money raised in the UK was spent in creating some bee based defences for local farmers so they can grow vegetables without invasion from local elephants. These are proving successful as well as an additional source of income for the farmers from honey.

My Victoria Falls Story:

“Flying into Victoria Falls we were welcomed by a wall of humid enervating heat 42 degrees in the middle of the day and a world away from the cold and wet Scottish Winter. Zimbabwe is worrying about an El Nino created drought and the rains had been very poor. Andrea and I went directly to the Vic Falls safari Lodge for our orientation. There we sat with the African renowned Charlie Hewat and our first Green Tourism assessment in Africa. As we discussed the plan for the day I watched the vultures circling the hotel’s thatch roof and drop to the waterhole and an elephant carcass which had been there a few days.

“That’s a sad story” said Charlie, “The elephant was shot by one of the local rangers as it was suffocating, we are awaiting the autopsy to find out the cause of death but it looks like poisoning. We have lost 8 elephants over the last month in the same circumstances. We believe its because they are entering the landfill site looking to supplement their diet with food waste.”

It was a sober welcome to Africa for Green Tourism. That evening having completed our green tourism audit of the property we came back to the restaurant and Andrea and I sat watching the sun go down over the waterhole and the Vultures the hotel work so hard to help protect.

“As with many pilot visits” I said “A mixture of excellence and opportunity. Vic Falls Safari Lodge really lead’s the way in educating and informing guests about the plight of Vultures, they are a great designed building and manage the grounds really ecologically. But, there are also some easy quick wins, from their towel policy to ozone friendly fridges and freezers, that said I am very impressed with their management team and their commitment to be a genuine green leader.”

As the sun set and the vultures roosted in a dead tree we noticed a steady movement around the darkening waterhole.

“Gosh!!” Andrea said “Elephants!!”

Slowly and deliberately 4 large adult elephants and one baby made their way towards us and the elephant carcass

“They have come to say goodbye to their cousin.” Said our waiter as he took our order. “The elephant which died was one of their family and they have come to pay their respects and mourn their loss. See how they are touching the bones…”

Knowing that the source of this misery is poor waste management and our purpose in Victoria falls to help develop sustainable tourism, we took it as a somber sign that we must succeed and develop the partnerships and relationships necessary to allow animals and man to share the planet and this wonderful world heritage site.

One Month on and we have 13 founder members in Victoria Falls a solid partnership with Environment Africa (Charlie and her team) and the Zimbabwe Tourist Authority (ZTA). ZTA hosted the first Green Tourism Award Ceremony in Africa (which celebrates good waste management among other issues) where we also featured Charlie’s next green project ELEFENCE.

Victoria Falls is a world heritage site surrounded by ecological areas of high value and with a traditionally healthy elephant population. As a major tourist attraction and natural heritage site one of the main conflicts between nature and people occurs in the local landfill site. This is where the waste generated by tourists and the local community attracts elephants, baboons and other animals into a deadly conflict. Elephants have a great sense of smell and are attracted to the food mixed with plastic wastes. They eat the mixed waste and suffer from a terrible and lingering death from a combination of suffocation and digestive constipation. The wastes even contain heavy metals in the form of batteries and tubes as well as clinical and other materials. All in all, a deadly concoction for both man and beast….

So what can you do?

First you should support the ELEFENCE campaign to create an elephant proof fence around the landfill site including guards to help prevent people and animals entering the area. You can do this very easily by going to Green-Tourism.com/visit/zimbabwe/Victoria-Falls-Elefence and paying £10 or more into the Paypal account.
You should ensure you do not put batteries into the waste stream and encourage your tour operators and accommodation to support Green Tourism and separate wastes better.
Take your old batteries (and electricals) home where they are closer to effective recycling systems.
Tell your friends about the issues and share your story. Tourism can be green, look for the logo for the Green Tourism programme. Businesses can receive the award if they do comprehensive green actions across all the areas where they impact on the planet or consumer. In Victoria Falls and surrounds there are 13 businesses involved and they can be found by searching for Zimbabwe on Green-Tourism.com