The first time I went to Ngorongoro in Tanzania was in 1953 when I was a year old and on one of my parents weekend jaunts upcountry from Dar es Salaam where my father had an engineering company. Although wildlife was abundant, elephant sightings were uncommon at Ngorongoro back then as the whole of the highlands and the rim forest was a hunting block. In 2009 Clarissa and I camped at Ngorongoro for a couple of weeks and on one of those days we had a lucky sighting in the Lerai Forest of a well known mega tusker. This elephant has the largest tusks I have ever seen in the flesh. This elephant is easily 60+ years old and could have been a calf when I visited Ngorongoro as a baby all those years ago. Considering the size of its tusks it is a miracle that it survived the intervening decades.

Inspiration for an artist in Africa!