This wasn’t my first time up Kilimanjaro and it won’t be my last, but it was the first time I had climbed with a team so passionate about the cause they were climbing to raise funds for… elephant conservation.

Located in southeastern Ethiopia, 400km from Addis Ababa, the Bale Mountains are a landscape created by volcanic fires and shaped by glacial ice.

2007, South Luangwa National Park, Zambia.

"Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen to twenty yards....the most wonderful sight I had witnessed in Africa."

Thirty odd years ago, as a gawky, gangly girl in my early teens, complete with orthodontic braces and a tomboy haircut, I had come from Australia, with my family, on my first African safari.

The Kafue National Park, is Zambia’s oldest and largest national park and one of the continent’s wildest.