Our cover for May features Hotel Verde Cape Town - 'Africa's Greenest Hotel' - for a while anyway. Because the hotel's owner, Mario Delicio and his industrious team have just launched Verde Hotels - a hospitality solutions group that aims to establish 'Greenest Hotels' in countries throughout Africa, and abroad.

Our cover for July is dedicated to the National Arts Festival - a major tourist attraction, and an important event on the South African cultural calendar. It is also the biggest annual celebration of the arts on the African continent. Starting at the end of June/beginning of July, it runs for 11 days and is held in the small university city of Grahamstown, which is situated in the Eastern Cape, 130km from Port Elizabeth.

Our February cover features a meerkat recharging her solar-panel-like belly as the African sun rises over the semi-arid Klein Karoo scrubland of De Zeekoe farm in Oudtshoorn, South Africa (read more on pages 13 and 21 in this edition).

The Tourism Tattler Trade Journal - an educational resource for the inbound travel trade in, and to Africa. The May edition front cover features a pair of young Cheetah at Inkwenkwezi Game Reserve (Inkwenkwezi means 'Star' in isiXhosa). Read more on Inkwenkwezi Game Reserve in our Property Review on pages 14 to 17 plus a whole lot more.

The July edition front cover features a pair of cheetah at Tintswalo Safari Lodge in the Manyeleti Game Reserve in Mpumalanga, South Africa (see page 11). Classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the cheetah has suffered a substantial decline in its historic range, but thanks to the conservation efforts of private game reserves and wildlife sanctuaries, cheetah are being repopulated in their home ranges across eastern and southern Africa.

The June edition front cover features the awesome Storms River Mouth on South Africa's Garden Route. Explore this untouched playground by kayak, lilo, scuba or snorkel with Untouched Adventures. Read more about Untouched Adventures on page 13, and about Adventure Tourism in Africa and South Africa on pages 06-15.

Our October edition front cover features a tower of South African giraffes recently released at Lalibela Private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape as part of their extensive game repopulation project (read Vernon Wait's report on page 10). As of 2016, a maximum of 31,500 southern giraffe (Giraffa giraffa) remain in the wild, with around 45 kept in captivity (zoos), while the total giraffe population worldwide is approximately 90,000 in the wild, with around 1,144 in zoos. Despite these rather low numbers, the IUCN has assessed the giraffe species as a whole to be of "Least Concern" from a...