False Bay is a hotspot for shark-spotting, but only the hardcore brave a cage dive: with luck, you should be able to spot a great white breaching from the safety of the boat deck.Ī hippo in Kruger National Park, South Africa (Alamy) 3. ![]() The cold, deep waters off Cape Town are home to some of the largest great white populations on the planet. But they certainly look the part: bristling with teeth and sporting that iconic dorsal fin, they’re basically ocean terminators. Only around 320 great white attacks on humans and 80 fatalities have ever been recorded, making them comparative softies compared to mass killers like the mosquito or tsetse fly. Jaws may have cemented the great white in the world’s imagination as the most terrifying denizen of the deep, but they really don’t deserve their dreaded reputation. Cooinda Lodge* runs regular wildlife-spotting tours (guides know the biggest crocs by name).Ī great white shark breaching at Seal Island in False Bay (Getty Images) 2. Kakadu National Park in northern Australia is awash with massive saltwater crocs (this is where Crocodile Dundee was filmed, after all). They’ll snack on anything that crosses their path, including humans - around 1,000 people a year are killed by crocs. Reaching up to 6m in length, these monster reptiles lurk in saltwater estuaries and brackish waters from eastern India to southeast Asia and northern Australia. They’ve been around on earth since the Pliocene era, so crocodiles have had plenty of time to evolve into one of Mother Nature’s most efficient killing machines. If you click and buy a product, we may earn revenue.Ī saltwater crocodile in Yellow Water Billabong, Kakadu National Park (Alamy) 1. These buttons and adverts are clearly signposted, and provide direct links through to external sites. We also feature properties and itineraries from a specially selected list of trusted operators. Our travel journalism is written and edited by independent experts to inform, inspire and advise our readers about the best choices for your holidays. Main photo: a strawberry poison dart frog in Costa Rica (Alamy) Then again, a holiday watching tsetse flies or snails really doesn’t sound like a great way to spend your money, now does it? We’ll stick with the tigers, hippos and crocs, thanks. Strictly speaking, of course, our list leaves off many of the mass killers of the animal kingdom: assassin bugs (carriers of Chagas disease, causing around 10,000 human deaths per year), the tsetse fly (African sleeping sickness 10,000 deaths), the freshwater snail (which causes the parasitic infection bilharzia and acute abdominal pain 20,000 to 200,000 deaths), and of course mosquitoes (carriers of countless mosquito-borne diseases from malaria to dengue fever 750,000+ deaths, making it the deadliest of all creatures). If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be an item on the breakfast menu, you’re about to find out. There’s a weird frisson to seeing a big cat or a bad-tempered croc eyeing you up as much as you’re watching them. Whether it’s seeing whales in Iceland, spotting sloths in Costa Rica or observing orangutans in Borneo, there’s a world of wild experiences out there.īut for thrills, it’s the biggest, baddest beasts that counts. Watching wildlife is one of the joys of travel.
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