Cape Town City coolth rocks the new year in

A capacity crowd of 5 000 flocked to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens to celebrate the last hours of 2011 and welcome the start of 2012. The Mother City played along with near perfect weather conditions for the New Year’s Eve concert hosted by Amarula with Prime Circle as the headline act, supported by Elvis Blue.

Concert-goers were greeted on arrival by a massive ice elephant, dubbed Cool Ama-Ellie.  Amarula commissioned Ice Art to produce the sculpture, created by Matt Smyth. Working from a sketch, it took him two full days to carve the animal, using 16 ice blocks of 150 kgs each. Once completed and the excess ice had been removed, the elephant clocked in at a cool 1,5 tons.  Before leaving the ice room, it had to be dismantled into three sections for transportation and took a team of eight to reassemble on site.

Standing 2,6 metres high at its highest point, the sculpture was still intact and glistening at 05:00 on New Year’s Day, 12 hours after its installation, according to Ice Art director, James Cussen.
Elephants are closely linked with Amarula, made from the fruit of the marula tree, indigenous to southern Africa. They are great lovers of ripe marulas and help to spread the seeds and ensure the continuation of the trees, which grow only in the wild.

Amarula is also a major supporter of research into elephant behaviour with findings applied in elephant conservation strategies in Southern African state-owned and private game parks.  For the past decade, the brand has been funding the Amarula Elephant Research Project, managed by Prof Rob Slotow of the Kwa-Zulu-Natal University (UKZN). It has become  recognised globally as an authority on the behaviour of African elephants and attracts international and local academic researchers of the highest calibre.