FAQ's

The guiding is the best on the continent. That isn’t a marketing line — it’s a training standard.

• Victoria Falls is roughly 1,708 m wide with a maximum drop of 108 m — the largest single sheet of falling water on earth. UNESCO-listed since 1989.
• Mana Pools is one of very few African parks where you may explore on foot without a vehicle — UNESCO World Heritage since 1984, and the spiritual home of the walking safari.
• Hwange covers around 14,650 km² and holds one of Africa’s great elephant populations, widely estimated at 45,000+.
• Zimbabwe’s professional guide qualification takes years to complete and has one of the lowest pass rates in the industry.

Low volume, high value — written into national policy, not just the brochure.

• The Okavango Delta became UNESCO’s 1,000th World Heritage Site in 2014. Its floodwaters travel some 1,200 km from the Angolan highlands and arrive months after the rain that made them.
• Botswana holds around 130,000 elephants — the largest population of any country on earth.
• Close to 40% of the country is under some form of conservation management.
• Chobe riverfront in the dry season produces elephant co

Where the walking safari was invented, and where it’s still done best.

• South Luangwa — roughly 9,050 km² — is credited as the birthplace of the modern walking safari, pioneered by Norman Carr in the 1950s and 60s, and carries one of Africa’s highest leopard densities.
• Kafue covers around 22,400 km², making it one of the largest national parks on the continent.
• The Lower Zambezi offers canoeing, catch-and-release tigerfishing and game drives on the same day.
• Around 30% of Zambia’s land area sits within national parks and game management areas.

Space. Silence. And a conservation model the rest of the world studies.

• Namibia was the first country in the world to write environmental protection into its constitution (1990).
• More than 40% of the country is under conservation management, including 80-plus community-run communal conservancies.
• The Namib is generally regarded as the world’s oldest desert, at somewhere around 55 million years. The dunes at Sossusvlei rise to roughly 325 m.
• It’s the second least densely populated country on earth — around three people per square kilometre.

The easiest first Africa. And a country you can return to for twenty years without repeating yourself.

• Kruger National Park covers about 19,485 km² — roughly the size of Wales.
• The Cape Floral Kingdom is the smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms and the richest, with around 9,000 plant species, some 70% found nowhere else on earth.
• Ten UNESCO World Heritage Sites, malaria-free Big Five options in the Eastern Cape and Madikwe, and a wine region that can hold its own anywhere.
• World-class road, air and medical infrastructure — which makes it the ideal opening or closing leg for a multi-country route.

The beach half of the trip, done properly.

• Around 2,700 km of Indian Ocean coastline.
• The Bazaruto Archipelago protects the last viable dugong population in the Western Indian Ocean.
• Gorongosa is one of the great conservation recovery stories of our lifetime — wildlife populations rebuilt from near-total collapse to well over 100,000 large animals.
• Two hours’ flying from Kruger or Vic Falls. Bush to beach without a long-haul in the middle.

Underrated, uncrowded, and now a genuine Big Five destination.

• Lake Malawi runs some 700 km and contains more fish species than any other lake on earth — well over 1,000 cichlid species, most endemic.
• Majete went from effectively empty in 2003 to a Big Five reserve by 2012 under African Parks management.
• Liwonde and Nkhotakota received hundreds of translocated elephants in one of the largest wildlife relocations ever attempted.
• Excellent value, and a warmth of welcome that earned the country its nickname honestly.

The great apes — and the clearest example anywhere that tourism revenue saves species.

• Mountain gorilla numbers have climbed from a few hundred in the 1980s to over 1,000 today — the only great ape whose population is increasing, and the reason the species was downlisted from Critically Endangered in 2018.
• Rwanda permits are US$1,500; Uganda’s are US$800 — with a significant share going directly to community revenue-sharing schemes.
• Uganda records over 1,000 bird species — roughly half of everything on the African list.
• Kigali is one of the cleanest, safest and best-connected arrival cities on the continent.

For the traveller who has already done the savannah.

• Odzala-Kokoua protects around 13,500 km² of Congo Basin rainforest — western lowland gorillas, forest elephants and forest buffalo at natural clearings.
• The Congo Basin is the second-largest tropical rainforest on earth and one of the planet’s most significant carbon sinks.
• Genuinely remote, genuinely specialist, and logistically demanding — which is exactly why you want it handled by people who do it regularly.