Telegraph
by Brian Jackman
March 18, 2013
The best safari guides in Africa, including those working in Kenya, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.
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| Garth Hovell leads barefoot guests along the Luangwa River bed in Zambia, home to large numbers of elephant and lion |
Since then, by foot or Land Cruiser and sometimes by camel and dugout canoe, it has been my privilege to be guided by the best in the business: Richard Bonham and Calvin Cottar in Kenya, Mothupi Morutha in Botswana, Rod Tether in Zambia. Some, like Louw Schoeman in Namibia, are no more, and others like Phil Berry, the “Leopard Man” of Kuyenda Bushcamp in Zambia’s magical Luangwa Valley, are now veterans.
So what does it take to excel at this most glamorous of outdoor professions? First comes safety, especially on walking safaris, which require a cool head, a respect for dangerous game and a thorough knowledge of animal behaviour. A good guide can read situations, react in an instant and avoid putting his clients in harm’s way.
John Stevens, perhaps the finest guide to come out of Zimbabwe, once described to me how he was forced to shoot an elephant. “When I am walking I always carry a rifle, but I’ve only had to use it a couple of times,” he said. “This time I fired a warning shot, but it still kept coming and I had no choice. It dropped 6ft in front of me. There was no time to be afraid. But afterwards I held out my arm to show my clients how it was shaking. I wanted them to know that even guides are human.”
The point he was making is that we all know what it is to feel fear. The difference is that professional guides are trained to handle it.
Most of the time, though, your guide is there to interpret the natural world in which he grew up, a bush-wise genius who can read animal tracks as others peruse a newspaper, put a name to every bird and be an inspirational source of knowledge on everything from elephant behaviour to the secret world of the termite mound. Added to which he or she will be the perfect host, a born raconteur with an inexhaustible fund of stories to keep clients entertained around the campfire.
Such expertise doesn’t come cheap. Seeing Africa through the eyes of a top-dollar guide undoubtedly costs more than your average package safari, but the rewards are well worth it. Here is my pick of the very best, based on personal experience.
Botswana: Ralph Bousfield
Botswana is the stomping ground of safari guide, naturalist, botanist and archaeologist Ralph Bousfield. One of Africa's most renowned guides, Bousfield is exceptionally experienced but can be hard to pin down - he does about three private escorted safaris per year. You can read about him in detail, and find out more about the intriguing safari experiences he offers, here.
Where to find him: unchartedafrica.com
Botswana: Map Ives
Keen eyes fixed on the trail ahead, this burly, bearded bushman is everyone’s idea of the archetypal safari guide. What he is doing is reading the news of the previous night’s wildlife encounters – unravelling the maze of animal tracks freshly printed in the white Kalahari sands. Elephant, lion, buffalo – their stories are all written there, but Map prefers to look at the big picture. He likes to present a more holistic view of the Delta’s wildlife, to explain the connectedness of everything, from termites to leadwood trees, and help his clients to reconnect with nature.
Map – aka Martin Anthony Paul – was born in 1955 and grew up near Francistown in Botswana. He worked first at Rhodesia’s National Parks Department, then as a safari guide at Londolozi Private Game Reserve, South Africa, in the late 1970s. His endgame, though, was to return to Botswana – and by 1981 he was guiding clients deep into the Okavango by mokoro, the traditional dugout canoe. Today, there is nobody in Botswana with a greater understanding of the Delta.
Map is now happily employed by Wilderness Safaris as its environmental officer and is also deeply involved in returning rhino to the Okavango. “My life has been so interesting and so much fun,” he says, “that 30 years seems like a few months to me.”
Where to find him: Wilderness Safaris.
How to book: Safari Consultants offers a six-night Botswana safari, staying three nights at Selinda and three at Duba Plains, from £5,570 [2013 price] per person. Guiding by Map costs around £775 [2013 price] extra per day.
Kenya: Jackson ole Looseyia
“Most of my relatives were killed by wild animals,” says Jackson ole Looseyia, casually. “For my father’s generation, that was the norm. Two of my uncles were killed by the same buffalo.”
Tall, graceful, powerfully built and looking every inch a Maasai in his blood-red shuka, Jackson moves effortlessly between the traditional pastoralist lifestyle of his Maasai mother and the western world.
Growing up in the bush is tough, as Jackson discovered when he started school. “I was eight years old and the school was five miles away and we didn’t walk,” he says. “We had to run all the way.”
When he was 16, he went hunting with his father and saw him gored by a buffalo. “He survived,” says Jackson, “but I never wanted to go hunting again.” It was soon after this that he met Ron Beaton, one of Kenya’s most respected safari tour operators, and began working for him as a spotter. That was in the 1980s when there were no Maasai guides working anywhere in the Mara.
Today Jackson is one of the most successful guides in Kenya, a former Big Cat Diary TV presenter and a partner with the Beaton family in their safari enterprises. Now 45, he has travelled widely in the United States and Britain – always dressed in his traditional Maasai clothes. “I live with one foot in both cultures,” he says. “I have my own blog site, laptop, cell phone and video camera, but wherever I go, I am a Maasai first and last.”
While we are talking, his keen eyes miss nothing: a striped kingfisher in the tree above, the drag marks where a leopard had hauled its kill through the grass. “All cats fascinate me but the leopard is my number one,” he says. “It’s a thing of beauty. There is something about its eyes, and the way it walks so lightly, as if it doesn’t want to hurt the grass.”
Where to find him: Rekero Camp.
How to book: Africa Exclusive offers a five-night safari, staying at Rekero or Naboisho, from £2,440 [2013 price], excluding international flights. Guiding by Jackson ole Looseyia costs £600 [2013 price] extra per day.
Tanzania: Richard Knocker
A founding member of Nomad Safaris, Richard Knocker is also its chief guide, most often found at Lamai Serengeti, the camp among the spectacular granite kopjes of the park’s north-west sector.
Time spent in his company is an education in the lore of the wild. I watched him re-assemble a wildebeest skeleton in a matter of minutes, fitting together its scattered vertebrae like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a party trick that demonstrates his profound knowledge of Africa and its wildlife.
Polymath he may be, but he is no dry-as-dust academic. He leads what he describes as “a charmed existence, doing what I love best, looking at awesome animals in the most beautiful parts of Africa”, and is renowned for his outrageous puns. “You need a sense of humour for this job,” he says. Hence his perfect description of the vultures we had seen near camp, waddling towards a lion kill with their “John Wayne walk”.
“Patience is the key to the larder” is another favourite Knocker phrase – uttered as we searched for a black rhino he knew to be hiding somewhere in the thickets. And of course, in the end, he found it. “Enjoy him while you can,” he said sadly. “With rhino horn selling at $60,000 a kilo, I just don’t think they are going to survive.”
His favourite animal is the cheetah. “It’s that blend of grace and vulnerability that gets to me,” he says. But he also talks eloquently about what he describes as “cathedral moments” – such as the time when he hid in a bush while 1,500 buffaloes wandered past. “Incredible,” he says. “They never knew I was there.”
Where to find him: Nomad Safaris.
How to book: Africa Odyssey offers a six-night Tanzanian safari, with three nights at Lamai Serengeti and three nights at Sand Rivers, from £3,970 [2013 price]. Guiding by Richard Knocker costs from £350 extra per day.
Zambia: Garth Hovell
Like many of Africa’s best guides, Garth Hovell is from Zimbabwe. It was there that he learned such guiding skills as dealing with crop-raiding elephants and buffaloes. Having dreamed of becoming a safari guide since he was six, he finished his apprenticeship at 21 – the youngest to do so – and now splits his time between Zebra Plains, in South Luangwa National Park, Zambia, and a new guiding venture in Panama. “We specialise in walking safaris and our camp is in a fabulous corner of the park,” he says. “It has everything: great game, tall trees, huge views; and best of all, it’s the only one in the area.”
Now 37, he has guided all over southern Africa, including a spell as head guide at Matetsi, Zimbabwe’s largest private game reserve, and tracked tigers in India as well as plying his trade in the wilder parts of Malaysia, Russia and Australia. “I’ve been charged by buffalo and lion and had my vehicle flung into an acacia tree by an angry elephant who was protecting her young, but it’s all just a walk in the park for me,” he says.
Even so, he treats all big game with the utmost respect and never walks anywhere in the bush without an armed scout. He loves getting close to nature with his clients. “We track lions on foot, watch them feeding and hear them scrunching on their kill,” he says. But he also likes them to share his holistic view of the bush. “For sure, we’ll show them lions and elephants, but it’s not just about the big charismatic animals,” he says. “There’s magic in birds and butterflies and plants as well.”
Where to find him: Zebra Plains Safari Camp.
How to book: Abercrombie & Kent offers a seven-day safari in the Luangwa Valley, with three nights at Zebra Plains and three at Chichele Presidential Lodge from £2,750 [2013 price]. Garth Hovell costs from £825 [2013 price] extra per day.
Zambia: Robin Pope
A true Zambian, born and bred in the Copperbelt, Robin Pope grew up running wild in the bush with a pellet gun and a fishing rod. In London, dressed in a suit and tie, he could pass for a librarian; but don’t be misled. Under that diffident exterior he is as tough as old boots, and in Zambia, in his beaten-up bush hat and with a rifle over his shoulder, he is the consummate professional safari companion. His knowledge of Zambia’s wildlife is unrivalled and comes with a natural gift for enthusing clients, who return year after year.
In 1988 he founded Robin Pope Safaris, Zambia’s acknowledged market leaders, whose four camps – Nsefu, Tena Tena, Nkwali and Luangwa River Camp – are among the best in Southern Africa, and it was under a huge fig tree near Tena Tena that he and his wife Jo were married three years later.
Like all true professionals he appears relaxed, yet all his senses remain on high alert, suddenly breaking off a conversation to point out a bird in a tree or the flick of an ear in the long grass.
I asked him which animals he respected most. “Elephant and hippo,” he said, without hesitation. “Elephants because of their sheer size and unpredictability; hippos because they have this nasty habit of hiding in thick bush.”
Now in his early 60s, he takes more of a back seat in the business but remains as fit as ever and still leads walking safaris to the remote and spectacular Liuwa Plain National Park, 900 miles away in western Zambia.
Where to find him: Robin Pope Safaris.
How to book: Rainbow Tours offers a seven-night safari in the Luangwa Valley, walking from Nkwali to Nsefu or Tena Tena with five nights’ mobile camping in between, from £4,850 [2013 price]. Guiding with Robin Pope costs from £410 [2013 price] extra per day.
Zimbabwe: Steve Edwards
The bear-like owner of Musango – a 12-bed luxury safari camp on an island in Lake Kariba on the edge of the Matusadona National Park – was warden there for many years. He is also chief guide, leading his guests on walking safaris while Wendy, his wife, runs the camp.
He was born in Margate, in Kent, and was only a year old when he came to Southern Rhodesia with his parents in 1955. It was during a school outing that he signed up to join a birdwatching group headed by a national parks warden, and from then on all he wanted to be was a ranger.
This dream came true when he joined the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management in 1972 – its youngest ever recruit – as a cadet ranger based at Victoria Falls. From there he steadily rose through the ranks to the post of provincial warden.
When politics within the department became too much for him, he left to pursue his own career and found himself guiding in the Zambezi Valley, where canoeing and walking in the magnificent Mana Pools and Matusadona national parks convinced him where his future lay. Twenty years ago, he set up his own safari business and finally built Musango – the camp of his dreams.
Here, whether you are tracking black rhino on foot, star-gazing in the clear Kariba skies or sneaking up on a herd of buffalo, a walk with Steve is a revelation. “There is so much more to the bush than what you read about or see on television,” he says. “My job as a guide and wildlife enthusiast is to introduce you to its wonders.”
Having clocked up more than 30 years of guiding in the wild (including a near-death experience with a hippo), he is also a decent photographer and a mad-keen birder. His other abiding passion is palaeontology; he recently discovered a fossil site in Matusadona with four species of dinosaur.
Where to find him: Musango Safari Camp.
How to book: Expert Africa offers a nine-day safari in Zimbabwe, with four nights at Musango Camp and two nights at Bumi Hills, from £3,329 [2013 price].
Namibia: Garth Owen-Smith
With his silver beard and thousand-mile stare, Garth Owen-Smith has the look of a desert prophet, which is not far from the truth: his has been a voice in the wilderness, crying out to protect the Kunene Province thirstlands of north-west Namibia.
For years he fought the ignorance of government officials with their leftover views from South Africa’s apartheid regime as he championed the rights of the indigenous Himba, Herero and Damara people, pursuing his dream of allowing them and their livestock to live in harmony with Namibia’s desert-adapted wildlife.
Those were the days when commercial poaching was rife and elephants and rhinos were being driven close to extinction – a situation that was turned round only when Garth was grudgingly allowed to involve local communities in wildlife conservation. “I felt that involving the local people was the only way to save what wildlife was left,” he says. “They wanted the wildlife but they also wanted to benefit from it, which was fair enough.”
Today, with his partner, Margaret Jacobsohn, he spends much of his time at Wereldsend, a desert oasis whose Afrikaans name translates as World’s End. But every year he leads small groups of clients on what are best described as “limited edition” tours run by Kunene Conservancy Safaris, a community-based organisation involving five Kaokoveld conservancies whose members receive all the company’s profits.
In 12 days he will show you Cape fur seals on the Skeleton Coast, walk you up to rare black rhinos, help you to look for desert-adapted elephants in the Hoanib River Valley, explore Puros Conservancy – home to Himba and Herero pastoralists – and spend time in the remotest part of the country along the wild Kunene River.
For anyone with a passion for the world’s wildest places, a safari in the company of this remarkable man has to be one of the most worthwhile experiences that money can buy.
Where to find him: Kunene Conservancy Safaris.
How to book: The Ultimate Travel Company offers a 14-night Namibian safari in the company of Garth Owen-Smith, staying in the Skeleton Coast, Hoanib River Valley and Etosha National Park, from £4,466 [2013 price].
South Africa: Juan Pinto
The best guide in South Africa? No contest. It has to be Juan Pinto, director and head ranger at Royal Malewane, the glitziest game lodge in the Kruger Lowveld. He works with Wilson Masiya, a master tracker with whom he has developed an almost telepathic understanding over the years, making this keen-eyed duo the finest guiding team in Africa. He was born in Johannesburg, got involved in raptor research in the Kruger National Park while at school and, as soon as his school days were over, headed straight back to the park. Two years after his guiding career began in 1993, he had become head ranger at Thornybush, leading his clients around this 13,000-hectare private wilderness adjoining the Kruger’s western boundary. Here he helped Liz and Phil Biden build Royal Malewane, which opened in 1999 and has been attracting the world’s celebrities ever since.
Besides tracking down the big five for the likes of Elton John and Nicolas Sarkozy, he is a hugely talented photographer and speaks four languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Tonga. He is also the only field guide in South Africa to hold the country’s SKA qualification (Special Knowledge and Skills – Dangerous Game) as well as senior tracker status. All this, plus the ability to wax lyrical about ecology or spell out the grim statistics of rhino poaching while mixing your favourite sundowner cocktail.
Where to find him: Royal Malewane Safari Lodge.
How to book: Audley Travel offers a nine-day South African safari, with four nights at Shumbalala and two days’ guiding with Juan Pinto at Royal Malewane, from £5,140 [2013 price].
South Africa: Pokkie Benadie
Known and respected in conservation circles throughout Africa, Karel (Pokkie) Benadie was born in 1963, on a farm in the Great Karoo – the lonely semi-desert of the Western Cape province. His father worked as a shepherd and his mother was a direct descendant of the Khoi people. His nickname comes from the word kapok, meaning snow in the local Afrikaans dialect, and was chosen because his birthday was the coldest day ever in the Great Karoo, with snow on the ground.
He grew up helping his father look after the sheep, setting traps for predators. This kept him out of school but provided him with an education of a very different kind – learning the ancient art of tracking and the secrets of the veld.
By the time he was 11, he was already venturing into the Karoo by himself, and three years later he joined South Africa National Parks (SANParks), which was in the process of setting up the Karoo National Park and recognised his expertise. In no time, instead of mending fences, he was helping to stock the new park with game.
At the age of 27, he was discovered by Louis Liebenberg, known as “The man who wrote the book” on tracking. With Liebenberg as his mentor, Pokkie soon became a junior tracker and was given the job of following the park’s reclusive and potentially dangerous black rhinos. Three years later he had passed all the tests to become a senior tracker, and after a further 10 years, at the age of 40, became a master tracker – one of only three in the country to be recognised by the Field Guides Association of Southern Africa.
Today he still lives and works in the Great Karoo on the Samara Private Game Reserve with his wife and children. “I’m a happy man,” he declares, “doing what I love best, training young trackers in the skills my father taught me.”
Where to find him: Samara Private Game Reserve.
How to book: Red Savannah offers a seven-night South African safari, staying at the Samara Private Game Reserve, from £2,655 [2013 price].
All prices are per person, and include full-board accommodation (based on two sharing), flights, transfers, guiding and park fees, unless stated.
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