Last autumn, a guest asked me a question I couldn’t immediately answer.
We were sitting at the fire after dinner, the flames pulling light from our faces and giving it back as shadow. She had visited three different safari camps in as many weeks – each beautiful, each promising transformation – and yet something felt absent. She couldn’t name it, but she knew it was missing.
“What protects the real thing?” she finally asked. “In a world where wilderness is becoming a luxury product, what keeps safari from becoming just… a really nice hotel with animals nearby?”
I’ve been asked versions of this question more times than I can count. It surfaces in quiet moments on the back of a Land Rover, in long debates with colleagues, and most often around fires when the bush seems to lean in and listen. After nearly forty years of living and working in the safari world – growing up in it, being shaped by it, watching it evolve – I’ve gathered some thoughts. Not proclamations, but musings from someone who has spent a lifetime paying attention to how wilderness shapes people, and how people, in turn, shape wilderness.
This is where my mind goes. I offer it humbly, honestly, and with deep gratitude for the land and lineage that taught me to see.
The Quiet Truth About Champagne
There’s a region in France where, for centuries, families have tended the same slopes. Only there, on that specific chalk-rich limestone holding rain and sun like a living archive, can true Champagne be born. The French understood early that the alchemy was never just in the bubbles. It was in the terroir – that untranslatable word meaning the way place, memory, and human devotion fuse over time to create something that cannot exist anywhere else.
It’s the cool climate forcing grapes to grow slowly, revealing character.
It’s the limestone holding centuries like a ledger.
It’s generations of families who poured not just labor but frequency into the soil – their instincts, their devotion, their particular way of listening to what the land needed.
Because of this deep, layered resonance, the region earned protection. Only wine born of that soil, through those hands, across that time, may carry the name Champagne. Everything else – however bright the bubbles, however fine the taste – is simply sparkling wine.
I return to this truth often when reflecting on safari. Today, wilderness and wellness are fashionable. New lodges rise quickly, often beautifully. Chains arrive with confidence and capital. Yet the principle remains:
Place is not a backdrop. Place is a living force. And the human and animal spirit layered into that place across decades becomes what makes it unrepeatable – a vintage that cannot be rushed, replicated, or bought.
Time: The One True Luxury
In an age of instant everything – instant booking, instant connection, instant transformation – time remains the single thing that cannot be manufactured or accelerated. And intimacy with place, real intimacy, requires time.
Not weeks. Not months. Decades. Generations.
This is what distinguishes certain landscapes. Some places are merely looked at. Others are lived into – slowly, attentively, reverently – until the land itself becomes layered with what Indigenous peoples have always known: memory lives in landscape, and landscape lives in us.
At Londolozi, four generations have walked the same paths, watched the same leopard lineages unfold, known the same marula trees as old companions. Over more than a century, the land has absorbed the frequency of those who have cared for it – the laughter and hardship, the devotion and prayers, the stories told under lantern light, the quiet attention paid to a single spoor at dawn.
That energy doesn’t dissipate. It settles. It gathers. It becomes part of the soil’s vocabulary.
You can sense it when a tracker places his hand on fresh tracks – not just reading sign but greeting relationship. You feel it when staff speak of animals the way others speak of elders – with familiarity earned across decades of shared territory. You taste it in meals prepared from recipes carried forward by memory, not manuals.
This layering – this slow alchemy of human attention meeting wild presence – creates what I’ve come to think of as frequency.
What Frequency Means
Frequency, in this sense, isn’t mystical speculation. It’s the measurable resonance created when the same people return to the same place with the same quality of attention, year after year, generation after generation.
It’s what accumulates when your grandfather taught your father to read spoor, and your father taught you, and now you’re teaching your daughter – all of you walking the same drainage line, tending to the same fig tree, tracking descendants of the same leopard your father first found in 1979.
It’s the bandwidth of understanding that opens when you’ve watched a landscape through forty rainy seasons and forty droughts, when you know which waterholes hold longest and which acacia groves the elephants favor in August, when you’ve buried family under that hill and named your children after that river.
Scientists might call it intergenerational ecological knowledge. Indigenous wisdom keepers might call it ancestral memory. I simply know that places touched by this kind of sustained devotion feel different.
You sense it with your nervous system before your mind can name it.
You feel held, known, part of something both ancient and immediate.
This is what cannot be replicated – not by speed, not by design, not by capital, not by global branding.
Because frequency, like terroir, can only be earned.
Why Chains Can’t Reach This Depth (and Why Some Shouldn’t Try)
Let me be clear: chain hospitality brings real value. Beautiful design, reliable systems, accessibility, innovation that family-run places sometimes resist. Some of the most thoughtful conservation work I’ve witnessed has come from well-resourced corporate partnerships.
But – and this is the essential distinction – they cannot bring lineage. They cannot bring the specific resonance that grows only when people don’t just work the land but belong to it, when staff aren’t employees but custodians carrying forward something larger than their tenure.
A safari is not a hotel room with a view of animals.
It’s a relationship – between land, lineage, and the people who interpret wild presence for you.
And that relationship requires apprenticeship measured in decades, not training programs measured in months.
Here’s what I’ve noticed: at the places that have earned their name – the true Champagnes of safari – the tracker doesn’t just show you leopard. He shows you the Three Rivers female, daughter of the Xidulu female, granddaughter of the Sunset Bend female, and he speaks of them the way you might speak of neighbours whose lives have intersected with yours across years of shared experience. The difference is palpable.
A Moment That Shows the Difference
Let me offer you a scene from last month.
We’d been tracking the Nkuwa female leopard for two hours through dense riverine thicket. Andrea Sithole – who has worked this land for twenty years – suddenly stopped, crouched, and placed both hands flat on a track in the sand. He stayed there, silent, for perhaps thirty seconds.
When he stood, he said quietly:
“This is her grandmother’s crossing. She used to wait in that jackalberry before ambushing impala. she’s doing the same thing now, generations later. The memory is in the path.”
It wasn’t mysticism. It was knowledge earned through decades of attention to this specific drainage, these specific leopards, this specific conversation between predator and prey and place that has unfolded here since before Andrea was born.
No training manual teaches that. No professional development course delivers it. It emerges only from being here – fully, faithfully, across seasons and years – until the land’s patterns become legible and you can read relationship in a footprint.
This is the vintage that cannot be rushed.
This is what you taste when you visit places with terroir.
The Lineage Thread: What Persists Across Generations
There’s a profound parallel I’ve come to recognize: the way we track leopard dynasties mirrors how we must maintain human knowledge systems. Both are forms of intergenerational intimacy with place.
When the Nkuwa female disappears and her daughter establishes territory, we wont start fresh. We carry forward everything we learned from watching her mother, her grandmother, her line. The knowledge compounds. The relationship deepens. The story becomes richer because it’s continuous.
Raised as an intact litter, first in 7 years, who has now made her own history by raising two males to independence as an intact litter.
The same holds for how humans inhabit wilderness. At family-held places like Londolozi – and many others across Africa worth seeking out – hospitality becomes inheritance. Stories become connective tissue. People become custodians rather than employees rotating through. A camp becomes what I’ve started calling a soulscape rather than merely property.
The families who build these places pour themselves into the land the way vignerons pour themselves into vineyards. Each generation leaves a layer – of care, of learning, of devotion, of hard-won understanding – that deepens the flavor of what guests eventually experience.
The question each generation faces is the same:
How do we honor what came before while adapting to what’s needed now?
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s stewardship. It’s knowing that the choices you make today will echo in your grandchildren’s relationship with this place.
The Paradox at the Heart of It All
Here’s where complexity lives: safari tourism exists in a delicate paradox.
These places require visitors to survive financially. Conservation at scale isn’t free. Local communities need sustainable income. Wildlife protection demands resources. Yet visitors – even the most conscious ones – bring pressure to the very thing that makes these places extraordinary.
How do you welcome the world without diluting what makes the place worth welcoming the world to?
The authentic camps navigate this knife’s edge through what I’d call regenerative presence – the understanding that impact isn’t neutral. You’re either contributing more than you extract, or you’re slowly diminishing the source.
This means difficult choices: vehicle limits even when demand is high, areas left untraveled even when guests want access, saying no to expansion even when investors are ready, investing in staff development across decades even when staff turnover would be cheaper, protecting land beyond your borders even when it costs more than it returns.
It means recognizing that authenticity requires sacrifice – the willingness to protect what matters most even when it limits growth.
And woven into all of this, inseparable from everything else, lives this truth: the protection of land and the wellbeing of wildlife must come first. Not as marketing language but as operating principle. The privilege of safari carries responsibility – to ensure our presence holds reverence, that we contribute to flourishing rather than depletion, that we don’t displace the very life we come to witness.
Authenticity begins with alignment. Alignment begins with care.
The places that honor their terroir know this in their bones.
Returning to the Fire
The guest who asked me that question is still sitting across from me in my memory. The fire has burned lower. Someone has added wood. Sparks rise toward stars that feel closer here than anywhere else I know.
I realize now what I should have told her:
Seek the Champagne.
Not because other places lack beauty or value or heart, but because in an era of infinite choices, discernment becomes devotion.
Look for the places where lineage persists. Where staff carry decades, not months. Where the land has been tended, not merely occupied. Where stories are lived, not performed. Where conservation isn’t marketing but mandate. Where the leopards are known as individuals, not sightings. Where hospitality emerges from inheritance, not implementation.
Look for the frequency – that subtle but unmistakable resonance that tells you this place has been loved long and well.
You’ll know it when you feel it.
Not with your mind, but deeper. A settling. A recognition. A sense of coming home to something you didn’t know you’d been missing.
An Invitation to Choose Well
The heart of African travel isn’t only about where you go, but how you choose to go – and why. Safari is not a neutral act. It has impact. Your presence shapes what persists. So I offer this gentle invitation: Do your research. Look deeply into the places you’re considering.
Ask who they are across time, not just in this moment. Ask how they serve their communities. Ask how they steward their land. Ask how they navigate the paradox of welcoming visitors while protecting what makes visitation worthwhile. Ask whether the experience has been lived into over generations or merely built for this season’s trend. Ask about lineage – not to fetishize age but to understand commitment. Ask what they’re protecting and what they’re willing to sacrifice to protect it.
Seek the places that pay it forward, that honour their terroir, that contribute more than they consume, that offer you something genuinely earned through time.
Because when you choose well – with intention, discernment, and curiosity – you help protect the very thing that makes safari so extraordinary. You become part of the living thread that keeps wild Africa shining in its truest form.
You become, in your own way, part of the vintage.
In the end, perhaps it’s simple:
You can drink sparkling wine anywhere. But Champagne – real Champagne – can only be found in the places that earned the name. And once you’ve tasted true terroir, you’ll recognize it forever.
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on The Champagne Of Safari