My father advised me to leave safari before I came back to it.
I was twenty-two. I had completed my field guide qualifications in the Greater Kruger, I was tracking lion on foot in the Timbavati, and I thought I knew the bush as well as anyone my age. My father looked at what I was doing and said: 'You know this place. You don't yet know what this place is for. Go and see some other worlds first, then come back.'
He had climbed Everest twice by then. He had walked to both poles. He had seen things that most people only read about. When he told me to go and see other worlds, I listened.
I spent four years in technology. Then in finance. Then in operations consulting. I learned how to build systems, how to run teams, how to read a business the way a tracker reads a game path — looking for the friction, the wear patterns, the signs of where something has been going too long in the wrong direction.
When I came back to safari, I was a different guide. I could see the industry the way an outsider sees it, and what I saw was an industry that ran on fragmented systems, that frequently did not reflect the Africa it was supposed to celebrate, and that was — in the most important ways — not telling the right stories.
My father's Africa is vertical. It is the summit of Everest at 8,849 metres. It is the South Pole at 90 degrees south. It is the Uhuru Peak at 5,895 metres. His relationship to landscape is the relationship of someone who has stood above it and understood it from the highest possible vantage.
My Africa is horizontal. It is the Lowveld at ground level. The Limpopo Valley. The northern Delta. The private concessions of the western Kruger where the land is still wild and the paths are not on any tourist map. My relationship to landscape is the relationship of someone who has followed it for years, on foot, at ground level, in the company of animals that are not afraid of people who move carefully.
Together, we have both planes. Vertical and horizontal. Altitude and latitude. The summit and the savannah.
I did not understand, when I came back to safari, that the thing my father had given me was not just permission to leave. It was a way of seeing. He gave me the mountains — their lesson of endurance, of preparation, of patience in extreme conditions — and I brought those back to the bush. Where they belong.