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Guides are the key to a great safari experience. They’re the experts in the bush, and their familiarity with the terrain and wildlife behaviour alike helps increase your odds of spotting the animals you most hope to see. A great guide can even become a friend; there’s lots of time to get to know each other over the course of hours-long game drives, coffee breaks, and sundowners.
Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work out so nicely. Personalities can clash, and you may not “click” with one guide as well as you did with another, but we’re all human, and this is normal. Where things take a turn for the worse is when a guide starts to prioritise their own goals over those of the guest. If there’s something to prove, be it to you or to themselves, game drives can become less about enjoying nature and more of a single-minded quest.
As you may have deduced, yes, I’m speaking from experience. I won’t name and shame the guide, the camp, nor even the particular concession, but I did have the unpleasant experience of being matched with a guide whose strategy in the field did not align with mine. While I make it a point to go into any safari with an open mind and deference to my guide – they’re the experts, after all – I do hope, at the very least, for reciprocity when it comes to listening.
Things started fine. The guide met me at an airstrip, and we had the usual back-and-forth exchanges about where I’d just been, how long he was with his previous guests, and what to expect during the drive to camp. As guides often do, he asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to see during my stay. I knew that roan antelope could be in this area, so I mentioned I’d love to see them if possible, but I emphasised that I’m just happy to be in the bush and prefer to let the days unfold as they will. Then I made the passing comment that ended up being my mistake: I added, very casually, that “seeing a leopard might be nice.”
My guide latched onto these words as though I’d offered him a brand new car if he could track down the big cat. He immediately began a monologue about how the leopards in this concession are extremely habituated and don’t hide from vehicle noise, how they’re seen nearly every day, and how he’s the best guide around and has 20-plus years of experience, so if anyone can track a leopard, it’s him.
Going off-road is allowed in this concession, and my guide took that to heart – too much so, in my opinion. He regularly veered off the path to plough through patches of brush, sometimes mowing down bushes or small trees with the 4×4. “Leopards are usually in this area,” he kept saying during our drive the next morning. “I don’t understand why I’m not finding one.”
I told him several times that a leopard was not a must and that we should just drive around and see what else we can find. “I don’t give up,” he said, ignoring my request to move on. His speeding around and crashing through foliage in a large, loud vehicle felt incredibly disruptive, and I told him that I didn’t want to find a leopard like this. The whole thing felt deeply unethical.
My dissatisfaction turned to anger when, once again off-road, my seat unexpectedly dropped out from underneath me. I flew up into the air and landed hard on the aluminium water bottle that stood in the steel centre console next to my seat. My tailbone took the full brunt of the impact just before my ankle smashed into the frame of the seat in front of me. The guide had driven into a burrow camouflaged by tall grass. He couldn’t see the hole and didn’t know it was there until the right front tire fell into it, which certainly wasn’t on purpose, but had he stuck to the roads instead of aggressively driving near wooded areas, it never would have happened. At the time of this writing, months later, I’m still dealing with tailbone pain.
But it’s not just the reckless off-roading and obsessive focus on finding a leopard that frustrated me about this guide. He lacked awareness of when I was taking photos, often driving off as I still had my camera to my eye. He wasn’t bothered about disrupting animals, and in one instance, he kept repositioning the vehicle so frantically around a herd of elephants on the move that I soon asked him to simply leave them alone. He shared no information at all about the birds, mammals, and plants we encountered. And he just would not listen when I told him I didn’t need to see a leopard, only doubling down on his insistence that he was trying his best to find this animal.
On my final morning, we spotted roan antelopes. They were mercifully near the airstrip, and I was pleased to have found the long-eared creatures and to be in my final hour with this guide. As I was taking photos, he got word of a leopard sighting about ten minutes from where we were. He asked if I wanted to try our luck, but I was so fed up with his obsession that I said I’d prefer to stay with the antelope. “Let’s just try,” he said instead and sped off towards the reported location. Part of me hoped we wouldn’t see a leopard because I knew this guide would make it about himself.
There was a cat, though. Two of them, in fact, were slinking through the underbrush as we joined two other vehicles. I was able to snap a few photos before they disappeared from view, and we drove back towards the airstrip. The gloating began immediately. “I knew it! Didn’t I tell you we would see one on your last morning? Now you can go home and tell everyone that you looked and looked for a leopard and your guide came through at the last minute. He found you a leopard.” He went on like this, praising himself in the third person until it was time for my flight. I’ve never been so relieved to part ways with a safari guide.
I wish I could conclude this tale with advice on how to ensure you get a terrific guide on your next safari, but unless you’re a return guest or have a trusted referral and know who to ask for, it’s a matter of the draw. Fortunately, most guides are terrific and committed to operating ethically in the bush. As for the outliers? Well, at least they become a good story.
