Safari Holidays: A Brief History Part One
Written by Kirsty on 29/01/09, filed under General, Namibia Safari, South Africa Safari | No Comments“Safari Holidays”. Adventure, excitement, spectacle or romance? Here at Africa Sky we’ll tailor make a Safari experience that will include all those elements if you wish. To us, a Safari Holiday is a journey of the mind and body. It’s a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and emotions that should leave indelible memories. But how did it all start?
Safari has it roots in Arabic via Swahili and means “to make a journey”. Originally, Safaris were essentially trade missions seeking ivory, rhino horn, and slaves. With the coming of Europeans, the Safari began to be associated with exploration and the discovery. And those early European Safaris were huge operations that involved armies of staff and crew along with supplies and weapons. They blazed a trail for scientific safaris by Stanley and Livingstone or Burton and Speke. Many explorers never returned alive. Disease, starvation or death was part of the early African Safari experience.
African Safaris were trendy too. The novels of Rider Haggard, such as King Solomon’s Mines, introduced Allan Quatermain and the African Safari to an entirely new Victorian audience. Inevitably, along with great naturalists and men of science came the hunters. The European colonial ethic was to rule and dominate the people, the mineral resources and the wildlife. The Safari became synonymous with the “Hunt”. Conquering the wild beast and returning with trophies became the Safari’s entire purpose. Great White Hunters like Cornwallis Harris and Frederick Courtenay Selous prospered and by 1850 they were killing 30,000 elephant a year in East Africa. Gradually, this attitude changed. Those same hunters realised that the wildlife they were slaughtering was a finite resource. The first seeds of a conservation ethic were planted.
In our next posting we’ll look at how the Safari Changed to become closer the the experience we know today..
On the eastern boundary of the Etosha National Park in Namibia lies Onguma Game Reserve; and within this reserve are four 
Game drives both day and night within Onguma Reserve are offered to guests staying at any of the four camps, and excursions into the national park itself are also popular and reward guest with sightings of the abundant wildlife of the park; however the main emphasis at the Tree Top Camp is on walking. The guide that is resident at the camp has been fully trained to walk guests in an area where potentially dangerous animals inhabit so walking safaris can be offered in the morning and afternoon. A walk in the African bush offers a break from the norm of the usual routine of game drive after game drive and the chance to enjoy the smaller aspects of nature often ignored on drives: – Birds and their calls, animal tracks and tracking, trees, plants and their medicinal properties. Should you wish to see the large mammals of the reserve then there is no better place to see these animals than from the viewing deck at the camp or from your chalet.
Safari ventures often market themselves as Eco Tourism ventures, though many of them fail to live up to that claim. One camp that does justify that status is Desert Rhino Camp in North West Namibia. The camp is run in conjunction with the Save the Rhino Trust, an NGO that has been operating in the Palmwag concession of Namibia for nearly a quarter of a century; and some of the proceeds from your stay will be channelled into this trust. The Black Rhino population within the concession are probably the last remaining Black Rhino to be living in a completely free, unfenced area, and without the protection of the trust’s dedicated community game guards would more than likely become extinct within a short period of time.
