Daily guided game drives and walks are the highlight of any southern African safari. These outings provide the opportunity to see Africa’s most sought-after creatures in their natural environment as well as enjoy unique activities like sundowners or picnics in scenic spots.
Although the animals take centre stage during a game drive, your game guide is certainly the backbone of the experience. A good game guide can transform every excursion into a fascinating showcase of the environment sprinkled with amusing anecdotes and a wealth of knowledge.
What Makes a Safari Guide Tick?
Although anyone can become a safari guide, there are certain characteristics that make some stand out above the others. The main ingredient for any safari guide is an overwhelming passion for Africa’s creatures and conservation and a desire to share this information with others.
A good safari guide can keep you mesmerized by a scrape in the sand, or enthral you for hours with their tales while you wait patiently at a waterhole. This is an amazing feat when you consider that a game guide can achieve their official qualification in under a year of formal study.
During this time, they’ll learn the basic safety procedures involved in guiding, fine-tune their bush driving skills and get plenty of practice in the field. There’s a good deal of book-learning involved in the safari guiding course too, but the best safari guides get most of their knowledge from self-study and experience in the field.
Many of them enjoy a love affair with the wild that started long before they ever signed up for their official safari guiding course. By the time they arrive at their training facility of course, they’ve often accumulated a lifetime’s worth of knowledge already.
The Field Guides Association of Southern Africa (FGASA) is the authority on game guide qualifications for this part of the world and these courses are offered at numerous accredited colleges.
Okavango guiding school in Botswana provides many of the guides for Botswana’s premier lodges and mobile safari operators. One of these is Letaka safaris, where you can share in the experience of game guiding by joining in on a mini guiding course before embarking on your mobile tented safari with Letaka.
If you’d like to fully immerse yourself in the southern African safari experience, get in touch and we’ll arrange it all for you.
