Writing in the first issue of Travel Africa, in 1997, Bill Adams of Safari Consultants asked: “Is the value of travel in Africa determined simply by monetary cost, or by the way it fulfills your soul?” The monetary cost has risen steeply. A well-known tented camp in Kenya’s Masai Mara that cost US$390 per night in 1997 for a double tent in the high season, including full board and game drives, now costs US$1100, not the roughly US$600 one would expect. Commenting 20 years later, Bill Adams remarks: “Maybe ‘safari Africa’ does itself no favours by quoting all-in prices.”
Contributing to such increases, fast-growing economies across Africa have experienced high inflation. While this rise, over the past 20 years, has been around 50 per cent in the USA and around 70 per cent in the UK, in many safari countries it has been 300 per cent or more.
But if prices have zoomed up, there’s also an expanding universe of fulfilling safari options out there-the soul enriching experiences Bill Adams was referring to. You can visit mountain gorillas and desert rhinos; you can walk with baboons, track wild dogs and big cats, and follow on the trail of elephants; you can stay in camps staffed by Maasai warriors from the local community, a hotel devoted to giraffe conservation where they come to your room to be fed, or an increasing number of tree lodges and star-bed camps where you’ll sleep on a platform and awake to that life-affirming African dawn chorus.