“We appreciated having Kane to guide our game drives at Zarafa. Kane was an absolute magician in the bush! One of the highlights of the trip was at Zarafa.

One of the other guests wanted to go out at 3:00 am to travel over two plus hours to an area where he might see wild dogs. We weren’t so keen to get up that early or go that far and, instead, had a wonderful morning closer to the camp with another guide, Rueben. The other guest, John, and Kane, came back saying they’d seen, in addition to some dogs, two leopards in a tree contesting a kill and they wanted the rest of us to go see them. David and Alice, the camp managers, went to heroic measures to get us there as quickly as possible – which involved driving an hour, getting on a boat for five minutes, being met by another vehicle and driving 15 minutes to the “tree”. When we arrived, the leopards had gone. Lots of effort for no result, we thought.

However, on our way back to the boat, we came upon a pack of wild dogs as they set out on their evening “hunt”. We followed them off road and heard the sound of one of them coming across what he hoped would be dinner and the other wild dogs closed in for the kill. But they had come across a honey badger who would have none of their nonsense and quickly, with teeth and growls, dispatched the entire pack of dogs – right by our vehicle! A bit further on we ran into a pack of hyenas! Then, on the other side of the river, back in the other vehicle, we headed off back to Zarafa in the pitch dark with Kane driving and using his torch and, obviously, still “hunting”, he followed tracks, stopped to listen to the herd of impala to see if they were “‘nervous”, followed more tracks, and suddenly drove us off road and right up to within 6 feet of a leopard lying in the grass!

As we said, he was a magician in the bush!”

The Carlson party were recent guests at Zarafa and traveled with Safari Architects