Luxury Africa Safari Review: South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Meno a Kwena Tented Camp, Lebala Camp, Cape Town, Victoria Falls

This is the letter that we wrote to our Africa safari travel agent upon our return. 

On behalf of Jocelyn and I, we send our heartfelt thanks for your exquisite planning of this journey of a lifetime. Each step along the way we praised your choices — from the seamless moving from place to place, to the unusual experiences that awaited from Cape Town to Meno a Kwena. The people we met along the way will be in our hearts forever, and the tastefully appointed hotels and camps will always be a place we can return in our minds to find elegance and simplicity as a way of life.  There is no way this experience would have been as rich without your guidance and care. The camps you chose for us were perfect, as were the daily routines.  What you could never have planned are the extraordinary sightings we were blessed to see.

Just to name some of our wonderful sightings:

• Lions mating, over and over again
• Four lion cubs playing on their own and again chasing their mom as she left them to hunt
• Leopards (on three different occasions)
• Black-backed jackal (2 different camps)
• Hippos out of water in our first camp
• Baby giraffe and a journey of giraffe
• Herds and herds of elephants large and small
• Dazzle of zebra in each camp, troops of baboons beginning in Victoria Falls
• Lions roaring during dinner...
• Elephants that charged one of the other jeeps
• The bird sightings were amazing in each and every camp
• And the list goes on.....

Your guidance in helping us to pack was invaluable and all the guides & pilots commented on our light luggage.  Yet, we had more than enough for the three weeks, and thus were able to bring back gifts.  Your advice on tipping helped enormously and gave us a guideline of how to error on the side of generosity with these amazing people each step of the way.

We highly recommend all of the camps we visited, especially our entry camp of Lebala, where we fell in love with the entire staff and had a room so far away from camp, they told us we were going to Namibia each night as they walked us to our tent.  What an exciting way to begin with hippos outside our tent laughing through the night, birds singing and tortoises moseying around at siesta time.  Meno a Kwena was an ideal ending point.  When we flew into Maun, we bemoaned the fact that our trip was almost over....thus being in this rustic, artistically appointed camp overlooking the Boteti River, where warm water was brought to the outside shower each day where we bathed overlooking the river with either a sunrise or sunset was a magical ending to a trip of a lifetime.

Thank you for all the details you so carefully planned.  My family loved receiving the post cards from our first stop in Cape Town...

With a heart full of gratitude,

M & J