SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 155

“They could have been scratching their horns here,” the guide says, pointing to an
8-foot-high cone-shaped termite hill. “The male impala has scent shards in his hooves. His
footprints leave his musk scent for females to follow.”
Further ahead was the impala dung and signs, according to the guide, that a leopard
had been rolling in the heap. “The leopard does this to disguise his scent. He wants to
smell like an impala when he hunts for antelope.”
So much to learn from dung! Lifting our eyes, we caught glimpses of the sharp-beaked
kingfisher and then, as the four-hour walk was coming to an end, I saw the African hoopoe,
a cousin of my favorite bird of India. He had the silhouette and similar coloring, with
a black-tipped orange crest that waved like a ceremonial turban. Then I heard his faint
plaintive cry of hoop-hoop, hoop-hoop-hoop . I was happy to go back to breakfast.
Waiting for me was Andy Hogg, the Zambian founder and director of the Bushcamp
Company. Before I had a chance to say a word, Hogg turned to me and asked, “Did you
really see a sable yesterday?”
I laughed and said I had never even heard of such an animal before yesterday, and then
I described what I saw, including the shock of seeing that dramatic mask of a face at dusk.
“That's a sable,” he said. “That's good news. We rarely see them in this park.”
Hogg is a member of a small fraternity of European-Africans that forms the backbone
of much of the international safari tourism business. No matter the difficulties of their po-
sition, especially as white Africans, these men and women seem attached by their roots to
the parks of south and east Africa. Hogg was born in the Copperbelt of Zambia in 1964
when it was still known as Northern Rhodesia. His father was an Anglo-American busi-
nessman and his mother a schoolteacher. “We lived near the swamps with herds of lechwe
antelopes and shoebill storks,” said Hogg by way of explaining his attachment to the land
here and why he can't seem to leave.
After independence a wave of nationalism swept through Zambia and much of the
economy became state-owned. Facing financial ruin, Hogg's family left in the 1980s and
moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. Hogg finished his schooling in Cape Town and re-
ceived a certificate in hotel management from the local Protea hotel chain. With those
qualifications he hoped to return home to Zambia and land a job in a safari camp.
Thanks to his Uncle Jerry, Hogg got his foot in the door with an entry-level position at
the safari camp and resort of the legendary Norman Carr, one of the founding fathers of
the African national park system.
Carr was the role model for Hogg and countless other young safari entrepreneurs. He
practically invented the business. Born in East Africa in 1912, Norman Carr lived during
the height of colonial life—great wealth and decadence—immortalized in the true-crime
book White Mischief . Carr reveled in his colonial privileges as a game warden. He loved to
hunt and on his twentieth birthday he proudly killed his fiftieth elephant. A decade later,
at the start of World War II, Carr's life changed forever. He served in North Africa as an