Escape Safari Co.

Home
South Africa
Cape Town
Escape Safari Co.

Escape Safari Co. is an African Safari Specialist. We specialise in tailor-made luxury safaris around the African continent.

05/11/2026

Some photographs don’t need a caption. This is one of them.

Inspired by curiosity.

Come ESCAPE with us.

20/10/2026

There's a moment, sitting with meerkats, when they stop treating you as something to watch and start treating you as part of the landscape.

At Tswalu, in the southern Kalahari, you settle on the red sand near the burrow just after sunrise, camera in your lap and wait. The colony emerges in its own time. A few stand and turn to face the sun. One climbs onto a log to keep watch. Slowly, the distance between you and them stops mattering.

Photographing them changes the way you look. To be at their eye level, you have to get down into the sand, hold still, and let them come into the frame rather than chasing the shot. You start to notice the light catching their fur, the way the sentinel turns its head at every shadow overhead, the small exchanges between them you'd never see standing up.

It's one of the few safari experiences where the best seat is on the ground, at eye level, with a camera in your lap and nowhere else to be.

19/10/2026

Find a fresh leopard track with a drag mark beside it and two things happen at once. The tracker reads the sand. The guide looks up.

A leopard can haul a carcass heavier than itself several metres into a tree. Up there, it's safer from lions and hyenas, and a single kill can keep her fed for days.

That makes a tree with a kill in it one of the most interesting things you can find on safari.

Come back at dawn and she may be feeding. Come back at midday and she's draped over a branch, tail hanging loose. Come back at dusk and she's watching the ground below as the bush comes alive again.

A good tracker reads her the same way they read a track. A tail hanging loose and still. A sudden twitch at the tip. A shift in her gaze. A squirrel alarm-calling from the next tree. Each one says something about what's happening around her.

Moments like this are seldom stumbled across. They come down to the art of tracking, and to a guide and tracker team who know that bush and each other, working from the right lodge in the right area. That's what we plan around. The tracker finds the story. The guide puts you in the right place to watch it unfold, for as long as it takes.

08/10/2026

Thirty-one lions, one waterhole, and thousands of zebra with no choice but to walk past them.

In the Grumeti Reserves, on the western edge of the Serengeti, there is a pride of lions called the Butamtam pride: ten females, seventeen cubs and four dominant males.

We stayed at Sasakwa in early September this year. By this time of year the migration herds are usually far to the north, crossing into the Maasai Mara. But a natural waterhole on the plains below Sasakwa was keeping tens of thousands of zebra and wildebeest right where they were.

A pride this size needs sustenance every day. This time, the food had come to them.

One afternoon we found a male lying near the water and followed him as he walked to join his brother. The two of them lay down together as the light turned gold. All around them, thousands of zebra were moving in a slow, wide circle to reach the water, close enough to keep the lions in sight but never close enough to give them a chance.

The lions didn't move. They didn't need to. They waited for dark. Every morning we went out, the pride had made a kill in the night. One day it was four wildebeest, another day a buffalo.

A dry year can change where the animals are. Knowing when it's happening, and where to sit when it does, is the difference between reading about a pride like this and spending an evening with it at the water's edge.

Inspired by curiosity.

Come ESCAPE with us.

04/10/2026

Hot air ballooning is nothing like anyone expects. As the sun rises, so do you. The ground simply disappears beneath you. No lurch, no rush of air, no engine. In truth, it doesn't even feel like you're moving.

And one of the best places to do it? Namibia's Sossusvlei and Swakopmund regions.

As the morning light arrives, one face of every dune turns copper, the other stays in shadow, and the desert becomes a set of long curved lines running away from you in every direction. Dunes over three hundred metres high. Gravel plains reaching to the Nubib mountains. The shadow of your own balloon travelling across the sand somewhere below.

You move at exactly the speed of the wind, so there's no wind either. Just the burner every few minutes, then the quiet again.

An hour later you come down somewhere out in the middle of it, and breakfast is already set under a camel thorn with the day barely started.

01/10/2026

There are a handful of star beds in Africa we recommend without hesitating. Ruckomechi Camp, on the Zambezi floodplain in Mana Pools, is one of them.

Here's what it is. A wooden platform built into a tree about a kilometre from camp, in Mana Pools. Your guide drives you out after dinner and sleeps in a dome tent a little way off, within shouting distance.

Made up with a proper bed on a raised deck out in the reserve, and all the comforts of your usual room. Two beds with more pillows and blankets than you'll need, armchairs facing out into the dark, a loo and a basin.

With no traffic and no neighbours, sound in Mana carries further than you expect. Whoops, giggles, a shriek, then quiet, then all of it again.

For one night you hear Mana Pools the way the animals in it hear each other. Then you climb down at first light and you're back on the deck at Ruckomechi with a coffee before the day has started.

Photo credit:

23/09/2026

We tend to think of safari as something that happens only happens on land.

But for us, safari has never really been about the vehicle, or even the destination. It is about curiosity. About stepping into wild places and allowing yourself to become completely present in them and that sometimes means going beneath the surface.

The Indian Ocean offers an entirely different expression of the same experience. You enter a world where you are no longer simply looking in from the outside. Your pace changes. Your senses shift. Everything else seems to disappear, and for a while, your attention belongs entirely to the natural under water world around you.

At Alphonse in the Seychelles, that feeling is particularly powerful. Remote, wild and surrounded by an extraordinary intact marine ecosystem, it reminds us that some of Africa’s greatest wilderness experiences aren’t always found on land.

That is what we are ultimately searching for when we travel and plan travel. Not simply somewhere beautiful, but experiences that pull us out of the everyday and reconnect us with something much bigger than ourselves.

Above the surface or beneath it, the instinct is the same.

Inspired by curiosity.

Come ESCAPE with us.

19/09/2026

The best sightings aren't always the ones you happen upon. Some of them you have to wait out.

On a recent safari to Namiri Plains, in the eastern Serengeti, an area known for its “kopjes”: granite boulders pushing up out of flat grassland.

We had spent time with a resident female leopard on a kill in the grasslands not far from camp. An incredible experience in itself.

But what really had our attention, was a rumour that she had a cub hidden away at Soit le Motonyi, a kopje nearby.

Kopjes are a favourite of big cats raising cubs. Their cracks create safety, shade through the heat, and a clear view of anything approaching. A leopard raises her cubs alone, so in order to hunt she has to leave it alone, sometimes for a couple of days.

She the leopard had abandoned her kill, we knew she would return to the cub. So later that day, we drove to the rocks and sat. Nothing. We went back and sat again. Nothing.

At sunrise the following morning, we knew our plan - and like clockwork, she had returned. The cub came out of those rocks like it had been counting the hours for her return. All legs and no coordination. She let it feed, and after that it simply could not leave her alone.

Bouncing off her, swiping at her face, climbing on her while she sat and took it. She'd been gone roughly two days, and it showed.

We were the ones who found her. We went back a few times after that, and at every one of those sightings, it was just us and them.

That's what a privately guided safari actually buys you. Not a guaranteed sighting but the freedom to drive out on a rumour, trust the process, test your patience and let nature reward you.

16/09/2026

Some of the best moments on safari are moments of tranquillity, anticipation and excitement, when you can truly hear and feel the natural world around you. No engine. Just a guide, a scout and the sound of your own footsteps.

In a vehicle, you sit just outside the wilderness, looking in. On foot, you become part of it, sharing the same space as everything around you, tuned to the same sounds, signals and rhythm.

On the Lower Zambezi floodplain, the morning is still. Soft light filters through the winterthorns and the river slides quietly past. Walking slows everything down, and the details come alive. A track pressed into the sand. A feather caught in the grass. The flattened patch where something spent the night. Your guide reads each sign, piecing together a story that played out before you arrived.

Then an alarm call breaks the silence. Everyone freezes. You listen. You notice the wind. You become aware of every step. Up ahead, a branch snaps. Elephants.

You find a place to sit, low and still, and wait. Minutes stretch. You can feel your own heartbeat. When they appear, your whole sense of scale shifts. From a vehicle, elephants are impressive. On foot, they are immense. You find yourself looking up. You hear the tear of grass, the creak of a branch giving way, the deep rumble as they call to one another, and you notice how softly something so large moves.
Nothing stands between you and Africa's largest land animal.

This is no longer a sighting. It is an encounter. You are a guest in their space, and every part of you feels it. They feed around you, unhurried, and move on when they are ready, not when you are.

Peace and adrenaline, held in the same breath.

Disconnected from everything else. Reconnected to this.

Inspired by your Curiosity? Come ESCAPE with us.

11/09/2026

In the early hours just before sunrise, the landscape is silent. Dead quiet. And then you hear it. A lion’s roar breaking through kilometres of stillness. Raw, primal, and nothing like the movies teach us.

When you're close enough, you don’t just hear it, you feel it. The vibration moves through the air, through the earth beneath you. It's a sound that stays with you long after the roaring stops and the silence returns.

Those who are lucky enough to ever experience it will never forget it. How it sounds, or how it feels.

Address

11 Imam Haron Road, Claremont
Cape Town
7708

Website

http://www.escapesafarico.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Escape Safari Co. posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.