There are guides who know the bush. There are guides who understand it. And there are guides — very few, across a lifetime of searching — who appear to be genuinely at home within it, reading landscape and animal behaviour with an ease that suggests some deeper calibration. Alan Elliott is of the third kind.

Alan began guiding in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, a period when the country’s professional safari industry was being forged from the raw material of the professional hunting tradition. He founded Touch the Wild — one of Zimbabwe’s original photographic safari operations — and spent decades building operations in Hwange, Matobo Hills, and the Zambezi Valley. His guests have included presidents, wildlife photographers whose images have defined the popular understanding of African wildlife, and thousands of ordinary travellers whose lives were changed by an encounter with the Zimbabwe bush guided by a man who knew exactly what he was showing them.

What This Means For Your Safari

When you book a ZimTravellers safari, you are accessing a network of relationships and knowledge built over four decades of professional guiding in Zimbabwe. We know which guides in Mana Pools are extraordinary. We know which Hwange concession is producing the best wild dog sightings this season. We know which rock art sites in Matobo are currently accessible. We know these things because we live here, and we have been working here — in the case of Alan Elliott — since before most of our guests were born. That is the ZimTravellers difference. Not a promise. A provenance.