There is travel, and then there is the first time you sit in an open vehicle at dawn, coffee going cold in your hands, while an elephant decides — unhurried, enormous, utterly indifferent to your schedule — to cross the track in front of you. People come home from safari and struggle to explain it. The word they reach for most often is "changed."

Africa is one of my true specialties, and I'll tell you plainly: no trip I plan depends more on planning. On safari, three decisions determine nearly everything, and none of them can be Googled with confidence.

The first is where and when — because Africa is not one place. The Great Migration thunders through the Serengeti and the Masai Mara on a calendar written by rain. Botswana's Okavango Delta floods into a green labyrinth in one season and dries to golden game country in another. South Africa pairs malaria-free reserves (a genuine gift for families) with Cape Town and the winelands. Kenya layers savanna with culture; Rwanda holds the gorillas in its misted hills. The right answer depends on your month, your dreams, and who's coming.

The second is the camp. Not the country, not the park — the camp. A safari lived from an intimate tented camp with twelve guests, where dinner is under the stars and a lion's call carries through the canvas, is a different universe from a large lodge, even in the same reserve. I match you to camps the way I match clients to hotels in Paris: by soul, not by star count.

The third is the guide, because on safari the guide is the difference between seeing animals and understanding them. The camps I work with employ the guides other guides talk about.

My job wraps around all of it: the flying-doctor logistics and light-aircraft transfers, the honest conversation about seasons and budgets (a spectacular safari exists at more price points than people assume — the trick is knowing where luxury matters and where wilderness is the luxury), the pairing of safari with Cape Town, Victoria Falls, or a barefoot beach finale in Zanzibar or the Seychelles. And the timeline: the best small camps book out a year or more ahead, especially for migration season and honeymoons.

If Africa is on your list — and it tends to sit at the very top, patiently — let's give it a date.