Words & images by Chris Wallace
Freelance Writer and Photographer
Chris explores the intersections of style, culture and character for the likes of Vogue, The New York Times, Departures and The Financial Times.
It may seem, at first, a silly question, but I mean it quite in earnest: what is safari for? Apart from creating the kind of dreamy abstraction that leads one to ask the elemental, perhaps even fundamental, questions like: what is safari for?
If, on the one hand, we generally think of a journey into the bush, to sleep in camps, commune with nature, and see the grand megafauna remaining on this Earth, as a kind of personal saga, a bucket list adventure par excellence—the best and greatest way to escape the real world—well, we’d be right. But if, on the other hand, we consider that the so-called real world from which we escape to go on safari isn’t necessarily the natural order of things, and that a trip to the geological swirl of the Rift Valley, say, to the neighbourhood where it is believed that we all grew up, genetically speaking, might that not be more like a return, then, a kind of coming home?