We’ve Been Quiet. Here’s Why, and What’s Next.

If you’ve been following Escape for a while, you might have noticed we’ve been quiet. No steady stream of posts, no regular updates. And we want to be upfront about why.

The honest answer is that we’ve been busy. Properly busy, doing the thing we actually exist to do: safaris. The business has grown, and as it has, our focus has stayed exactly where it’s always been: making sure every detail is dialled in and every guest has a safari worth remembering. As much as we love the creative side of this business (and we really do, Mike and I especially), content creation is time-consuming, and when things get busy it slips down the priority list. We’d rather go quiet online than let something slip on the ground.

And what a privilege this stretch has been. We’ve been fortunate to explore, guide, and host individuals, couples, families, and groups right across Southern and East Africa, and our own curiosity has carried us far beyond it. We’ve tracked snow leopards in the Himalayas. Some of us have run around Mont Blanc, hiked the Pondo Trail, and chased ski lines in America. We’ve dived with millions of sardines, and been lucky enough to see pangolins, tigers, and black leopards.

Most importantly, we’ve shared all of it, the places across our continent that we’re so passionate about, with people we love and people we’ve come to love along the way. We’ve genuinely enjoyed each and every person who’s travelled with us, and that, more than anything, is what’s pulled us back to wanting to share again.

But enough about where we’ve been. Here’s what’s new.

A New Website

Today we’re launching our new website. It’s been a long project for a small team, and we’re proud of it.

To be clear, we loved our old site. It was a brochure in the best sense. Every image on it was our own, taken on our own travels and our guests’ journeys, and that mattered to us. It still does. Nothing on the new site is stock, and nothing is borrowed. What you see is what we’ve seen.

But we’ve outgrown the brochure. The new site is the first step towards something bigger: a genuine resource for anyone who wants to learn about safari. Not just where we can take you, but the honest, practical knowledge that helps you make the right decision. Where to go, when to go, what a destination is really like in green season versus dry, and how to tell the difference between travel that gives back and travel that just looks like it does. That guidance comes from first-hand experience, not from a search engine, and we want to share it openly, whether you end up travelling with us or not.

You’ll also see this blog come back to life. We want to use it to share where we’re going as a business, what we’re learning along the way, and the things we’ve already learned that are worth passing on. What you see today is just the beginning. The site will go through a few more evolutions over the next six to twelve months, and each one will add more depth, more destinations, and more of the practical guidance we wish every traveller had before booking a safari.

What Guides Us

If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s the same one that’s run through Escape from the start: we are inspired by our curiosity. It’s why we started this business, and it’s what still gets us onto a plane, into a hide at 4am, or up a mountain we have no business being on.

That curiosity comes with a responsibility. Ethical, responsible travel isn’t a section on our website. It’s part and parcel of who we are as people. The places we love only stay wild because travel is done right: with respect for the wildlife, real benefit to the communities who live alongside it, and honesty with our guests about which operators and destinations genuinely uphold that. When we recommend a camp, it’s because we’d stay there ourselves and stand behind what it does, not because it photographs well.

And underneath it all is a simple belief about why any of this matters: the best journeys let you disconnect from the world around you in order to reconnect. With a place, with the moment you’re standing in, and with the people you love and the people you meet along the way. That feeling of being deeply immersed and completely present is what we’re trying to create, every single time. The world has enough noise. We want to share the good stuff, and hopefully inspire a little curiosity in you, too.

A Growing Family

None of this would be happening without the people who’ve joined us. As the business has grown, we’ve been able to bring some incredible additions into the Escape family. People who share the same curiosity and care about the details as much as we do.

Most notably, Amy has joined us to lead digital marketing. She’s been an incredible asset from day one, taking the ideas Mike and I have carried around in our heads for years and actually bringing them to life, along with plenty we’d never have thought of ourselves. The new website carries her fingerprints, and so will much of what you’ll see from us in the months ahead. With Amy driving this side of the business, the two of us get to refocus on what we do best: being on the ground, planning safaris, and looking after our guests, while Escape finally shows up in the world the way we’ve always wanted it to.

There are exciting things coming, and for the first time in a while, we have both the team and the momentum to deliver them.

So, Go Explore

Please have a look around the new site. Explore it, poke at it, and if you have feedback, good or bad, we’d genuinely love to hear it. This site is for you, and it’ll be shaped by the people who use it.

More to come soon.

Don Heyneke
Co-Founder of Escape Safari Co.