The people you will be hunting with

Gordon has spent most of his adult life in Africa — over thirty-five years now, and counting. A hunting trip in his early twenties changed the direction of his life; the professional hunter he travelled with became his business partner, and Nhoro Safaris followed not long after.

The early years were less about growing a business than earning trust — from landowners willing to lease a concession to an unproven outfitter, and from trackers willing to teach an outsider which tracks mattered. Decades later, he knows the concessions, the wardens and the ground better than almost anyone still working, and that same slow, trust-first approach is still how the business is run.

He is now moving toward retirement and handing the day-to-day hunting to the professional hunters who have worked alongside him for years — the same people, the same standards, just less of it resting on one pair of shoulders.

Lourens grew up on a game farm in South Africa, which meant the bush was simply where he was from rather than somewhere he later discovered. He was hunting by the age of seven, and by his early teens he was already guiding local South African hunters — young enough that some of his first clients were older than his own father.

He earned his professional hunter’s licence at twenty-one, the earliest age South African law allows, and has hunted on and off throughout his career since. It is a rare thing to reach that licence with more years already spent in the field than most hunters get in a lifetime, and it shows in the way he reads an animal, a track, or a client’s nerves before either of them has said a word.

Solly has been tracking for more than twenty years, and it shows in the way he works — unhurried, quiet, and rarely wrong. He can read an elephant track the rest of us would walk straight past: age, sex, how long ago it was made, all from a shape in the sand that most people would need pointed out twice.

Clients notice it within the first morning. There is a particular moment on every hunt where Solly stops, looks at something on the ground for a few seconds longer than seems necessary, and then simply says which way to go — and he is right far more often than luck could explain. Two decades in this bush will do that to a person.