A snapshot

Ellie’s passion for Africa started early. She has South African family and she spent multiple holidays there during her childhood. During her 20’s she travelled independently across Southern and East Africa, before joining a safari specialist in 2006. Since then she has been to Africa 25 times and she has accumulated over 12 years’ experience in the safari industry.

Expert destinations

Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, the Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia.

Recent travel experience

Ellie has enjoyed a two-week trip around Zambia’s lesser-visited Kafue National Park, followed by a family trip to Ruaha National Park in Tanzania to do what she loves best – a walking safari.

Ellie's most memorable safari experience

"I have always loved walking safaris, and so it is no wonder that my most memorable safari experience was whilst I was on foot. I was staying at Kichaka Camp in Ruaha National Park and being guided by the renowned Moli, known for getting people up close to elephants. We had seen two young bulls from a distance and with the wind in our favour approached them on foot. With no more than 10 metres between us and them, they suddenly caught our scent and turned with heads raised. Moli’s upstretched hand said it all: ‘Do not move!!’ What felt like minutes later, after a trumpet and a forward lurch in our direction, the two bulls moved away, leaving us with our hearts in our mouths."

Ellie's biography

As a child, Ellie would go to South Africa to visit family every summer. She fondly remembers spending time in her grandparents’ garden chasing lizards and chongololos, swimming in the sea near their house, and going on camping safaris to Pilanesberg National Park. But it was a family holiday to the Okavango Delta when she was a teenager that started Ellie’s passion for safari.

A few years later, during her year before university, Ellie boarded a plane bound for Dar es Salaam. A three-month conservation research placement on Pemba Island followed by a six-month backpacking adventure down to Cape Town took Ellie through most of Southern and East Africa. As if that were not enough, she returned to the continent after university for a short stint of volunteer work at an orphanage in Kisumu – a small town on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya – and then again took to the road to travel through the areas she had missed out the first time.

On her return to the UK in 2006, Ellie started working for an esteemed UK safari specialist, moving up the ranks from Safari Specialist to General Manager by the time she left. During her career there she helped to set up the Northern Tanzania and Kenya programme, was a contributing author to the Rough Guide to Kenya and the Zambia Bradt Travel Guide, and helped the company grow to three times the size it had been when she started. She joined Yellow Zebra at the end of 2018.

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