Tales from a Mudd Buffalo
African to the core, Lloyd relishes the smell of the soil after a sudden rain storm and thrills to the sight of a Black eagle whisper-sweeping in play on pinched wings across a red granite crag. He loves nothing more than exploring amongst the fissured crags of an ancient mountain to see what lurks there, and the music of a mountain stream freshly released from the earth.
Entertaining, knowledgeable, and full of great stories, Lloyd Camp, a TMAC Specialist Private Guide, shares his tales of Africa!
Lloyd is a fifth generation South African, raised in a rural town in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where he grew up camping, birding and hiking amongst the grasslands, forests and streams of the Drakensberg mountains and the game-rich reserves of the South African east coast.
He completed an honours degree in historical geography and teaching at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, after which he was drafted into the South African Army for two years. He then became a history teacher and sports coach in Durban for three years. But the allure of the bush prevailed, and he started a career in environmental tourism at the prestigious MalaMala Game Reserve. A four-year trans-globe journey took him and his wife Sue to Europe, the UK, the USA, the Middle and the Far East, including Japan (where they taught English for two years), south-east Asia and Australia, but in 1997 they moved to the Okavango Delta of Botswana to manage high-end safari camps for Wilderness Safaris.
Lloyd and Sue moved to Namibia in 2001 where Lloyd was appointed Concession Manager of several Wilderness Safaris camps. Hereafter, Lloyd was tasked with establishing a Training Division for Wilderness Safaris in Windhoek, which provided luxury lodges with the managers, service personnel and safari guides that they required to operate at the highest level. Lloyd simultaneously worked alongside various NGO’s and with voluntary tourism bodies in taking training to the community areas of Namibia, and served on the Namibian Academy of Training & Hospitality as a board member. He also worked as a specialist guide across the Wilderness Safaris camps of Africa.
Since 2009, Lloyd has specialised as a freelance private guide and guide trainer in many parts of Africa and has lead numerous private client safaris as well as trips on behalf of The Malcolm Ainscough Collection, Wilderness Safaris and other companies in all the wildlife areas of southern and east Africa. His enormous ground base and experience in a wide range of differing ecosystems and cultures makes him a particularly engaging and knowledgeable guide and host. In 2012 he established Lloyd Camp Consulting Africa, which operates within the TMAC umbrella, focused on elegantly designed safari experiences and itineraries for small groups of friends or families, most of which he leads personally. Most of his clients are repeat or referred guests.
His free time is spent writing, travelling across the world, climbing major mountains such as Fuji, Kilimanjaro and Cotopaxi (Ecuador) and participating in endurance cycling, running, kayaking, triathlon and swimming events. But not at night. At night, he reads. Everything he can get his hands on. Unless he’s watching sports on TV.
He and Sue are now based in the UK from where Lloyd travels regularly to Africa to lead safaris.
Lloyd dreams of a future where the giant trans-frontier parks of Africa become a reality, a time when politicians award an intrinsic value to wildlife that matches their concern for their electorate and their egos.
Iconic moments on safari for Lloyd
- Rambling on Namibia’s Brandberg mountain massif, the last refuge of the ancient people
- Hot-air ballooning over the Migration on the Maasai Mara of Kenya
- Being touched by a silverback Mountain gorilla in Rwanda’s Virunga National Park
- Paddling a kayak in Botswana on a sinuous silver Okavango stream as Red lechwes plunge and leap in diamond-shattered water before us
- Sitting in the benign presence of the Mana Pools super bulls, the gentle old elephant giants of northern Zimbabwe
- Hiking on fine-gravelled beaches down South Africa’s Wild Coast, with a thousand dolphins at play in the crystalline waves
- Walking in the trusting presence of a leopardess and her tiny cubs along the Luangwa river of Zambia
- Sitting in a hot bath in a fine lodge on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, rose petals floating ion the water’s surface, as a multitude of wildebeest graze on the crater floor below
- Sipping a large glass of red wine in the lee of a wind- contorted sandstone bolder atop Table Mountain, Cape Town, as the copper sun settles with a quiet fizz into the Atlantic ocean
- Bobbing on an Arab dhow off Vamizi island, Mozambique, as whale sharks cruise quietly by in the warm, clear water of the Indian Ocean
- The organ-rattling roar of a triad of male lions calling at close quarters at night while you sit in awed silence on a gamedrive Land Rover
- Mourning doves coo-ing to each other, their calls not quite muted by the comforting rush of the Kunene river of Namibia making its inexorable way through the giant red dunes to the sea