Maningo had immense depth of knowledge having been a guide for over 25 years. Even with all that time doing the job, he was as eager as we were to get out and watch animals live their lives. He answered most questions from his own experience but also paid attention to what other guides and youtube videos said about possible animal behaviors. He knew many many guides and they all help each other to optimize the viewing for their clients. Even with just an iPhone camera that has only a 10x telephoto lens, I got great photos, thanks to Maningo knowing how to work with those limitations. He showed us not only the big charismatic animals but also the lesser known but fascinating ones e.g. rock hyraxes which are elephants’ closest living relatives but are the size of bunnies. He was very knowledgeable about birds too. He also identified plants, such as a date tree growing wild. He anticipated road conditions affected by the weather and worked around it.
“Excellent. From the beginning, Karen helped us design a custom trip that fit our interests. For example, my partner is very interested in birds. We got birds. We were interested in avoiding crowds. We did, as much as possible. And the choice of Mkomazi was ideal. There were remarkably few glitches along the way, and Joachim addressed each of them with calm professionalism. The trip was as close to perfect as we could have imagined. From Karen’s initial consultations to Joachim’s expert guiding, we could not have asked for more.”