There is a different quality to experiencing a landscape on foot.
From a vehicle, your field of vision naturally stretches outwards. On foot, it contracts and expands constantly. A track in the sand matters. So does a sound behind you, the direction of the wind, the behaviour of a bird overhead or a subtle change in what the animals ahead are doing.
At Chamabondo, walking safaris are an opportunity to experience the landscape at this more immediate scale. They are also an experience in which the knowledge and judgement of the person guiding you become particularly important.
Our new Camp Manager and Professional Guide, Dharmesh Daya, has spent more than a decade guiding across Zimbabwe. His experience provides an opportunity to look beyond the title of “Professional Guide” and at what professional guiding actually brings to a safari on foot.
A Zimbabwean guiding story
Dharmesh was born and raised in Bulawayo, and his interest in the natural world developed not through a grand plan to become a guide, but through time spent outdoors.
As a secondary school student, he regularly travelled with his family to Matobo.
“Matobo is one of the most special places to me. We would go as a family and just climb rocks and explore, enjoy the area. That was probably where my love for nature began.”
There is something refreshingly unconstructed about the way he describes what happened next.
As he became more interested in being outdoors, he began talking to friends whose parents worked in the safari industry. Until then, professional guiding hadn’t even occurred to him as a possible career.
“I had no idea that there was a whole guiding industry.”
He started asking questions.
Those questions eventually led to more than a decade spent guiding in Zimbabwe, including Hwange, Mana Pools and Gonarezhou National Parks.
These are very different environments, each requiring a guide to understand a new landscape, its wildlife and the particular conditions in which encounters take place. Dharmesh now brings that accumulated experience to Chamabondo, in Zambezi National Park.
Guiding with responsibility
That experience is also about knowing when to move forward, when to wait and when conditions call for a different approach.
Guest safety is an essential part of professional guiding. It relies on an understanding of animal behaviour, awareness of changing conditions and the judgement that develops through years spent in the field.
For Dharmesh, that responsibility sits alongside the enjoyment of sharing what he knows—whether during a guided walk, an encounter with wildlife or a conversation back at camp.
No two walks are the same
Dharmesh’s guiding philosophy is that no two safaris should ever be the same.
For him, that means responding not only to what the landscape presents that day, but to the interests of the people walking through it. Someone fascinated by tracking will experience Chamabondo differently from someone drawn to birds, plants or animal behaviour.
This is where professional guiding can transform a walk from simply searching for wildlife into learning how to read a landscape — asking what made a track, why an animal moved in a particular direction, or what a change in bird calls might reveal.
Dharmesh’s years of guiding across Zimbabwe give him the knowledge and judgement to let those experiences unfold naturally rather than follow a set formula.
And that is an important part of walking at Chamabondo: the opportunity to experience the landscape on its own terms, in the company of a Professional Guide who knows how to read it.
