Podcast: Chris Roche from Wild Expeditions

Beyond the Savanna: Chris Roche on Rewilding Three Forgotten Corners of Africa

Most people who end up building lodges in Madagascar did not start there. Chris Roche started by wanting to track leopards in the Congo after watching a John Varty film as a teenager. Reality intervened: he spent the next several years cutting hair and deejaying in Johannesburg. But the pull never went away. He eventually found his way into guiding, then into the sustainability teams of some of Africa’s biggest safari companies, and finally, after more than a decade and a half at Wilderness Safaris, into founding Wild Expeditions, a small operation with a large ambition: to prove that conservation tourism can work in the places everybody else has written off.

Shaun sat down with Chris to talk about coastal rainforest in Madagascar, walking safaris in Zimbabwe where you can cover 350 kilometres without seeing a fence, and a community concession in Botswana where cattle grazed for forty years and zebra have almost forgotten how to migrate. What follows is the story of how Wild Expeditions came to exist, and why Chris believes the future of African conservation depends on getting tourists out of the savanna.

From Jo’burg to Wild Expeditions

Chris grew up on the outskirts of Johannesburg, close enough to open land that bird watching and tracking became second nature by the time he was ten or twelve. After university, where he wrote his honours thesis on the evolution of conservation consciousness in the black middle class in Knysna as it related to elephants, he guided for &Beyond before moving into sustainability roles. He later completed a master’s at UCT on springbok treks in the Karoo before joining Wilderness Safaris around 2005, where he stayed for fifteen years.

“Africa is not just savanna. There are thirteen biomes and more than a hundred and twenty ecoregions. If we think we’re conserving Africa by just operating in the savanna, we’re cooked.”

That line is the thesis of everything Wild Expeditions does. Chris left Wilderness at the end of 2019, finished in March 2020, and walked straight into COVID. Wild Expeditions was not supposed to start in Zimbabwe; the original vision was Madagascar and Ethiopia, but COVID shut both down before they got going. To keep the company alive, he pivoted to Zimbabwe, then Botswana. The three destinations he built in are, in a sense, the product of what the pandemic would allow, but they also happen to be exactly the kind of places he always wanted to work in: Masoala Forest Lodge in the coastal rainforest of northeastern Madagascar, Camp Wangi in the Mana Pools region of Zimbabwe, and Karengoma in a community concession north of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Each one sits in an ecosystem that needs tourism revenue and is not getting it.

“I didn’t get into tourism to make people feel happy on vacation. That’s a bonus. But it’s a means to an end. Tourism is really about making a difference.”

Madagascar: Rice, Lemurs and a Rainforest Saved One Hectare at a Time

The Masoala Peninsula in northeastern Madagascar holds one of the most threatened habitats on earth: coastal lowland rainforest. Most of Madagascar’s forest is gone. What remains on Masoala is under constant pressure from subsistence farmers who clear land to grow rice. Chris’s partner on the ground, Peter Bester, has been working there since the late 1990s. The model they use is straightforward: pay local families double the rice equivalent of what a hectare of forest could produce if cleared. Leave it standing instead.

When the lodge closed during Covid, with no tourists and no income, the reserve still grew. It expanded from fifteen hectares to eighty-five hectares during the pandemic years. There are now roughly a thousand hectares of undisturbed forest on the peninsula in total, with the private sector contributing around eight percent of that through this kind of direct payment model.

Masoala National Park sits adjacent to the reserve. Wild Expeditions buys around two thousand of the three thousand park entry tickets sold each year, which means the company is effectively funding a significant portion of the park’s operating revenue. Guests do not just pass through the park; they sustain it. Local procurement covers eggs, fish and chickens. Starlink has recently arrived, which matters enormously for a camp this remote.

“Luxury is not so much about utility. It’s about emotion, and it’s also about rarity. Space and time and flexibility. And for me, the luxury of an intact ecosystem that’s functioning as it should.”

The biodiversity case for Masoala is not subtle. More than a hundred bird species, ten lemur species, four of them endemic to the Masoala Peninsula alone. That level of endemism, species that exist nowhere else on earth, is exactly what makes this place irreplaceable and exactly what makes every decision about land use matter so much.

Zimbabwe: Walking a Landscape Nobody Fenced

Camp Hwange sits in an area where two completely different landscapes meet: granite and basalt terrain to the north, teak woodland to the south. Chris partnered with Dave Carson, the chief examiner of the Zimbabwe Professional Guides and Hunters Association, which is the qualification that sets the standard for walking safari guiding in the country. The result is a walking operation built around genuine guiding culture rather than a vehicle-first model with walks added as an option.

The statistic that stays with you from this part of the conversation is the one about fences. You can walk 350 kilometres in this landscape without seeing a fence or encountering another person. In an era when most African wilderness is fragmented, fenced and managed in blocks, that kind of continuity is rare enough to constitute a conservation argument in itself.

Wild Expeditions runs a guide training programme at Hwange, with four or five learner apprentice guides at any time working toward their qualifications. The camp also runs an eco club programme with Benson’s school, which Chris describes as probably the best rural primary and high school, government or otherwise, in the area. Groups of children close down the camp for ten days, rotating through the kitchen, housekeeping and workshop departments, and spending three nights and four days out in the bush. Two consecutive groups go through each season. The curriculum is not conservation theory; it is practical immersion in what a well-run camp does and what a healthy wild place looks like.

Botswana: A Veterinary Fence and a Migration That Forgot Itself

Karangoma is the kind of concession that sounds straightforward until you hear what it actually took to get there. It sits north of the Okavango Delta, in a community concession where cattle grazed, and poaching continued for forty years. Driving fuel to the camp takes twelve hours. The lease fees go directly to the local community family and trust. At the moment, Wild Expeditions is funding school uniforms for children in the area.

The ecological story here involves the veterinary fence that runs along the border between Botswana and Namibia, a structure originally built to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease from wildlife to cattle. The fence bisects what was once a zebra migration corridor. Chris described watching zebra gather in pods along the Namibian side, running parallel to the fence, then turning back. They have been doing this for so long that they have essentially forgotten how to cross into Angola. The recolonisation that should be happening naturally is not happening because the institutional memory of the migration route has been lost.

“Every person, whether they’re interested in conservation or not, does make a difference just by travelling to the right places.”

The longer-term goal for Karangoma connects to this: reducing pressure on the veterinary fence to allow elephant dispersal northward into Angola. It is the kind of conservation horizon that operates on a timescale longer than any single tourism season, which is why the community lease structure matters. If the concession is economically viable for the community, the pressure to revert to cattle grazing stays low, and the land stays available for wildlife to move through when the conditions eventually allow it.

If It Pays, It Stays

Chris returns to this phrase more than once in the conversation: “if it pays, it stays.” It is the oldest argument for conservation tourism, and it is also the most honest. The forests and grasslands and migration corridors that have survived in Africa have mostly done so because someone found a way to make them economically useful to the people who live next to them. Where that calculation fails, the land gets cleared or grazed or fenced.

Wild Expeditions is a small company by any measure. Three camps, a handful of permanent staff at each, a guide training programme, a community lease, a rice payment model. But the logic it is testing is not small. If coastal rainforest in Madagascar and unfenced woodland in Zimbabwe and a neglected community concession in Botswana can each attract enough paying guests to sustain themselves and fund the work happening around them, then the argument that conservation tourism only works in the great savanna parks starts to look a lot weaker.

Shaun asked Chris what he would say to a traveller who is not sure whether their holiday makes any difference. His answer was direct: it does, as long as you travel to the right places. Not to the places that are already full, already famous, already economically secure. To the places that are trying to prove something.

Frequently Asked Questions

The easiest safari to sell is the one that sells itself. The Masai Mara at migration. The Okavango in flood. The places that appear on every list, fill every brochure, and need no introduction. Chris Roche is not interested in those places, not because they are not extraordinary, but because they are already fine. Wild Expeditions exists for the ecosystems that are not fine yet, the coastal rainforest being cleared one hectare at a time, the unfenced woodland that nobody has fenced yet, the community concession that spent forty years as a cattle field. These are the places where a paying guest still makes a measurable difference, where the argument that tourism can fund conservation is still being tested rather than assumed. If you travel to one of them, you are not just a visitor. You are part of the proof.