My father's name is Sibusiso Vilane.
In 2003, he became the first Black African to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In 2005, he did it again.
He did not grow up with mountains. He grew up with the idea that the world places ceilings on people, and that you are under no obligation to accept them.
I grew up watching him refuse those ceilings. By the time I understood what he was doing, the lesson had already taken.
The lesson was not about Everest. It was about attention. About choosing what you pay attention to — what other people say is possible, or what you can actually see in front of you.
He brought this to the bush too.
I remember the first time he took me into the Kruger. I was eight. It was before dawn, cold, and he had put me in the back of a borrowed vehicle and driven us to an open pan where elephants came at first light. We waited for over an hour before anything happened.
I was not a patient child.
But my father was quiet in the way that people are quiet when they're actually listening. Not politely silent — genuinely absorbed. And because I was eight and he was my father, I watched him watching the landscape.
When the elephants came — twelve of them, materialising out of the early grey light — he did not say anything for a long time. Then he said: This is why.
I did not ask why what. I understood.
My father's safari taught me several things that I carry into every drive I lead.
The first: arrive with empty hands. Come without your checklist, without your expectations, without your timeline. The bush will show you what it wants to show you, and your job is to be awake when it does.
The second: the people around you are part of the experience. My father noticed what his company was afraid of, what they were curious about, when they needed to talk and when they needed quiet. He paid attention to people the way he paid attention to the landscape.
The third: patience is not passive. Waiting is an action. Staying with something when the obvious thing is to move — that is a discipline, and like most disciplines, it is its own reward.
I think about him every time a guest asks me when we're going to see something.
I try to remember the way he looked at that pan in the early grey light, before the elephants came. Completely still. Completely present. Already grateful.