EXPEDITIONS
THE RAW SOUL OF AFRICA, CURATED
Into the heart of The wild.We travel slowly. We stay longer. We go deeper. Curated small-group journeys through Africa's most extraordinary wild places. Led by people who grew up in this landscape.
A Different Kind
of Journey.Are you looking for a life-changing journey into ancient wild spaces that bring you back to yourself? Have you ever dreamed of standing somewhere so wild it changes how you see everything after?
I grew up in Botswana, raised by the bush before I was raised by anything else. That's the lens I photograph through, and it's the world I want to take you into - not as a tourist passing through, but as someone willing to be undone a little by it.
This isn't a safari. It's a slower, more ethical way of travelling through Africa - one that follows the hidden threads between wildlife, landscape, culture, and the conservation work quietly holding it all together. We stay with places longer. We sit with stillness until it becomes presence. The camps, lodges and private retreats we travel through are chosen the same way I choose everything - for character, for conservation ethos, for their real connection to the land they sit on.
Come solo, with a friend, or with a partner. Bring a camera or don't. This isn't about experience - it's about the willingness to be somewhere that asks something of you.
Every group is small and chosen with intention. We look for people who carry the same quiet hunger for wild places, even before they've met.
We all arrive as strangers. And leave as friends.Upcoming Expeditions
Where are we going
From the water channels of the Okavango Delta to the silence of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans - this is Botswana at its most extraordinary. Ten days in two of Africa's most iconic wild environments.
APRIL 2027 · 10 DAYS · 6 GUESTS
From the golden plains of the Masai Mara to the sun-warmed dust and riverbeds of Samburu and the ancient shores of the Swahili coast, this is Kenya at its most extraordinary. Eleven unhurried days across the full emotional range of East Africa.
SEPTEMBER 2027 · 11 DAYS · 6 GUESTS
AFRICA WILL CHANGE YOU
WHY WE TRAVEL THIS WAY
Not because it is dramatic - though it is. Not because the animals are extraordinary - though they are. But because something happens when you step into a landscape this ancient and this alive. The noise falls away. The constructed world recedes. And in the quiet that remains, you remember something you had forgotten.
What it feels like to look at the world like a child again. With curiosity. With awe. With your whole self present in a single moment. That feeling, of being completely here and completely alive, is what the bush gives you if you let it.
We stay longer at sightings. We sit with stillness until it becomes presence. We photograph not to capture but to look more carefully. We eat around fires and talk about what we saw, and what it made us feel.
The more people who truly feel Africa, the more people will want to protect it.Our Ethos
How you travel matters.Every Unfold journey is built on respect for the land, the wildlife, and the people who call it home - chosen to leave as little behind as possible, and to put something back into the places that made the trip worth taking.
Supporting conservation
Which lodge you stay at is not a side decision for us. The camps we choose have conservation built into how they operate, not bolted onto it. Your stay helps fund anti-poaching patrols, ecological research, habitat protection, and the communities living alongside the wildlife.
Empowering communities
The people who live in these landscapes are their most important custodians. We travel with locally owned camps, locally trained guides and community projects built to last, so a stay with Unfold funds education, employment and cultural preservation long after the trip ends.
Treading lightly
Solar-powered camps, plastic-free practices, low-impact routes, and locally sourced supplies wherever we can manage it. The goal isn't just a lighter footprint. It's leaving the wild as wild and as whole as it was before you arrived.
One host. One local guide.
Both of them, the whole way.Françoise leads every Unfold expedition personally. For each route, she brings in a local co-host - a guide who knows that landscape as intimately as she does, chosen for the place rather than fixed in advance. As Unfold opens new routes, the co-host will always be whoever is genuinely the right person for that land.
Françoise V
Expedition Leader & PhotographerFrançoise was born in Botswana. She grew up a natural explorer - pulled toward wild creatures, wild country and the edges of the map long before she had a word for why. Africa was never a backdrop to her childhood. It was the ground she was formed on, and she has never really left it.
She is now a recognised fine art photographer, with a body of work built on an unusual closeness to wildlife, to the people who live alongside it, and to the natural world as a whole. The intimacy in her images cannot be manufactured. It comes from time, patience, and not photographing Africa from the outside.
What she believes is simple, and she will say it around the fire if you ask her: being out in the African bush returns a person to a state of childlike wonder - and what that does to a soul is not a small thing. It is also why she leads these journeys herself, rather than sending anyone in her place. Her hope is uncomplicated. Share the natural world with people, because the people who feel it are the people who go home wanting to protect it.
In the field she is calm, generous with what she knows, and entirely unhurried. She notices the light before anyone else has lifted their eyes..
Our guides
Russell Bergh
Professional GuideTwenty-five years in the field, and still most at home sitting in silence at the edge of a waterhole, waiting for something that may not come.
Russell began his career as a specialist safari guide with &Beyond and Singita, in some of the most demanding wilderness areas in Southern Africa, before moving behind the camera. As a wildlife cinematographer he has won both an Emmy and a BAFTA. His credits include Penguin Town for Netflix, Secrets of the Penguins, Whale Wars, Into the Pride, Escape to Chimp Eden with the Jane Goodall Institute, and Saving Rhino Phila.
-
None of that is the reason he is on this expedition. He is here because of an instinct for the wild that cannot be taught and is very rarely found - the ability to read a track, a wind direction, a change in the way a herd is standing, and know what is about to happen several minutes before it does.
He is quiet about it. He will not narrate, and he will not perform. He will simply put you in the right place, at the right hour, facing the right way - and then let the moment be yours.
Professional Guide Alex Davico
He took his first steps in the Serengeti, and he has been most at home in the places where the map runs out ever since.
Alex grew up between Naivasha and Arusha, where his mother worked in wildlife filmmaking. His childhood was spent among lion researchers, bush pilots and some of Africa's most respected conservation voices. His godmother is Cynthia Moss, who has spent a lifetime among the elephants of Amboseli. Since then he has guided across East Africa's most iconic landscapes, and worked in wildlife rehabilitation, conservation logistics, camp management and community training.
-
To Alex, a landscape is a living archive: the geology beneath your feet, the medicinal plants along the path, the myths attached to a particular hill, the season written into every track and birdsong. Spend a few days with him and you begin to see how it all connects: predator and prey, grassland and granite, culture and climate.
He reads people as carefully as he reads the land, and quietly shapes each day around the people he's guiding. Expect dry humour, an answer for anything the bush throws at you, and stories around the fire long after it should have been time for bed.
JOIN THE WAITLIST
There are six places.
That is the whole expedition.2027 dates will be announced soon. Because the group is capped at six, these journeys tend to fill from the interest list before they are announced anywhere else - not by design, simply because there are so few seats.
Joining commits you to nothing. It means that when the dates are set, Françoise writes to you first, before it is announced anywhere else. If Botswana or Kenya has been sitting somewhere at the back of your mind for a while, this is simply the next thing to do about it.
