A Typical Safari

What You Can Expect From ABS

Most clients are foreigners, and they fly into Johannesburg International Airport, where one or more of the employees meets them, and drives them to the first hunting concession. There are several options as far as areas go, and depending on what the client wants to hunt, they will go to one or more of the concessions during their stay. Hunting the high veld offers springbok, black wildebeest, hartebeest, common blesbok, white blesbok, gemsbok, kudu, and eland, while the bushveld offers blue wildebeest, hartebeest, blesbok, impala, kudu, eland, waterbuck, bushbuck, warthog, bush pig, nyala, buffalo, and sable. Wherever the clients choose to go, they will be treated well, with beautiful accommodations and full facilities. Breakfast is served around 6:20 in the morning, and lunch is served around noon. Dinner is waiting for the hunters when they return from a hunt, and everything a person could need while on a hunting trip is provided.

The biggest determining factor of what the hunting is like and which venues a hunter visits is whether the hunter chooses to hunt with a bow or a rifle. For the bow hunters, the days consist mainly of sitting in an elevated condo-blind complete with a thatched roof, shade netting and splitpole walls, and a concrete floor, as well as a lazy boy chair and a lunchbox with sandwiches, cokes, and candy bars. Bow hunters can go out to the blind any time from before first light at 6am until around 10 depending on how serious they are, and they will remain there until well after sundown. On the other hand, the typical day for a rifle hunter involves hunting from before sunrise to after sundown, with a lunch break and a nap running from noon until around 3. The rifle hunters, rather than sitting in a hide over water and waiting for the animals, typically hunt the animals on foot using the spot and stalk method. Particularly fit hunters can go to the Waterberg Mountains and hunt a concession ABS leases, but that farm is not for the weak of body. There are practically no roads on the 900 hectare farm, and the only method of hunting there is hiking from sunup to sundown and stalking any animals seen. After shooting an animal their, the client and the PH will gut it, quarter it, and carry it back out.

Most clients stay for 10 to 12 days, while some stay as long as 3 or 4 weeks and others only hunt for 3 or 4 days. Some will want to tour the countryside or visit Kruger National Park, the South African equivalent of Yellowstone.