So now you know the players, so let's talk about the stage: the BVC.
The BVC is just under a million acres of Old Africa. An amalgam of several old Rhodesian cattle ranches, the owners of the BVC have kept the ravages of the Mugabe Crime Machine at bay, no doubt by means of millions of dollars in bribes... er, I mean, "fees". A group of PH's hunt the BVC for the owners, but do not own it. The entire complex is surrounded by two 10-foot wire fences, so yes, it is a "high fence" operation... but it is so large, 95% or more of the game in the BVC never comes within sight of a fence in their entire lives. The game species and numbers within the BVC defy description. There is no wildlife park in Africa, or the rest of the world, to match it. There are more than 500 lions, almost 300 black rhinos, almost 300 elephant, more than 1000 leopards, and tens of thousands of Cape buffalo; and that's just the Dangerous Game. The plains game species are all represented there: wildebeest, zebra, kudu, eland, blackbuck, bushbuck, all of the Tiny Ten, impala by the zillions, and so on. If you want to see the size of the buffalo herds, I posted some pics of herds in my account of my 2015 safari, so go back to that post and you can view them. Suffice to say that we saw thousands of impala wildebeest and zebra every day, hundreds of giraffe and buffalo every day, and so on. We only saw 2 rhinos on this trip, but on my last safari, John and I sighted 14 black rhinos in 10 days, one of which was at Bad Breath distance.
The BVC is split up into 9 hunting areas or concessions, each of which is more than 100,000 acres. When you engage with the BVC and your PH to hunt there, you have exclusive rights to hunt your area. As John put it to Cate at supper on our first night on this safari, "Cate, your husband is the king here. Whatever he wants, within reason, is his to command. That maa
Each concession has a central "camp", which consists of several luxurious (for African bush, that is) chalets, a dining hall, and support facilities. I had selected Nengo as our hunt district. I did so because Nengo Camp is one of the loveliest camps in the BVC, overlooking a big dam with its attendant water hole, so the profusion of game right outside your chalet window is staggering. Nengo also benefits from having a long section of the Bubye River itself running through the middle of it, so you have the benefit of the mostly dried-up river bed and its sporadic natural waterholes to draw game.
Is it worth paying the premium price to hunt in the BVC? I can't speak for anyone else, but it was worth it to me. It is a safe place, for one thing; that is not as easy to come by in modern Africa as it was 50 years ago. And by safe, I mean safe from evil men with automatic rifles. It is NOT safe if you fear lions, at least theoretically. More than once on this safari, we came off a buffalo stalk to find on our backtrail that lion tracks had been laid down over our booted footprints. Yes, that meant while we hunted the buffalo, the lions hunted us. John assured me that no hunter had ever been killed by lions since the inception of the BVC, but he averred when I asked him if anyone had ever been mauled by lions. And I also noted that the black Africans in our camp became very anxious about being outside of the concrete walls of the camp after sunset.
This is truly one of the last vestiges of Wild Africa.
To be continued...
Last edited by DocRocket; 10/06/19.
