“poo walks,” animal tracking, and crafts: andbeyond brings the family vacation into the bush

April 19th, 2013

No more waiting in line to ride Thunder Mountain. Swap riding the loop-de-loop for tracking leopards, cooking up tasty treats in a bush kitchen, and going on “poo walks.” As a leader in the industry of experiential travel, &Beyond is launching a new WILDchild program, offering children an interactive learning safari experience, an activity traditionally reserved for adults.

WILDchild, offered at &Beyond lodges throughout Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, creates daily missions and excursions for children in the care of rangers, trackers, babysitters, and cooks.

Sample of Daily Missions:

Every lodge has a range of missions that is suitable to the lodge environment and will be given to the WILDchild to complete daily.

• Poo Walks – embracing the juvenile fascination with scatology, trained rangers at Sandibe help children collect the dried dung of various animals to take back to the lodge to analyze (hyena droppings are often white due to the amount of bones these scavengers consume, while elephant dung is hardly digested and often resembles a ball of hay)
• Animal Tracking – heading out with an expert ranger at Kirkman’s Camp to find clues such as broken twigs or freshly rubbed-off bark to find where certain animals are hiding
• Fishing – going to the river at Xaranna to catch fish or to get a little messy with a round of “Kleilat” (a local game involving mud flinging)
• Arts and Crafts – making traditional Zulu bows and arrows or embracing the modern, African love of recycling plastic into new objects such as animal figurines or purses at Phinda
• Cooking – joining the chefs in the kitchen at Sossusvlei to learn to make homemade pasta and fresh bread or to decorate cookies and cupcakes

WILDchild Gear

Each child gets a WILDchild backpack with a special logbook and other goodies. Throughout the safari, the log is filled with mementos from the bush, notes, stickers, and badges. Each &Beyond lodge has a signature item to add to the bag (solar powered flash light, magnifying glass, compass…).

For more details on andBeyond’s 32 extraordinary lodges and camps in Africa and India, visit andBeyond.com.

 

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