Trufflepig has grown slowly and carefully in our 16 years of snuffling. We have no sales team. No real marketing budget. If you call up looking for the IT department, we’ll patch you through to the Iceland expert. Sure, we’ve laid on some layers of bacon over the years, but we remain at core a […]

I’m not alone in finding that the Zambezi Valley always has a special draw – flying in invariably gives me a frisson of excitement. Once you climb over the hills east of Lake Kariba, you begin to descend as you cross into Mana Pools. As you get low enough, you’ll see an elephant or two, moving through the […]

The name Congo tends to conjure up images of war, exotic diseases and sweaty impenetrable jungles. Like most things though, the reality is often less frightening that the reputation, and this is particularly true when talking about the Republic of Congo, the smaller safer neighbour of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Congo, a conservation […]

We’ve been out on the road this year…. a lot. At half-time on 2019, our trotters are worn smooth, and it’s time to take stock. The pictures above flooded my inbox when I naively wrote to our planning team to ask for a few shots from recent research trips. I was struck by the awesome […]

Working in the travel industry affords you the opportunity to travel quite a lot. We get to explore lands both near and far, whether it be a new city in the states or a whole new continent (Antarctica, you’re next on my hit list). Working mainly in New Zealand, Australia and Asia, I have had […]

Every epic adventure needs an epic soundtrack and Africa is about as epic as it gets. Travel to the continent is diverse, confounding, fantastic, sublime, frustrating, breathtaking, heartbreaking, life changing – in short it has that indefinable magic which is the essence of travel. Defining Africa into easy generalizations is a fools errand, and like […]

Not that I ever look for a justification for a doors-off helicopter flight, but if you feel you need one, Duba Plains in the Okavango Delta in Botswana is it. Duba Plains is in a remote area of the Delta, so the best way to get full exposure to the camp’s huge area is by helicopter. […]

Taking a trip down Memory Road just got a lot more sandy.  And adventuresome.  This epic 6-night road trip, much more romantic when given its French title, La Route du Sud, will take you to some of the most remote and captivating areas of Morocco. I undertook the Route not long ago, thinking that after decades of living and […]

After an hour of crawling through a bamboo forest and scrambling up a muddy slope before finally bushwhacking through nettles, I saw him. Just briefly at first, on the opposite slope, even at a distance a full size Silverback Gorilla is massive. After a brief look at me, he loped off into the forest, moving […]

So, it would seem according to the recent pronouncement of one particular world leader, that I live in shithole country. Mind you, while I won’t pretend I wasn’t surprised, I’m not particularly bothered.  Shitholes can have some real appeal.  To describe the country I’ve moved to (or back to, I should say, since I previously lived many years in […]

Way out in the far western reaches of Zambia, close to the Angolan border, is a seldom visited National Park which is home not only to the second largest Wildebeest migration in Africa, but also to a brand new camp that’s part of one of the most ambitious African conservation projects ever undertaken, Time and Tide’s […]

We may be a tiny travel company (with a great big nose) but when Conde Nast Traveler magazine published its “2017 Top Travel Specialists” list last week, we blushed hot pink to see that Trufflepig has more experts listed than any other outfit. Our very own Dan, Rudston, Tyler and Sebastian, for Italy, Spain, Southern Africa and Myanmar. CNT describe them as “the […]

Cape Town remains one of our favourite cities in the world. It’s just our kind of place, dynamic, fun, constantly reinventing itself, achingly pretty, in short piggy as all get out. I’ve just returned from my yearly jaunt down to the mother city and wanted to share a quick some fresh digs I discovered when […]

Conventional wisdom holds that the king and queen of safari travel in Southern Africa have been always been South Africa and Botswana. We say conventional wisdom be damned. South Africa these days seems to be a victim of its own success, it’s popularity means that even despite a weak currency it’s getting more and more […]

I have writer’s block. I feel as though I have a homework assignment looming over my shoulder and try as I might to commit words to page, I keep failing. I’ve just been to North Island in the Seychelles and the problem is that I am trying to convert into words something so wonderful that […]

One of the most elusive animals in the African bush, and pretty much the holy grail of wildlife sightings for any die hard safari nut, is the peculiar pangolin. I’d been going on safari for nearly 2 decades before my first sighting, on my latest trip to Zimbabwe, and as you’ll see, even then it […]