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The 9 best ways to experience Africa beyond a traditional safari

From walking safaris and helicopter flights to golf and sandboarding, these experiences offer new ways to explore Africa beyond the game drive

Harshil Gudka / Unsplash

A first African safari almost always leads inevitably to a second one, but repeating the same game-drive formula on every return trip misses how much the continent actually offers beyond a truck full of cameras at sunrise. Luxury operators have caught on to this shift, building trips around specific personal interests instead of relying on a single standard itinerary that looks the same for every guest. Runners, golfers, private helicopter pilots, and travelers who just want to walk quietly through wild terrain all now have a real place on the modern safari map. This holds true whether they book just a single add-on activity or build an entire trip around one specific personal passion.

This shift shows up clearly in how varied these experiences actually are. Horseback routes through Kenya’s highlands, helicopter flights over Namibia’s dramatic coastline, and river expeditions through Botswana’s remote wetlands all count as safaris in the broadest sense, yet each one delivers a completely different kind of trip overall. Some experiences lean toward pure adrenaline, others toward quiet immersion, and a few genuinely combine wildlife encounters with activities most visitors would never even consider on a typical African itinerary. Several of these experiences also fold in real conservation work directly, giving travelers a more active role than simply observing wildlife from a comfortable distance behind a vehicle window.

The nine experiences below appear in Travel Leisure, based on recommendations from travel advisor Emily Baldwin, a specialist in family and multigenerational safari planning. Each entry covers precisely what makes the experience distinctive and exactly where in Africa to actually find it. Most can be layered directly into an existing safari itinerary instead of requiring an entirely separate trip, making them realistic, practical additions for travelers already planning a return visit to the continent.

1. ATV routes cross Botswana’s ancient salt flats

Credit: Info-Botswana

Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pan covers roughly 600 square miles of salt flat, a scale so vast that travelers standing at its center can actually see the curvature of the earth along the horizon. The pan was once a prehistoric lake roughly the size of Switzerland, and today it sits as a shimmering white desert that makes one of the most surreal ATV routes on the continent.

Riding a quad bike across that landscape delivers a version of Africa most safari-goers never encounter, since the pan’s flatness and open sightlines turn a simple ride into something closer to crossing an alien planet. The absence of trees or major landmarks across much of the pan gives riders an unusual sense of scale, one that’s difficult to appreciate from inside a standard safari vehicle.

Kenya’s Laikipia Plateau offers a different but equally compelling version of the same activity. Winding bush tracks and dry riverbeds cut through the plateau, leading riders into ancient wilderness that feels considerably more rugged than Makgadikgadi’s open salt flats. The terrain rewards riders willing to navigate obstacles instead of simply cruising across open ground, giving Laikipia’s ATV routes a more technical, hands-on character overall.

Both destinations share a distinctive overnight option that pairs naturally with a day spent riding. Star beds, open-air sleeping platforms set up beneath the night sky, let guests fall asleep under wide-open, unobstructed views of the stars after a day spent covering serious ground on two wheels. This pairing of daytime adventure and nighttime stillness gives both routes a rhythm few other African activities manage to replicate.

Guides typically build in stops to point out smaller details easy to miss at speed, like the fossilized baobab groves scattered across parts of Makgadikgadi or the flamingo colonies that gather at nearby Sua Pan during the wet season. Laikipia’s tracks pass working conservancies too, giving riders a chance to see rhino monitoring efforts and community-run wildlife programs alongside the actual riding itself.

2. Okavango Delta rewards a slower, water-level pace

Colin Watts / Unsplash

Botswana’s Okavango Delta flips the usual safari script by moving game viewing onto the water instead of along dusty tracks. Some of the best wildlife encounters in the delta happen from a boat rather than a vehicle, giving visitors a distinctly different vantage point on animals they might have only seen from a safe distance on land.

Motorboats offer the fastest way to explore the delta’s maze of lagoons and channels, covering considerable ground within a single outing and reaching pockets of the wetland that would otherwise take hours to access. This speed comes with real trade-offs, though, since a motor’s noise and wake can push more skittish wildlife further from the boat than a quieter approach might allow.

The mokoro, a traditional flat-bottomed dugout canoe, offers a slower alternative, and many visitors find it delivers a more memorable experience because of that reduced pace. Gliding silently........

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