A dream born from the wild
and realised in Australia
Some companies are built on business plans. Some on market research. Some on a gap identified in a spreadsheet.
Encompass Africa was built on a boy watching elephants with his grandparents, and a chance meeting on an overland truck in East Africa that neither party saw coming.
The waterhole
Born and raised in South Africa, Jonathon spent his formative years visiting Kruger National Park with his grandparents. The three of them would set off from Johannesburg in a VW Jurgens AutoVilla, if you’ve never encountered one, imagine a vehicle that’s half VW Kombi, half caravan driving for two days before settling into the National Park campsite for two glorious weeks.
Most of those days were spent at the waterholes.
They would arrive early and stay until the sun dropped, watching the wildlife gather, reading, talking, letting the hours pass without hurry.
From his grandparents, Jonathon learned about South Africa’s animals and birds, its weather patterns, ecosystems, history and people. He learned, through eight-hour stints in quiet company beside still water, the particular value of patience.
A seed was planted at those waterholes. It would take decades to understand fully what it would grow into.
The compass
After university, craving a life in the bush, Jonathon left for Africa to work as a guide, leading groups on long, multi-country overland tours through the continent he loved.
Before he left, his father pressed something into his hand: a beautiful antique linear compass. “Take this with you,” he said, “so you’ll always find your way home.”
Neither of them knew then that this compass would one day give a company its name.
To encompass something is to surround it completely, to hold it entirely within. His father’s compass was about finding your way home.
Encompass Africa, Jonathon and Danica would eventually understand, was about something similar: holding all of Africa, its wilderness, its wildlife, its people, its complexity within every journey they designed.
Not extracting from it. Holding it.
But that realisation was still years away.
5,300 kilometres
In 2003, Jonathon had moved out of overlanding and into private guiding. He was asked, reluctantly, to do one final overland trip, the team was short-staffed and needed him. He begrudgingly agreed.
He had no idea that tour would change the course of his life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Danica Sade, a 29-year-old Australian with a marketing career in Brisbane, a beautiful home and a wide circle of friends had decided she wanted more than comfortable. She quit her job, sold her house, bought a one-way ticket, and arrived in Cape Town with a backpack and no fixed plan.
The overland tour she joined departed from a hostel in Cape Town, bound for Victoria Falls. From the first day on the truck, Jonathon and Danica’s friendship formed easily and naturally. When the tour reached Victoria Falls, Danica extended her journey taking a seat on the same truck continuing north to Kenya.
Then the trip ended without warning.
The assistant guide contracted cerebral malaria and was airlifted to Cape Town for a life-saving blood transfusion. Jonathon found himself stranded in Nairobi with a truck that needed to return to Cape Town and an insurance requirement that he couldn’t make the journey alone.
Danica volunteered.
And so began 5,300 kilometres of long drives, border campouts, and shared stories that turned a friendship into something else entirely.
London, Paris then the world
After falling in love, Jonathon and Danica moved to London for what was supposed to be a year. Five years passed. They travelled extensively through Europe, back to Africa, across any continent they could reach. Danica worked in the creative industries. Jonathon received an offer to help establish a new Africa travel company, and the seed that had been planted at the waterhole in Kruger began pushing back up towards the surface.
They married in 2005. They talked constantly about what they were building toward.
With a business plan, a marketing strategy and their savings in order, they decided the time had come but not before one final journey together: six months travelling from Paris to Prague, Norway to Syria and beyond.
They arrived in Australia in December 2008.
Jonathon swiftly became a ‘Jono’. And on 1 July 2009, Encompass Africa was born.
What it became
Jono and Danica built Encompass Africa through everything the world could throw at it, an Ebola outbreak, a global pandemic, the particular uncertainty of building something you deeply believe in through years when travel itself felt impossible.
What never wavered was the conviction at the centre of it.
They now operate across more than twenty countries, with a team carrying over 85 combined years of Africa experience, and a community of travellers who return again and again. Every partner they work with is chosen against the same three pillars: wilderness, wildlife and community. Every journey is designed with the same question at its heart does this leave Africa stronger?
The boy at the waterhole learned patience. His father gave him a compass. A woman sold her house and got on a truck.
Encompass Africa is what happened next.