Into the Wylde

"Until you step into the unknown, you don't know what you are made of!" -roy t. bennett

How one continent changed my life...

I AM A DOG HANDLER, HUMANITARIAN, CONSERVATIONIST, ADVENTURER, STORY TELLER & A PHOTOGRAPHER. The Adventure That Changed Everything

Not titles I planned, just what happened when I stopped playing it safe.

It started somewhere between the dust, the laughter, and the kind of long bush drives where your thoughts finally catch up with you. A documentary project - a wild idea,

honestly - that cracked open a door I didn't know existed.

That first trip took me across Southern Africa. South Africa's ridiculous patchwork of landscapes. Zimbabwe's raw, unfiltered bush. Filming rhino conservation with Mount Kenya's snow-capped peak watching over everything. Tracking desert elephants through valleys carrying the weight of war. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized I was completely gone, hooked beyond any reasonable return. What started as an assignment became something embarrassingly hard to explain to people who haven't felt it.

A love affair with the wild. The real kind - the messy, inconvenient, life-rearranging kind.

Working alongside rangers, researchers, and local communities will do something to you. Their grit is quiet and enormous. Their grace even more so. I stopped thinking about capturing images and started thinking about capturing truth - stories that actually matter, told by the people living them.

Then life, as it does, threw something I didn't see coming. An ugly divorce that felt, at the time, like the floor dropping out. But pain has a funny way of clearing the noise. It pushed me to start again, and more importantly, to finally listen to that small, stubborn voice that had been whispering the same thing for years: this is your path.

That voice led me to Majete Game Reserve in Malawi. A place that wrapped around me like I'd been there before. Surrounded by bush sounds and the unhurried rhythm of the wild, something clicked. I didn't just want to document conservation anymore. I wanted to be part of it.

So I kept going. K9 units in the Republic of Congo and Zambia. Learning from the dogs, the handlers, the rangers, and the land itself, which, if you pay attention, teaches you more than anyone. Every muddy boot. Every 5am wake-up. Every sunrise that makes you forget how tired you are.

And through all of it - the hard parts especially - there were friends. The kind who show up at campfires and hold you together without making a big deal of it. Who believed in the crazy dreams even when I'd temporarily misplaced my own belief in them.

The heartbreaks, the detours, the beautiful unexpected turns - they all made me who I am. A storyteller. A conservationist. Someone who refuses to stop caring about the last wild places we have left.

What's next? No idea. That's sort of the point.

What I do know is this: I'm not just here to share adventures through words and pictures. I'm here to remind you - yes, you - that becoming the brave, dream-chasing version of yourself isn't as far away as it feels.

The adventure's far from over. My focus isn’t just on sharing my adventures through words and pictures, but on inspiring you to become that girl who’s brave enough to chase her dream. (photos: bog photography, clare james photography, nigel kuhn)