Why We Started This

In July 2025, my wife Tracy and I had been married thirty years. We wanted to mark it with something that wasn’t a resort.

We spent eleven days in East Africa. We tracked chimpanzees and mountain gorillas in Uganda. We stood with rhinos in Kenya. We reached the Masai Mara in time for the migration. And because I’d read enough to know that long road transfers eat the days you’re paying for, I insisted on flying between parks instead of driving. That one decision is the reason we saw what we saw.

The man who built that trip is Nicholas Bright. He owns All In Africa Safaris Company (U) LTD — a company registered and licensed in Uganda, operating out of Kampala and Kigali. His guides. His vehicles. His relationships with the lodges and the parks.

I came home thinking about two things.

The first was that almost nobody I knew in Utah understood the difference between what we’d done and what most Americans buy. We were never on a bus. We never waited on eight strangers to finish breakfast. We had our own vehicle and a guide who knew our names, and it did not cost what people assume that costs.

The second was Nicholas. He’s very good at this and largely invisible to the American market — competing against operators with real marketing budgets, for travelers who will never find him on their own.

So I built this company to be the American front door to his.

I’m in South Jordan, Utah. I answer the phone. I plan your trip, price it, and stay with you from the first email until the day you land back home. Nicholas and his team run everything on the ground. You get a US number to call and a US business to hold accountable, and you get a Ugandan team that has been doing this for years actually driving the vehicle.

I spent thirty years in the Army — six as a combat flight medic, twenty-four as a counterintelligence agent. That work taught me to plan carefully, to think about what goes wrong before it does, and to tell people the truth even when a softer version would be easier to sell. That’s how I plan safaris.

I’m not going to tell you every lodge is exceptional. I’ll tell you which one I’d send you to and which one I wouldn’t. I’ll tell you when the flight is worth the money and when you should just drive. I’ll tell you if what you’re asking for won’t fit in the days you have.

Every trip is built from scratch, for you. No fixed departures, no strangers, no itinerary you have to squeeze yourself into.

And every booking helps a business owner in Uganda build something for his family. That was the reason I started. It still is.

— Barton Jeffs, South Jordan, Utah