It was in my second year in Shanghai that I fell in love with the idea of living in different parts of the world. I had started an Instagram account to document my travels in Asia and beyond. Then a month-long, mostly solo, trip to Europe in 2015 triggered much engagement about how I go about planning a trip, how I can afford to ‘travel so much’, and which experiences had appealed to me in the various countries I had travelled to.
I remembered an 11-day road trip with a group of friends in 2009 from Johannesburg through Zimbabwe and Mozambique to Malawi and back. That is how the idea of Zulu Nomad was born: to create unique experiences allowing young South Africans to explore the African continent by road.
I realised that young, upwardly mobile South Africans had a great appetite for travel and exploring. My own travels felt like lifetime experiences that I wanted for every young South African. To this end, in 2016 Zulu Nomad was formally registered as a tour operator offering curated travel experiences in southern Africa to young people, mostly women between the ages of 21 and 42. Its journey since then shows the broader generational challenges facing younger women entrepreneurs in the region.
