About Us:
Michael van Eeden Born in Africa
Virtual Tours & Safaris Adventure Travel Specialist In Africa
About Us-Virtual Tours & Safaris-From the shores of Lake Kariba — where my grandfather ran Bumi Hills Hotel and a small family of elephants were my closest childhood neighbor's — to twenty-plus years of overlanding Central and Southern Africa in my Land Rover Defender, living rough and moving slow. That is the life that brought me here. No office. No desk. Just Africa, the bush, the open sea, and a camera.
This is my story.
About Virtual Tours
Virtual Tours & Safaris is a specialist safari booking and travel advisory service based in St Lucia, KwaZulu-Natal — the gateway to two of South Africa's most extraordinary wildlife destinations, iSimangaliso Wetland Park and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park.
We book safari accommodation for the full range of KwaZulu-Natal's Big 5 parks and private game reserves — from Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife's own camps deep inside Hluhluwe-iMfolozi, to boutique private lodges on the park's boundaries, to the estuary lodges and bush camps of iSimangaliso.
We also book beach hotels, B&Bs, and luxury lodges throughout the St Lucia and greater KZN region, and curate complete itineraries combining bush and coast in a single trip.
Beyond accommodation, we design and operate custom private exclusive safaris — off-the-beaten-track experiences for travellers who want something beyond the standard itinerary.
That includes eco travel, traditional Dhow sailing and beach camping along the Swahili Coast.
Walking safaris, photographic expeditions, and immersive wilderness experiences built around the landscapes and wildlife we know from decades of personal travel.
Virtual Tours is growing — and growing fast. Having recently parted ways with Heritage Tours and Safaris to chart our own course, we are expanding our advisory scope northward,
along the East African coast, covering destinations up the Swahili Coast as far as Zanzibar — Mozambique's island chains, the Bazaruto Archipelago,
Tanzania, and beyond. Our roots are in KZN, but our reach is the full sweep of East and Southern Africa's wild coast.
What makes Virtual Tours & Safaris different is simple:
every recommendation, every lodge, every safari route we suggest comes from a lifetime of personal experience in the field.
This is not a booking engine. It is the distilled knowledge of a person who has lived,
worked, sailed, and driven across this part of the world for more than four decades — and who knows it from the inside out.
Michael van Eeden — safari expert, wildlife photographer, St Lucia, KwaZulu-Natal
A Life Lived in Wild Places
I was born in Africa. Not visiting, not relocating — born here, into a life that moved through its wildest and most remote corners from the very beginning. Everything on this site comes from that life, and from everything it has made me.
Lake Kariba — Where It All Began
My grandfather started and ran Bumi Hills Hotel on the shores of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe — one of the most spectacular settings in Africa, where the Zambezi River was dammed to create a vast inland sea fringed by the ghostly trunks of the old flooded forest.
This was the landscape of my earliest childhood. A small family of elephants moved freely through the hotel grounds and became, in the way that only childhood can allow, my first wildlife companions.
Camp monkeys raided the Bumi Hills bar almost every night. The only transport in or out was a Land Rover on a corrugated dirt track, or a DC-10 dropping down onto a remote airstrip carved out of the bush.
My father Dr John (Papa John) had a small hospital operating from within the staff section at the back of the hotel itself, treating patients from the surrounding communities.
I grew up in that place — a child between the wild and the human world, equally at home in both.That early immersion in the African bush — the sounds, the smells,the daily presence of wild animals, the rhythm of a landscape that operated entirely on its own terms —
laid down a foundation that no amount of adult travel could replicate.Wild Africa was not something I discovered. It was simply where I came from.
A Father Who Built Hospitals in the Bush
My father was a bush doctor and surgeon who spent his career doing something extraordinary and almost entirely unrecognised: building clinics and hospitals from scratch in places that had no medical infrastructure at all. Jungle clearings in West Africa.
Remote islands in the Caribbean. Places where the nearest functioning hospital was days away and where the communities he served had been without any medical care for generations.
I travelled with him from a very young age, and as I grew older I worked alongside him in those bush hospitals. We spent extended time in West Africa — Sierra Leone and the Congo — and the experience of working in those environments left a mark that has never faded. I learned surgical basics and tropical wound care in conditions that a city-trained medical professional would find almost unrecognizable: equatorial heat and humidity, wounds infected with organisms that resist standard treatment, patients who had walked for two days to reach us.
You learn quickly in those circumstances. You learn what it means to stay calm under pressure, to work with whatever you have, and to take seriously the responsibility of being in a place where you are genuinely the only person who can help.
Living and working across West Africa with my father also gave me a knowledge of the African interior that goes far beyond the tourist map.
This was not the Africa of game lodges and guided safaris — it was the Africa of red dirt roads, small markets, river crossings, and communities living in close daily contact with the bush.
That experience broadened the photographic and natural history knowledge I was building from Kariba into a much wider, more complex understanding of what the African continent actually is.
Closer to home, my father’s work also took us through the heart of South Africa itself — not the tourist corridors, but the deep interior. The Karoo in those days, where the silence is so complete you can hear your own heartbeat and the fossil beds push through the surface of the veld,
And the back roads into the Kruger region , long before the park’s current infrastructure, when game sightings were genuinely earned.
The KwaZulu-Natal bush — the thornveld, the fever tree floodplains, the dense riverine corridors that hide leopard and nyala in plain sight. And the mountains: the Drakensburg range and its back hills, crossing the high passes into Lesotho on roads that challenge any 4x4, then dropping back down through the foothills and the midland grasslands toward the coast.
I have driven the back roads from the Drakensberg through Lesotho and down into the Eastern Cape — through Hogsback, the Wild Coast interior, and the War Trails country — more times than I can count.
This is not travel from a brochure. It is the accumulated knowledge of a person who spent their formative years moving through South Africa’s landscapes at road level, through seasons, in all conditions, with no fixed itinerary.