The young Geoffrey Kent could not be contained. At the age of 16, he set off from Nairobi on a motorcycle journey that took him 3,000 miles across Africa in six months. Quite the accomplishment for a kid. But, being a kid, he hadn’t exactly thought everything through. He had reached Cape Town — but he was out of cash. How was he to get home?
The clever, surprising answer to that question is found in “The Greatest Adventurer: From the Wilds of Africa to a Billion-Dollar Travel Empire,” co-written by Kent and Ben Mezrich, author of “The Accidental Billionaires.” Bandits, rebels, and dictators run amok in this tale of the swashbuckling explorer-turned-CEO.
Kent more or less invented the concept of luxury safaris over 60 years ago. Today, he’s just as curious as he was when he started out. He’s just richer. The Post spoke with Kent from his Monaco home. He had just returned from his latest expedition, leading a small group on a 26-day journey around the world via private jet. Starting price? Around $190,000.
“I go to all the places that I wish I’d been to and haven’t been to. And that’s the whole point of a private jet, isn’t it?” Kent told The Post.
The son of a British colonial Army officer and upper-crust Londoner, Kent was born in Zambia in 1942 while his parents were on a safari. He was always looking for the angles in a deal. His first taste of entrepreneurship coincided with a rite-of-passage elephant hunt when he was 16. The guides leading the trip wove the hairs from the elephant’s tail into a bracelet, and Kent noticed that tourists went crazy for the accessory.
Usually businessmen have to pay for their resources. But Kent managed to reverse that. He found a game warden with sacks of tails and nothing to do with them. Instead of offering to buy the tails, he said to the warden, “How much would you pay me to take these off your hands?” The warden responded, “20 shillings a sack — or 40 shillings a sack. I’ll pay you… get rid of them.”
Business got bigger in the 1960s, when he started Abercrombie and Kent with his parents. They had humble beginnings, running the hunting-guide service with a single Land Rover. But Kent had a few ideas that would change the travel business forever.
After a stint in the military as an aide-de-camp to an officer who demanded the luxuries and comforts of home even in the wilderness, Kent wondered why the same accommodations couldn’t be brought to the safari biz.
So he started lugging around air-conditioned canvas tents, champagne, fridges, fine china and meals cooked by top chefs lured away from tony clubs.
Then, another game changer: selling safaris where you shoot with your camera, not a rifle.
It was an instant hit, especially among a certain set of Americans.
“I needed a first client, a test case,” Kent writes. “I knew what I was looking for: boots, hat, watch. Texan.”
The first client agreed on the spot and luxury safaris were born.
The book takes you through the trials of wrangling a rising business, including ones not exactly common to the average venture.
In one passage, Kent remembers the time Sudanese rebels took his travelers hostage, including Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy. He flew to Sudan himself to negotiate the release, where he was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The fighters accused him of being CIA.
“I said, “I’m as far as possible from being a CIA. I’m not American. I’m English. I’m Kenyan.’”
He quickly found the traditional way out.
“What’s it going to cost?” Kent asked his captor. “When he returned hours later, he named a number so clean and heavy, it sounded like a blade dropping: $400,000.”
The fee was paid, and Radziwill and friends lived to haunt a gala another day.
Kent’s sprawling network proved crucial to the travel juggernaut. Friends made on the polo pitch or at London members clubs became glamorous clients that made the firm famous, including such pals as King Charles, Kent’s teammate on the Windsor Park polo team.
Some of the acquaintances were less fashionable. Kent was sent to Libya to help train King Idris’s troops. While there, he met an ambitious, up-and-coming officer: Muammar Gaddafi.
“For me, he’s just a guy I trained, but very, very capable, very handsome guy, who I liked a lot,” Kent told The Post.
Gaddafi eventually overthrew King Idris, and he long controlled much of Uganda, a favorite safari destination, including all the outposts that provided gateways to wild gorillas.
“I introduced the first client ever to look at a gorilla. And [Gaddafi] controlled all the lodges and hotels in Uganda. So it was obvious I should work with them to build more hotels,” Kent tells me.
Also in Uganda was a friend of Kent’s, the photographer Alan Root, who introduced the animal-conservation activist Dian Fossey to gorillas. She fell in love. Fossey and Kent had a massive fight over whether tourists should be taken to see the primates, with Fossey worried the trips would threaten their habitat. But Kent stood strong: he understood that tourism would save the gorillas.
Is there anywhere Sir Kent wouldn’t go these days? Or anywhere he still wants to visit, or return to?
“I would love to go to Iran one day. I think Iraq would be very interesting to go again. But again, now you got to be so careful. Everybody knows about tourists now. In those days, I just used to go with one or two people. Nobody even knew who we were. Nobody knew anything,” Kent told The Post.
“I really want to see Angel Falls in Venezuela, which might be on the horizon now. And I want to go to Socotra of Yemen, the island of Socotra, which is very much off the table now.”
As one of the first travel gurus — long before social media — Kent has watched a new wave of influencers sweep TikTok and Instagram. Their method of posting everywhere they go has made some previously incredible locales unbearable to visit.
Does the master of travel believe it has lost some of its luster?
“I think so. Look at Venice, I went there 50 years ago. Look at it today. Look at Monaco. Steamers come in, people all queued. Look at all the arrivals in Barcelona. Too many tours. Look at some of the Spanish islands. [The natives] don’t want tours there.”
Hordes of tourists descend upon these beautiful places, and “They all take a picture, a selfie, but none of them spend any money.
“First of all, I would never go where an influencer says I would go. That would be an immediate no. They don’t impress me one tiny little bit.”
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