From Manchester to Marula Hill: how Vikki Jackson built a safari business in South Africa

The flight from Manchester to Johannesburg takes roughly eleven hours. Vikki Jackson made it for the first time at age eight, wedged between her parents, somewhere over the Sahara, with no idea that the country below would eventually swallow her whole.

That trip was meant to be a three-week holiday. It took about twenty-five years, but South Africa got her in the end.

The olive incident

The first memory Vikki has of South Africa is not a lion or a sunset. It is an olive.

Eight years old, at a family lunch somewhere she cannot now remember, she picked one up off a plate and ate it, assuming it was a grape. The shock was instant. A young Mancunian palate, raised on grey skies and chips, was not prepared. She has not touched an olive since. The only exception, as she will tell you with a laugh, was during Covid when she needed to test whether she could still taste anything. She could. It was still terrible.

It is a small story. But it tells you something about Vikki: she remembers the specific details, not just the broad impressions. That is exactly the kind of thing that makes a good safari consultant.

A career that built the foundation

Back in Manchester, Vikki built a solid corporate career working with a US multinational. The skills she gathered there, reading clients, understanding what people actually want versus what they say they want, managing complexity across time zones, turned out to be the exact skills needed to run a travel business.

The transition was not instant. Corporate life pays reliably. Running your own thing does not, at least not at first. But the pull of South Africa kept coming back.

"It is hard to explain to someone who has not been here," she says. "You land and something in you relaxes. The scale of it. The light at a certain time of day. It gets under your skin and eventually you stop pretending you are going to leave."

What Marula Hill actually is

Vikki co-founded Marula Hill with Sian Loehrer. Both women know the bush. Between them they have stayed at more lodges than most clients will ever visit, and they can tell you, from memory, which camp lit a better fire. That knowledge is not decorative. It is the whole point.

When a client asks whether Singita or Royal Malewane is right for their family, the answer comes from having stayed at both, from knowing which one has a longer drive to the airstrip, from remembering which camp the guides were sharper on a specific morning game drive. That is a different kind of advice than anything an algorithm can offer.

The business is owner-run. Vikki and Sian handle the itineraries personally. There is no call centre.

What we believe about travel

Safari is not a checkbox. That is the central thing Marula Hill was built around.

We have seen clients come back from a generic package and feel vaguely disappointed, not because the lodges were bad, but because nothing was designed around them. The wrong reserve for the time of year. A family with young children booked into a camp that does not allow under-twelves on game drives. A couple who wanted something remote and wild, booked into a lodge better suited to first-timers.

Getting it right requires knowing the client as well as you know the destination. Vikki spent years in corporate environments learning how to read people and understand what they need. That skill moved directly into what we do now.

Why South Africa

People ask Vikki why South Africa specifically, given that the rest of the continent is also extraordinary. Botswana. Tanzania. Zimbabwe. All of them worth every hour of travel.

The honest answer is personal. South Africa is where the thread started for her. At eight years old, eating the wrong thing off a plate, arriving somewhere that felt nothing like home and somehow feeling at ease. The country stayed in her. By the time she moved here, it did not feel like a leap. It felt overdue.

The Greater Kruger, the Sabi Sand, the Waterberg, the Cape, the Drakensberg in winter when the mountains go white. South Africa holds an unreasonable amount in a single country. She has spent years getting to know it properly and is still finding corners she has not seen.

The kind of trips we plan

We work with people across all of it: first-time safari guests who want the full bush experience without getting anything wrong, families who need game viewing and a lodge that will genuinely welcome a seven-year-old, couples marking a significant birthday or anniversary, and returning guests who have been to the big five lodges and are ready for something smaller and harder to find.

If you are thinking about any of it and want to talk through the options, get in touch with us. No pitch, no package. Just a conversation about what you are looking for and whether we can help build it.

South Africa has been surprising Vikki since she was eight years old. She is still not tired of it.