The Full Circle – Dave Varty

As a schoolboy, Dave Varty was passionate about two things: playing cricket and the family’s bushveld farm, Sparta, on the edge of the Kruger National Park. Set up as a hunting camp when their grandfather bought the land in 1926, the four small mud rondavels became the Varty brothers’ holiday home and the base camp for a lifetime of learning and adventure. When his father died Dave was fifteen and the family was left in a precarious financial position. Selling the family farm was the sensible option but the maverick Varty brothers had a vision. Less than two years later and with only R62 in the bank, Dave and his brother John started a safari business and Sparta became Londolozi – ‘the protector of all living things’ – and a journey began that would change the conservation landscape across the African continent.
In what grew to become a personal quest to save the last remaining wilderness areas of Southern and East Africa, and to grow the reach of his ecotourism business, Dave learnt invaluable life lessons along the way. His has been a voyage of discovery and rediscovery – bringing him full circle, from the owner of small family-owned and operated game lodges to tourism mogul and conservation kingpin, and now, finally, back to Londolozi, his original family farm.
Part memoir, part motivational manifesto, The Full Circle is Dave Varty’s story, a story told with passion, hope and humour. Filled with anecdote and drama, success and failure, Dave sweeps his readers along with him in his determination to track a path for others to follow and to find workable solutions for conserving wild spaces in a complex and crowded world. He reminds us of the sheer grit that is required to follow your calling and the sacrifices needed to make the world a better place for wildlife and, ultimately, for mankind.

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