3 minute read
Make game drives fun again
Going to Etosha National Park for school holidays with your family is always exciting as a youngster. The resorts in the park are fun to explore, the swimming pools are a great place to cool off and, of course, there is plenty of wildlife to see. Although luck plays a large role in seeing certain animals, like leopards, having the patience to sit in your vehicle and wait at a waterhole can be extremely rewarding. You could potentially see anything from a jackal catching a dove to a funny interaction between a lion and an elephant, or you could see nothing but hundreds of springbok. For a child bursting with energy, the time spent in the back of a vehicle can easily become tedious, like hours passing without anything happening. What if there was a way to prevent this boredom from setting in – by drawing inspiration from the wildlife around you?
A Namibian teenager faced with exactly this problem came up with an ingenious idea to keep herself and her brother amused. Clara van Heerden spent Christmas holidays with her family in the Zambezi Region. The area’s abundance of wildlife meant visits to national parks and game drives. As they set off for Nkasa Rupara National Park, she had the idea to scribble some animal names on a piece of paper for a game of trying to spot all the animals on the list first.
Surprised at how much she enjoyed the game, Clara, along with her mother Denise, started expanding on the idea and developing it into a physical product. Their hard work resulted in Safari Bingo – a game in which participants compete to spot all the animals on their Safari Bingo sheet. Each sheet is unique and contains the names and pictures of 15 mammals and birds. Each game set includes a folder explaining the rules as well as a fact sheet on all the featured animals.
The first Safari Bingo game focuses on Etosha because it is Namibia’s most-visited national park and it thus makes sense to start with, Clara and Denise explain. They decided to include not only mammals but also birds as Namibia has such a rich diversity of birdlife, and to give the game an extra dimension.“We looked at which animals and birds occur in the park and distributed them across the sheets in such a way that no player has an advantage over the other,” Clara says.
Safari Bingo is suitable for children from eight years old, but Clara reckons it is meant for people of all ages looking to spice up their game drives. “We tried it with my grandparents from Germany and they had such a great time playing the game with us.”
Clara’s game recently won the student category of the Agra Grow Competition. Up-and-coming entrepreneurs present their business ideas to a panel of judges – similar to the television shows Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den. The winners receive a variety of prizes such as marketing, design and brand-building mentorships as well as access to business networks, including banking services and marketing opportunities.
What is next for the young game entrepreneur? Clara is now busy working on Safari Bingo for the wetland parks of the Zambezi Region and possibly releasing German and French versions to reach a broader audience.
