About Us

My name is Malemba. My friends call me Leshy.

I was born on a dusty track in Tsavo West, on the way to the hospital. My mother didn’t make it in time. It’s not a dramatic story – just how things sometimes go when home is deep in the bush – but it feels like a fitting start to a life that’s never really left the wild since.

My father worked for the Kenya Wildlife Service his entire career, from back when it was still called the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, so we lived wherever the parks needed him. My early years were spent in conservation camps among wardens, rangers, and researchers – their children were my playmates, and our lives ran on the parks’ clock rather than the world’s. Dinner conversation was never small talk. A ranger had been mauled on patrol that day, and lived. Poachers had been spotted nearby, and the units were closing in. Elephant herds passing near camp were simply background noise, the way traffic might be for someone else’s childhood.

That upbringing led me into Tourism Management, then into a career spent journeying with clients across Africa. After more than a decade with some of the continent’s finest safari operators, I kept noticing the same gap: between a beautifully run itinerary, and a trip that actually means something to the person taking it.

There’s a version of this journey that any operator can arrange. I’m interested in the version that only someone who grew up here would know to build. That’s the gap Leshy Journeys exists to close – building journeys that stay with people long after they’ve returned home, and a circle of friends around the world bound by the places we’ve shared.

Leshy Journeys dream. live. connect.