Exploring Africa

We see two Greatest Safari on Earth trips completely sell out and launch two spectacular new journeys aboard the Emirates Executive Private Jet, The Wildest Safari on Earth and Sand, Sea, City & Safari - both set to take off in 2024. The ROAR AFRICA team, affectionately called the Navy SEALS of travel, gather in Botswana in December to celebrate our most incredible year yet!

This landmark year marks a cautious, deeply emotional return to African travel. ROAR AFRICA launches and sells out during the pandemic, the first adventure of its kind in the world, The Greatest Safari on Earth aboard the Emirates Executive Private Jet. Elevating the African travel experience to new, never seen before heights, this adventure takes just ten guests beyond first class, exploring the continent's most iconic wildlife experiences in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, and Rwanda.

Our world shuts down, and travel to Africa comes to a hard stop at a detrimental cost to conservation efforts and livelihoods entirely dependent on tourism. We buckle down and support our partners, friends, and suppliers as much as possible while retaining 100% of our team. During this terrifying time, we challenge ourselves to remain positive and plan for a brighter future, pushing beyond what we, as a team, ever thought possible. We launch a webinar series, ROAR PRIVE, and ROAR VILLAS, inspired by the unprecedented demand for private end-to-end travel. At the same time, Deborah relocates from New York City to Segera in Kenya, hosting American families looking to let Africa be their classroom while supporting the lodge and its conservation efforts.

After a lifetime of frustration at the patriarchal traditions that shaped her childhood and continue to anchor much of the safari industry, Deborah launches the ROAR AFRICA Women's Empowerment Retreat in South Africa. Now an annual journey in a different African country, this trip's concrete impact, and empowered community continue to ripple far beyond our greatest expectations with funding granted, documentaries made, TED Talks given, books written, careers changed, jobs created, and scholarships given.

ROAR AFRICA is celebrated by the top-tier press as a global leader in the industry, winning Travel + Leisure's World's Best Award and celebrated as one of Conde Nast Traveler's Top Travel Specialists. We're delighted to report these accolades continue with ROAR AFRICA recognized as one of Robb Report's 21 Travel Masters for 2023 and again making Robb Report's Best of the Best list.

In July 2016, the company celebrates a decade of success with a milestone 'Downton Abbey' party in South Africa — an example of the bespoke parties that ROAR AFRICA specializes in.

Deborah Calmeyer is invited to Beijing by Lan Yang (the Oprah of China) to address the business elite on the detriments of the illegal wildlife trade. This speech is broadcast online and receives over 191 million views.

Actor Robert Redford makes an emotional return to Africa for the first time since filming the iconic 1985 film, Out of Africa. We are touched and humbled that Redford trusted ROAR AFRICA to lead his nostalgic journey of re-discovery back to the continent where this story began.

After years of creating itineraries, introducing contacts, and advising friends seeking to travel to Africa while living in New York, Deborah Calmeyer founds ROAR AFRICA. But, on a more personal note, Deborah also creates the company to give her father, a retired zoologist, opportunities to introduce the African wilderness he knows and loves to intrepid guests. Underpinning every itinerary is a philanthropic, conservation-led mission, contributing toward protecting the precious continent Deborah and the growing ROAR AFRICA team of on-the-ground specialists grew up in.

Deborah Calmeyer's husband, South African Robert Breen, trekking with mountain gorillas in the DRC on a year-long adventure from Cairo to the Cape. In 1999, the couple move to New York - with every vacation and spare moment thereafter spent exploring the Africa they both love.

The Calmeyers leave Zimbabwe due to mounting pressure under the Mugabe regime. The family's prospects look better in South Africa.

Four generations of Calmeyer women photographed in Johannesburg. From left to right: Deborah Calmeyer; Deborah's maternal grandmother, Hestelle Scheppening; her great-grandmother, Mimi Hugo; her mother, Tish Keth; and Deborah's sister, Terry Calmeyer.

Deborah Calmeyer's parents, Tish Keth and Geoff Calmeyer dining out in Harare, Zimbabwe. A year later, in 1973, Deborah is born. She grows up on a dairy farm with a pet lioness called Carmel (which her father adopted as part of the family), Labradors, and horses.

Reg and Molly Calmeyer, Deborah Calmeyer's grandparents, move from a farm in South Africa to a farm in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe (Glenara Estates, formerly owned by Harry Oppenheimer). The Calmeyers live on Glenara Estates for 48 years.

Deborah Calmeyer's great-aunt and paternal grandfather Margaret and Colin Scheppening, who grew up on a farm in the Eastern Cape. Colin Scheppening becomes a lawyer while his wife, Hestelle, teaches English for 33 years. They live in Johannesburg.

Deborah's maternal great-great grandparents, Hester & Heinrich Hablutzel. Heinrich, the grandson of a Swiss doctor, started an auctioneering business in Cape Town that is still there today. His wife, Hester, was born in Cape Town; her cousin was J H Hofmeyr, a Rhodes Scholar and Prime Minister of South Africa before the Apartheid government.

On May 12, 1688, Deborah Calmeyer's family arrives in South Africa. Daniel Hugo, a French Huguenot, travels here on a Dutch ship called Brossenberg, eventually settling in Franschhoek.