About Us
Tembo Journey Editions is a small travel house built on a simple idea: that the finest way to see a wild place is through the people who know it best. We do not sell a catalogue of trips. We compose a handful of journeys, each released as an Edition, around the places we return to, the guides we trust, and the seasons worth traveling for.
Tembo is one house with several arms: fine-art photography, a wildlife apparel collection, and a conservation foundation. The journeys are where they meet, travel shaped by a photographer's eye and anchored by a real commitment to the wild.
Tembo Journey Editions began with a camera and a question: how do you let someone feel a wild place the way you do when you are standing in it, watching the light, waiting for the moment?
Mital Patel is a fine-art wildlife photographer, entrepreneur, and conservationist. His work spans all seven continents and lives in private collections around the world, and his eleven-year study of the natural world became the monograph States of Nature, published by Hirmer with Thames & Hudson and the University of Chicago Press. He is also a hospitality operator by trade, which is why a Tembo journey is run with the same care as it is composed.
He is the founder of The Simba Trust, which brings education to children in Kenya, and for him business, photography, and conservation are a single pursuit: to build things that outlast him and leave both the traveler and the place better than he found them.
In East Africa we travel with Jemu, a Kenyan guide, naturalist, and conservationist who has spent years at the side of Ol Pejeta's rhinos, among them the last northern white rhinos on earth.
Jemu and his team shape each journey with care, choosing the routes, the timing, and the conservancies that give both the wildlife and the traveler room to breathe. Elsewhere in the world we return to a small circle of captains, expedition leaders, and camps we trust, chosen for how they treat the traveler and the place in equal measure. Some access cannot be bought, only earned through relationships, and those relationships are the foundation of every Edition.
A share of every journey supports the people and places protecting the species we travel to see. These are the partners we stand behind.
East Africa's largest black rhino sanctuary and home to the last two northern white rhinos on earth. The heart of our Kenya journeys, and conservation at its most urgent and most alive.
Guardians of Kenya's great tuskers, the last elephants to carry hundred-pound ivory. Their fieldwork protects the giants who walk beneath Kilimanjaro at the close of our Kenya Edition.
Working to end the demand that drives wildlife crime, so that protection earned on the ground is not undone by markets far away.
Mital's foundation in Kenya, removing the fees, uniforms, and books that keep children out of school. Every Tembo journey helps put a child in a classroom, documented on the ground.
Conservation here is not a line of marketing. It is the reason the house exists. We would rather do a little of it well and out of sight than wear it as a slogan.
Every journey begins with a conversation. Tell us what draws you to a place, and we will compose the Edition worth traveling for.
Request an Invitation ← Back to Tembo Journey Editions