Trader Joe,
I was reading your thread with interest. I think I have something for you that doesn't match your specifications exactly but it's very close, especially if you're interested in hunting the communal conservancy areas to the west of Etosha, which I highly recommend if you want the challenge of hunting free roaming, unfenced wilderness. Myself, I think it's more like the real deal. And I like the conservancy model too, especially the fact that the communities benefit from hunting in terms of money and jobs. From everything I saw, it actually works like it's supposed to.
We went with Savannah Safari's, who have the hunting contract with Torra Conservancy. Henk Fourie was our main guide. He's Namibian and a good guy. He definitely knows his stuff. They also just recently rebuilt their hunting camp and it's absolutely first rate without being over the top. Hunting Torra is an amazing experience all around.
The American side of it as actually a funny story. We had been driving south and west one morning from Henk's camp for about 4-5 hours. Henk's camp is already in a pretty remote spot, so we were out there. There were no people, no villages, nothing we had left the dirt track long ago and were somewhere near the Huab River close to the border with Skeleton Coast. It was just open range driving. I don't think I've ever been in a more remote spot in my life. There were plenty of springbok, oryx, and kudu, which is what we were after.
Anyway, we were at the furthest point that we could go and were getting ready to turn back. Even Henk looked a little nervous about being that far out. Just then, some guy strolls over the ridge ahead of us and kind of waves casually, like he's walking to the corner grocery store. Henk gets his binocs out and shakes his head and just laughs. Then he asks us if all Yanks are as crazy as this guy. The guy turns out to be American. He's just whistling as he walks up to us, wearing a big cowboy hat, torn shorts, and a Seattle Seahawks T-shirt. Henk knows him and does the introductions. Then the guy turns to our local guides, who also obviously know him because they can't stop laughing, and he begins speaking fluent Herero to them. We were wondering who the hell is this guy.
Turns out the guy had been working on some kind of ecological survey of the entire Kunene region for 7 years, and he pulls out these beautiful GIS maps of northwestern Namibia that detail all of the core wildlife areas and general movement patterns, all of the cattle grazing patterns for every village in the region (which can be important on an open range hunt like that), and every single borehole, spring, water collection point in northwestern Nambia also obviously important. His knowledge of the area and the wildlife was so detailed that even Henk and the local guides were asking him a slew of questions. I guess he supplied the conservancies and the Namibian government with all of this information because everything he had was far superior to their own. Turns out he is some kind of anthropologist/biologist, married to a Himba woman, and knows every traditional and community leader in the region. He was from Alaska and had hunted all his life but never in Africa ironically. But he knew everything a good hunter needs to know, gave that knowledge freely, and turned out to be our impromptu guide for the rest of our stay. It made the experience go from being very good to out of this world. He took us to some places that I doubt very few people know about. That's the beauty of hunting those conservancy areas with the right person.
And after all that I am sorry to admit I forgot the guy's last name. But his first name is Chris. If you go with Savannah Safari's, ask Henk if he can hook up with the guy for your trip. Maybe other hunters in those conservancy areas know about him too but I'm not sure because it sounded like he didn't really interact with hunting outfits it was really just a chance encounter. But he's one of those characters that you're lucky to meet on a hunting trip like that. And like I say it the made trip go from about a 7 out of 10 to an easy 10 for all of us, and we're a pretty discerning group.
I'll try to dig up his last name...