Well said John. I forgot to mention that very vital piece of information.

I've experianced this in many west/central African countries myself when out in the middle of "no where". The locals living far away from cities often speak no other language than their tribal one, and hand signals have been the only way to communicate. And even when you are able to communicate in some way, the information you receive is often given to you depending on what they think you want to hear. So if they think you want to hear that there are lots of elephant in this or that direction, they will say so even if they know this is incorrect. This is partially a cultural thing, because it is considered impolite in many African cultures to give someone a negative answer. And thus, questions must be frased in the right way if you want to hear the truth. On the otherhand, sometimes the wrong answer is given just because they don't know, and prefer not to admit that they don't know. I've wasted a hundreds of kilometers of driving on the wrong tracks in Africa due to this! When hunting on your own, with trackers who you don't actually know and with whom don't speak a common language, this could be quite a big hurdle to overcome!

But it would certainly be an adventure anyway!

Erik