Our African Roots

The Inspiration Behind Our New Logo

The baobab tree has been the image of BJ Adventures for over 30 years. In the early days, we used to camp out under the stars on Kubu Island, a special place located in the middle of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans of Botswana-known for its ancient baobab trees. We felt that it represented so many of the things that we wanted the company to reflect: longevity, being grounded, and exposing our travelers to off the beaten track places and incredible people, who share their culture and history.

This year, we decided to re-envision our BJ Adventures baobab tree with Coral Bloom Studios, and give it a beautiful, iconic and detailed look. We also are emphasizing the different parts of the tree —the flower, the pods, the leaves, and the seeds (the New Year's "sparklers"!). We look forward to sharing our new designs, created with original drawings by Philomena, in our new travel gifts.

The baobab has many names, from the Tree of Life to the Upside-down Tree (because the branches look like roots). They can live to be over 4,000 years old, seeing so much history come and go. It provided shelter, nutritional food and medicinal uses to the San people and animals in the form of leaves, flowers and fruits and could store hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in its trunk. The fruit powder is now used in foods such as ice cream, and is known as a type of cream of tartar. The oil pressed from the seeds is used to make all natural skin care products, which we are busy planning to launch our own co-branded travel bag with Fijn Botanicals later this year!

Wishing you a very Happy New Year, and thank you for trusting us with your travel, as we design new journeys and grow the branches of BJ Adventures!