The Clubhouse

Since they began back in May 2014, HG Safari tours have always departed from a Clubhouse. At that time, hypergridding was a much more hit-and-miss activity, and many first time grid jumpers crashed or had terrible lag problems. A big part of the remit of the Safari was - and still is - helping others to find workaraounds to their teleporting difficulties, and generally to encourage one other not to give up, and to keep exploring and reaching out to new parts of the Opensim community.

Not only did we virtual tourists have problems, but our hosts often experienced difficulties too, such as their entire grid crashing when we arrived -- most regions in opensim were never built with crowds in mind, so we have always been pushing the boundaries of the technology, and it has always been useful to have a clubhouse to fall back on when things don't work out.

The first purpose-built clubhouse was on Teravus Plaza on OSgrid, and there still is a Safari building on that sim. After less than a year, we moved to Metropolis, and then to Francogrid. The Safari group has always been grateful to the various grid and region owners who over the years have donated places for the community to meet. In 2021, Ange Menges donated a region on OSgrid to HG Safari, and we met regularly there until the winter of 2024. At the same time Avacon grid provided us with a backup region called Safari where we could also meet if there were problems with OSGrid. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see some photos and more information about these previous versions of the HG Safari clubhouse.

In 2024 the new HG Safari grid came online and a new clubhouse was constructed, and starting from January 2025 this is now our primary home. During the Safari season, you can pick up the Landmarks and information about the tour each week at the clubhouse. It is a simple structure designed to be like a sort of open air waiting room, where most people spend no more than about ten minutes getting ready for the first jump.

Apart from the Clubhouse, the HG Safari region also has a few other areas of interest. These include the following: HG Safari Archive, the Safari Market, the Arrival Tower, the portals and landmark givers of the Self Guided Tours, the HG Safari dance floor, and Meshanthropy. More details about these parts of the region are below.

Map of the region

As a play on the name of HG Safari, the region is terraformed to look a bit like an elephant. The spirit of our Safari tours is: you never know what wildlife you may see during the visit, so, keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, take a lot of photos and try not to get lost. We cannot guarantee you'll survive to the end but we hope to show you something memorable.

Arrival Tower

The Arrival Tower is an island exactly at the center of the HG Safari region, and is the general landing point of the both the HG Safari Clubhouse region, and of the whole grid. The preposterously tall tower represents the ambition of our troupe to get out and see as much as is possible on the hypergrid, however impractical it may turn out to be.

From this moated island there are bridges to take you to the west, south and east of the sim. To the west you will find the Landmark box at the Clubhouse waiting area, and on the hill behind the waiting area is the Archive building. Watch out for the alligator. To the south is the little Safari Market, and beyond that, the self guided tours area. To the east, you climb a steep set of stairs to the Paw dance area. Beneath the tower, there is a teleport device that will take you to the other public regions on the grid.

The terrain of the whole sim has a soft giraffe skin motif which is one of the classic HG Safari tropes, along with the elephant and zebra, as shown in these posters.

Archive

HG Safari is also history!
Opensim is a virtual community with its own unique mixture of cultures, ideas, creativity, and aims. It also has a heritage, through the memories of its residents, and the builds they have made. As time goes by, people leave opensim for one reason or another, and their builds and their stories vanish from the virtual platform. However, the human connection they made with the community is still there, through our recollections, whether through words or pictures or ideas that persist and continue to inspire builders, years after the original creation went offline. This building tries to reflect some of that, in pixel form.

As many of us have learned to our cost, not all assets survive, and many grids have disappeared over the years. Additionally, Opensim is such a vast place with so many hundreds of regions, it's not easy to remember all the cool places that are out there, or perhaps you remember the place but not exactly where it was. In this Archive building, you will find a record of all our tours going back to the very beginning, along with photos and souvenirs of many of the destinations.

Some of the objects are copyable, but please remember these are objects given to the group and a few are No Copy/Mod/Transfer. As far as possible, the permissions have been left as they were on the day of our HG Safari visit, out of respect for the kind hosts who gifted them to us. The archive not a freebie shop.

Market

This small clearing on the sand just south of the arrival tower features a few african-inspired market stalls. Here you will find a range of freebies, some are just silly, some are artefacts from our many travels, or made by Safari regulars, some items are useful tools and toys, and some things you will find here are artistic pieces.

The original Safari Market on Francogrid included crazy items like a wearable iceberg for a Titanic event, a roastable meeroo and several spanking devices. Today, the content here is a little more useful and less bizarre.

Among the contributors here are Wizard Gynoid, Cherry Manga, Lavia Lavine, Aaack Aardvark, Dabici Straulino, Sunshine Szavannah, Snowbody Cortes, Taarna Welles, Aine Caohime, Luna Lunaria, and Jimmy Olsen.

The Safari market is not meant to be a considered as a serious freebie shop or a Mall, but just a fun area to visit, especially for those who can't resist looking for something to Take Copy whenever they are out exploring the hyperverse.

Self Guided Tours

Our group tours of the hypergrid are at 12 noon Pacific time on Wednesdays, and each season lasts just ten weeks, which means that traveling with the group is not always convenient or possible for everyone. With this in mind, in 2022, the 'Self Guided Trails' project began and this provides some ideas about interesting places in Opensim you may not already be aware of.

These tours are entirely autonomous. Each one comprises of six destinations on six different grids, so it's an opportunity for you to visit places you may never have seen or not visited in a while and also practice your hypergridding skills.

The tours fall broadly into two categories: art destinations where the emphasis is on original creatvity and builds made to evoke an emotional response, and informative destinations where the emphasis is on factual reconstructions, or where some aspect of science, famous books, films, TV shows, or other cultural elements from the real world have been recreated or elaborated upon.

The tours are deliberately designed to be super low-tech and easy for anyone to use, with no scripts to break or permission issues. Simply a notecard with brief information about each place and the address, plus the Landmarks. Each notecard giver has preview pictures of the places on the tour. The Self Guided Tours were available both here, and on Safari region on Avacon grid. Next to each tour package giver is a portal that will take you to the first destination.

Originally there were about 25 of these portal/tour package givers, each offering 6 destinations, for a total of about 150 places of interest. Over time, though, many of the destinations on the tours have either gone offline, moved, or changed from their original form. Maintaining these portals is a big job and it has been some time since they were overhauled, but hopefully in 2026 they will get a new lease of life.

Dance Floor

The dance area is located on high ground to the East of the main landing point, on the 'back' of the elephant. You access it via a long stairway framed by flowers and palm trees... or just fly or teleport over.

This part of the build, like the rest, is not very fancy. The reason is simple; the whole point of the HG Safari region is not to draw attention to itself, but to promote our tours, and to be a springboard to other destinations. After all, the focus of HG Safari tours is to go and visit other people's grids and regions, and not to party at home.

The dance area does however feature one item of interest, the 'Safari Paw' dance floor, which has been part of the clubhouse build since 2018. The last party held 'on the paw' was HG Safari's 10th anniversary party, which took place on Safari sim Avacon in May 2024.

Meshanthropy

The freebie store Meshanthropy first appeared back in 2016 on the Francogrid HG Safari region. At that time, SL creator Damien Fate had released as copyright-free items a set of men and women's mesh clothing. The items were freely available on Damien's website to be uploaded inworld. This provided a sort of short cut to clothing design for anyone who did not have the time or desire to learn how to rig mesh.

The shop and its contents survived on Francogrid until early 2022 when the grid went definitively offline, but just before that happened the contents were ported to OSgrid and thereafter to HG Safari Grid, so now remain here as legacy items. In today's Opensim, these items lack the sophistication and detail of the content that can now be found everywhere, but thse Damien Fate items do have the charm of being both vintage and of absolutely impeccable pedigree.

Most of the clothes in Meshanthropy are casual or businesswear, with a mixture of mesh and baked layers, and work best with an avatar of average height and proportions. All the textures are by Thirza Ember, apart from the collection of Victorian era outfits for men by Ange Menges. The ground floor features womens' clothing, and upstairs are mens suits, sweaters, and tee shirts. On the north side of the store there is a collection of Cornflakes Woodcock items.

Originally HG Safari tours departed from OSGrid. In the summer of 2014 OSgrid went offline for about eight months, and during that time, HG Safari moved to Metropolis Grid, to a region called Outlands, thanks to Timothy Rogers of Zetamex and Nara Malone. In November 2014 we moved again, this time to Francogrid, courtesy of Gill Beaumont and later Nino Whitman.

We stayed on Francogrid until 2018, while also maintaining a presence on OSGrid's Teravus Plaza at the same time. On the return of HG Safari in the winter of 2021, Ange Menges kindly donated a region called HG Safari on OSGrid. As a backup, Avacon grid also gave a region called Safari, which is still online and was also for a time home to Mal Burns' Inworld Review studio.