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I WALK THE LION

On safari in South Africa
Harper's Bazaar, March 2008

“THERE he is!”
  Where?
  “There. Right there.”
  Andrew, the burly, ginger-haired ranger driving the truck, jabs his finger towards a view of untidy, tangled bush. I squint at it; so do the three other guests in the vehicle. The view of untidy, tangled bush looks to me, and to the three other guests in the vehicle, like a view of untidy, tangled bush.
  “He’s right there,” insists Andrew, and edges the truck off the dirt road, into the untidy, tangled bush. We know what we’re supposed to be seeing. We’ve spent the last hour or so blundering and bashing around the Exeter game reserve, trying to pin down an earlier sighting, reported by one of the lodge’s other rangers, of a leopard. We’ve seen the animal’s paw prints. We’ve heard – once attuned to it by Andrew, and the vehicle’s tracker, Victor – the warning calls of treebound monkeys as the big cat loped across his territory. We’ve watched as Victor set off on foot in search of the creature, armed only with a walkie-talkie, and reflected that this was a good deal less, in the way of protective equipment, than I’d want to do the same job. But we haven’t seen a leopard. Except Andrew, who is still insisting that he has.
  “Right in front of you,” laughs Andrew, and wrestles the vehicle further into the wilderness. The four of us in the back continue to regard the landscape, and each other, with expressions of bewilderment, until Andrew rolls the truck into a small clearing, shuts down the motor and points once more into the thick beige whiskers of grass.
  “Right there.”
  And so he is. A magnificent adult male leopard, perched like a mad emperor’s armrest. And we didn’t see him until he was – what, five metres? – in front of us. It’s a bracing lesson in how a leopard makes his living. He stands, as we take his photograph.
  “He’s thin,” notes Andrew. “Hungry.”
  The vehicle we’re sitting in is open-topped, and open-sided, its only protection a rifle lashed across the dashboard. We’ve been assured that there is no history of wild animals climbing into these things, but as the leopard saunters towards us, pauses, and brushes along the side of the truck before meandering back into invisibility, we all – possibly even Andrew – experience the briefest thrill of pure, survivalist fear, and it’s worth travelling a long way for. Most Europeans have seen live leopards – and lions, and elephants, and giraffes, and buffalo, and zebra, and most of the rest of the fabulous menagerie that populates these private reserves alongside South Africa’s Kruger park. But they’ve seen them in zoos, in environments built by and for humans. Out here, you’re the guest. Out here, if things were only a little bit different, you’d be lunch. It’s a wondrously humbling experience.

THE same sign is up at each of the three lodges (Exeter, Ngala, Ngala Tented) I stay in. “The lodge is not fenced off,” it begins, before gently reminding that, this being the case, walking the grounds unaccompanied at night is strictly forbidden (the staff at all three lodges have their favourite stories about unscheduled encounters – leopards in the restaurant, hyenas in the driveway). The lodges are run by Conservation Corporation Africa, who strike a terrific balance between an elemental safari experience, and the sort of luxury usually associated, in an African context, with the regime of the late President Mobutu of Zaire – although it’s rather more tastefully done. The accomodations, food, wine and staff are fautless, the overall effect suggestive of Eden with room service (especially Ngala Tented, where the lodgings are as close to mansions wrought from canvas as could be imagined).
  The game drives, however, would make the lodges worth visiting even if one was obliged to sleep in one of the region’s alpine termite mounds. Two drives leave every day: one at some preposterous hour of the morning, one in late afternoon. Each vehicle is operated by the ranger, who drives, and the tracker – usually a Shangaan tribesman from the region – who rides like a human hood ornament on a jumpseat on the bonnet. For the guests in the back, the veldt is an illustrated book in a language we don’t speak – we recognise the pictures, the rhinos and hippos and mongeese and jackals, but the surrounding verbiage is impenetrable. The rangers and trackers are capable and affable translators, reading the text of footprints, bird movements, random noises, dung deposits and broken bush to deliver us to the sights that will fill our memories, and memory cards. They perform uncountable effortless miracles of this sort, one of which I’ll record as exemplary. Driving back to Ngala one night, the deep dark breached only by the spotlight being swung randomly from the bonnet jumpseat, Joe, the tracker, signals the vehicle to stop. He slips off the vehicle towards a tree ten feet from the road.
  “Chameleon,” he says, indicating the lizard he’s spotted. It’s a feat next to which locating a needle in a haystack is as difficult as putting on socks. It’s night – cloudy, lightless African night. His roaming torch must have caught the thing for the merest fraction of a second. The whole point of chameleons is that you can’t see them, even in the middle of the day, because they change to the same colour as their surrounds. And none of that is even the most remarkable aspect of what Joe has just done. Since a childhood accident, he’s only had one eye.
 
CC Africa make a point of sustaining the region’s people as well as its animals. Through something called Africa Foundation, they run various projects in local communities. Lodge guests can arrange to visit one of them, so I do. An amiable sort called Lotus, who works for Africa Foundation, runs me out to a nearby town called Welverdiend, home to many reserve employees. Welverdiend huddles beneath the marula trees through which the locals believe they can communicate with their ancestors, the sprawling branches functioning as aerials for picking up signals from the next world.
  The town’s Afrikaner name is a cruel joke, translating as “Well Deserved”: it’s difficult to imagine what anyone could have done to deserve a home like this. It’s a third world township, depressing, filthy and defeated, the only signs of life and energy found – as is always the case in such places – in the crowded and cruddy classrooms, where heartbreakingly polite, smartly-dressed and disciplined kids diligently cram into their heads the knowledge that might be their ticket out of here. Signs on the school gates remind departing visitors that donations are welcome - which is partly the point of these visits. When I ask the deputy head of the high school what he needs most, and how much it’d cost, he says a new building, about RS230,000 – about £16,500, comfortably inside the Visa limit of most CC Africa guests. Some, indeed, have been moved to give or raise money, which is good of them, but doesn’t seem right. This is South Africa, not Sierra Leone. If concerned parties should be bringing anyone to Welverdiend, it’s not guilty tourists, but the South African Minister of Education, who should be tied to a goat-trough while the locals pelt her with last week’s tomatoes.
  It probably doesn’t hurt, however, to be reminded of what too much of Africa still is, in between the time spent at the lodges marvelling at what Africa can be, and the time out on the reserves contemplating what Africa was – which was, of course, for any biped, our ancestral home. One afternoon at Ngala, fortune has it that I’m the only guest in the vehicle – it’s just me, one-eyed magician Joe, and a ranger called Kenny. Kenny asks where I want to go, I say I don’t care, and he heads out to the rugged western edge of the reserve, where few drives venture due to the unreliable nature of the game-spotting.
  That considered, it goes well – a magnificent kudu bull, an elephant flapping its ears in warning, the 14 eyeballs of seven hippopotamus blinking on the surface of a dam. And then Joe notices vultures along the treeline. “Something’s made a kill,” says Kenny. “The vultures are waiting for whatever it is to clear off, so they can have the carcass.”
  Kenny drives towards the vultures, trees and bushes whipping along the sides of the vehicle, into a clearing.
  “Aw, will you look at that,” says Kenny.
  Three male lions, preposterously handsome, are arranged in a circle, tails in the middle, heads facing outwards, as if someone has stolen their statue of Nelson. Under a tree behind them is the crumpled wreckage of a slow buffalo. They’re a bit wary, taking it in turns to keep an eye on the Land Rover, and so are we, edging the truck as close as we can without annoying the lions unduly. It’s as close as I’m ever likely to get to being alone with wild lions, and as close as I’d want to, and it’s a moment like this that makes the safari experience. It’s a faintly perceptible, but genuinely moving, realisation, of the unfathomable chaos of existence: an understanding that I’m only here at all because, a long, long time ago, in a location which would have looked much like this, one of my ancestors didn’t meet one of theirs.

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