We've been tracking the lions all morning, the four of us following our guide, Richie, through a landscape of scrub veld, palm trees and towering termite mounds that resemble washed out Gaudi churches or Brancusi sculptures left out in the rain. Every now and then, Richie bends to the ground and talks us through the latest clue. This time, it's a paw print (a very large paw print, I can't help noticing) with a blade of grass still damp with dew pressed at its centre.
“They're going this way,” he says, pointing toward the ruler-straight horizon, “and they were here just recently.” Richie obviously knows his stuff. Just minutes later, two lionesses rise from behind a thicket a few metres ahead of us. We're out in the middle of nowhere. We have no rifles. We are on foot.
Richie has been telling us all morning what to do when this happens. “Stay absolutely still. If you run, it is like when a mouse runs from a domestic cat,” he explains, “and you know what happens then.”
In theory, this sounds fine, but in practice, with those amber eyes looking straight into yours, it's a different story. Every instinct tells me to hightail it out of there. Luckily, however, the lions turn first, bounding off over the sandy earth and stopping just once to cast a disdainful glance back at us before slipping out of sight into the bush.
Safari is a Swahili word derived from the Arabic safara, to travel. Its usage in English was taken up in earnest during the early years of the scramble for Africa. Adventurous explorers, as well as hunters, were said to have “gone on safari” whenever they travelled through the continent.
To be honest, I've always thought the modern safari bears little resemblance to these turn-of-the-century roots. Yes, people still travel into the African wilderness to view the wildlife or, sadly, shoot it (when my plane landed in Johannesburg the pilot rather unnervingly asked those passengers with firearms in the hold to identify themselves. “Yup, that's us,” a cheery American called out from behind me), but they do so from the comfort of a 4 x 4 and a king-sized bed with room service.
The modern safari was a cosseted, diluted experience, a week-long dip-the-toe-in spot of drive-by animal watching exclusively for the rich. At least that's what I thought until I came on this Explorations Safari and found myself out in the bush eyeball-to-eyeball with a lioness.
The safari I'm on is called Migration Routes and starts with a two-hour canoe trip to our first campsite deep in the heart of the Okavango Delta. Fed by generous rainfalls in the Angolan highlands, the Okavango is the world's largest inland delta, covering an area the size of Switzerland. It was formed only around 2,000 years ago, when silting and tectonic activity created a massive basin into which the Okavango River now dissolves into a labyrinth of lagoons, channels and islands.
Just 12 hours after leaving Heathrow and I'm being punted through this unique habitat in a mokoro, a traditional log canoe used by the tribes who live in the delta. It's an incredibly calming way to arrive, the long, low boats slipping through the narrow channels laced with reflected clouds, the reeds and grasses brushing your face as you pass.
The departure lounges, the airplane, all of it slips from me as I settle back and listen to the birdsong and the rhythmical dip and slide of the punting poles. Then suddenly there's a hippo. Right in front of us, crashing up through the water and away again in a flash of grey and pink.
Richie ushers the mokoros into a side channel. We all stand in them, swaying as if on tightropes and watch the bubbles pop on the water's surface where the hippo had been. Richie looks for the telltale ripples that will show the hippo has passed, but they don't come, so we beach the mokoros and walk the remaining distance to our camp.
