Wildlife Wonders: Safari Adventures in National Park

We left the camp at 5:40 every morning, which sounds brutal and was in fact the best part of the day. It is cold, nobody talks much, and the light comes up over about twenty minutes in a way that makes everyone in the vehicle go quiet without agreeing to.

What we saw, and what that actually means

I am going to resist listing species, because the list is the least interesting thing about it and because the listing habit is part of what I want to think about here.

What I remember is not the leopard, although we saw one. It is a herd of elephants crossing in front of us for eleven minutes while our guide, Samuel, switched the engine off and said nothing at all. Eleven minutes is a long time. Long enough to stop taking photographs, which was the point, I think, of switching the engine off.

The guides were the trip

Both of them had grown up within thirty miles of the park. Samuel had been doing this for nineteen years and could identify a bird from a two-note call while reversing a Land Cruiser out of mud. Neither of them performed wonder for us, which I appreciated enormously — they were interested, which is different, and much harder to fake.

The part I am less comfortable with

Six vehicles arrived at that leopard within four minutes of the first radio call. Six. Engines running, cameras up, people standing on seats. The leopard did what leopards apparently do in that situation, which is to lie there and ignore all of us until it got bored and left.

I cannot tell you that our presence was neutral, because I do not know, and neither does anyone selling the trip.

What I can tell you is what the park says: the fees fund the anti-poaching patrols, the patrols are the reason the population is what it is, and the population is why we came. That is a real argument and I find it reasonably convincing. It is also exactly the argument you would expect from the people taking the money, and I notice that I want to believe it.

What I would tell someone booking one

• Pick the operator on the guide-to-guest ratio and nothing else. Ours was 1:6. I would not go back above 1:8.
• Ask who owns the camp and who works there. The answers were good at ours; they are not always.
• Take fewer photographs than you want to. You will not look at most of them, and you cannot watch anything properly through a viewfinder.
• Go in the low season if you can bear the rain. Fewer vehicles at every sighting, which is better for you and — I suspect, though I cannot prove it — better for whatever you came to see.

My camera stopped working on the fourth day. The last two days are the ones I remember in detail, which is the sort of tidy lesson I would not believe if somebody else wrote it.