Yet another post waiting patiently in the queue, written as you can see, several days ago…
Yesterday, Sunday 28th June, I joined Janet and Wil, a very friendly Dutch couple, on their Walking Safari. Although this sounds a grand undertaking, possibly over several days, in fact it was only a couple of hours, covering 7.1 kilometres in total if my pedometer is anything like accurate.
We set off from camp in the Land cruiser, after the usual early breakfast, at about 5.45am. Dawn was breaking and the air still very chilly. After a shortish ‘game drive’ Paul stopped the vehicle, and out we all trooped to receive our safety briefing.
We were accompanied by Peter, an official armed guide from the national park, who walked in front with his gun, followed by Paul our Lion Camp guide who went next. We walked behind, in single file, through mostly flattish but some quite rough grassland and scrub.
We did come very close to some elephant, and I noticed subtle silent messages conveyed through gestures between Peter and Paul. They do seem particularly large when they are looming over you but at no stage did I feel the slightest frightened, reasoning quite confidently that no self respecting safari lodge was going to put its clients into a risky situation.
Incidentally, we had been told that if a situation did look in any way threatening we should stay still, not run, which was comforting. I didn’t feel my pace could match an elephant’s, let alone a leopard’s.
It was great to be walking, and almost disappointing to find after a couple of hours that we had returned to our vehicle, until we discovered an entire welcoming party from the camp, and a table laid for a magnificent champagne breakfast!
But before we relaxed into the champagne, eggs and bacon we noticed a rather subdued figure nearby, not looking at all relaxed. This was a somewhat shaken John who had his own adventure to recall. See the next post…
