Timbavati

L, E and I spent four days in the very wonderful Timbavati reserve - part of Kruger National Park - and had a superlatively great time. The formula for staying in a game lodge is very simple and very effective - a ranger wakes you up at five a.m. every day and you spend four hours cruising around the park (which is huge - over 400 kilometres north-south) on an open high-backed Land Rover looking for animals; the ranger (driving) and the tracker (scanning) can read tracks and spot things that us ordinary urban mortals would never notice (the tracker actually saw a well-camouflaged chameleon in a tree AT NIGHT from a moving jeep - very impressive). Part of the fun is that the guests are encouraged to look for animals too, and sometimes we spot them when the professionals don't (or at least they let us think so). Sometimes you drive for half an hour without seeing anything at all, then you round a corner and find a group of zebra, giraffe and impala all grazing together. Few of these animals run away - there's been no hunting in this reserve for decades and they've got used to these strange animals with ten heads on four wheels which don't do any harm except occasionally use a flash on the camera.

You go back to the lodge for breakfast at 9.30, then if conditions are right (i.e. the wind steady in one direction - to be able to anticipate which direction predators could come from) you go out for a "bush walk" with the ranger carrying a rifle and warning you not to lag behind (lions prefer stragglers). Then you get a bit of time to yourself (swimming pool available though sometimes you have to throw some frogs out) until lunch at two thirty - then it's back on the vehicle for another three or four hours driving around, stopping for a sundowner at sunset, then another hour in the dark heading back to camp. Dinner is at eight thirty and then you go to bed, knackered. There's no mobile phone coverage or telephone TV or internet or newspapers in the lodge (the only communication is by radio) - and there's nowhere else to go (the last twenty kilometres to get to the lodge are inside the park, half of them on a dirt road), so there are no distractions.

I'll probably come back to our wilderness experience, and I'll try not to post too many amateur photos of animals, but just to give you an idea of how amazing the Kruger is, in four days we saw: kudu, impala, elephants, giraffes (including two having a fight, swinging their heads at each other like conkers), leopards (including a female stalking some impala), scorpions, dung beetles, buffalo, eagles, kingfishers, warthogs, giant millipedes (which curl up when touched into a shiny coil much like a dog turd), lions, stag beetles, steenbok, giant spiders (and football sized nests holding a thousand spiders), hippos, zebras, mongeese, jackals, vultures, civets, hyenas, water buck, tortoises, baboons, wildebeest, gnu, hares, various snakes (including the deadly black mamba, the fastest snake on land - we chased it in the land rover), and the rare and endangered wild dog... and dozens of birds whose names I couldn't keep track of... and hundreds of flowers whose names I didn't bother to ask about. You get very close to all of these things - the ranger parked virtually in the path of the leopard that was hunting and it walked right past us, ignoring us after the first glance - and a leopard's glance, when you're twenty feet away in an open jeep, is electrifying - and during many of these experiences you realise how our deep instincts are still geared for reacting to and surviving in this environment; you catch your breath, you're totally focused on the moment; sometimes you fight your fear. I don't think the hair has stood up on the back of my neck so many times ever before in my life. The four days were wonderful, exciting, totally engrossing, thrilling. I want to go back and do it again soon.