Nambiti

After Cathedral Peak, I went to a game reserve - my fourth in nine months, which is right on the edge of being too many, but I won two free nights at the excellent Nambiti Plains Lodge in a prize draw, so I could hardly say no. The game-viewing routine was the standard offer: up at dawn, off on an open land rover for three hours or more, then breakfast - then nothing to do for six hours except eat lunch (or swim in the pool if you can stand the temperature - nights here are still cool even though the days are hot, so unheated pools stay cold; you're not allowed to walk anywhere, for obvious reasons, and this lodge didn't offer bush walks because they're still waiting for their rifle licence) - then back on the land rover at four o'clock for another three or four hours of bouncing around on bad roads (why, I wonder, is the suspension on land rovers so awful? I know they're heavy-duty vehicles but you would've thought a tourist-friendly version would exist by now... or perhaps risking back injury is part of the authenticity of the experience); stop for a sundowner, back to the lodge in the dark, then dinner, then sleep.

I still enjoyed much of this, and we saw quite a lot of animals; but I shared the land rover with a British family who were on their first visit to a reserve, and their enthusiasm ("WOW, a giraffe!! Isn't it HUGE!!!") made me realise how quickly I've got used to seeing wildlife in its "natural" habitat - and that I'm starting to understand the extent to which the game reserve experience is carefully managed. Nambiti has only been a game reserve for four years - it was farmland before and it's still littered with abandoned buildings - and it's still being stocked with wildlife to get it up to its "carrying capacity" - the ranger showed us the "release platform" where dozens of impala and wildebeest are trucked in and unloaded on a regular basis - "lunches for lions".

We didn't manage to see the lions, because they'd made a kill the day before so they were digesting slothfully somewhere - and our rangers couldn't get off the vehicle and track them... because they didn't have a rifle. But we did see three cheetahs, twice, and we noticed that they had plastic collars around their necks. The ranger was a bit unclear about why this was - "the ecologists are tracking them, studying movements and things"... but then I thought... hang on a second... if somebody knows where the cheetahs are, all the time, why don't they just tell us (over the standard land rover radio) rather than make us bounce around on these rocky tracks for seven hours a day? Why not tag the lions, too, before they're shoved off the release platform, so we can find them when they hide? In fact, why not tag everything and visit them in ascending order of interest, so that the guests have a truly satisfying bush experience?

I joke, cynically, but a wildlife enthusiast friend of mine says that a popular lodge in the Kruger has been caught engaging in exactly this sort of malpractice - to their immense shame they were found with tracking and GPS devices on board the land rovers. But this seems to me to reveal an odd sort of paradox - if we have the technology to locate these animals, why not use it? What's the fine moral or aesthetic line between actively managing the "stock" in a game reserve and being able to find it when you want to? There's a tacit consensus that the tourist expects the drama of having to hunt for a lion and perhaps not finding it - and any intervention which alters the odds is somehow cheating - in fact the experience becomes or stays a lot more like gambling. It also perhaps means (taking my cynicism up a notch) that the tourist is more likely to come back and try again to see that elusive lion, or leopard - as in any reward system, a certain level of failure increases motivation.

Having said all of that, I should also say that I still got a thrill out of seeing eland galloping past the collared cheetahs (too big for them, said the guide, but they jumped up and seemed to consider giving chase for a moment - and I'd love to see a cheetah take off from a standing start... so I'll undoubtedly be going back to a game reserve, gambling on seeing something really exciting, managed or not) - and the lodge itself was excellent - great food, sumptuous accomodation (with the biggest mosquito net around the bed I've ever seen - a tented room within the room) and perfectly pitched attention and friendliness from the staff and managers - and this is perhaps one of the best reasons for going to a game reserve: the game drives are often uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating, but for the rest of the time you feel relaxed, well-fed and pampered - and that you fully deserve this indulgence.