Apricot Skies

Sitting in the back of an open-aired Jeep, heaving across the African Savannah during sunrise sounds like a fairly clichéd image splattered across the glass of a cheap Travel agent. Actually experiencing it is like being violently slapped awake by some hybrid of a surreal dream and a visceral reality.

Even the most camera-obnoxious cannot help but let their lenses fall to their laps at the sheer scope and vastness of this world within a world. Here, we are the caged ones.

Troops of baboons confidently block the crudely outlined ‘roads’, birds of prey and paradise dot the apricot sky and a single, skeletal gazelle staggers in the distance; victim of an unknown virus we are told.

By some stroke of luck we come upon a dozing, aged, lion, indifferent to the fact that it’s simple existence is enough to make months of planning, saving and organisation worthwhile.

A crackled voice over the radio says something we cannot understand, before Jack, our un-exotically named driver speeds away from our new feline companion. ‘Vir olifante’ he says… elephant.

Some defining moments happen too quickly for the memory to capture – but turning a sharp bend to be faced with a charging male African elephant isn’t one of them..

It’s difficult to imagine being both petrified with fear and awe inspired at the same time. By the time I manage to do both, Jack has managed to put the 1.8 tonne four wheel drive in reverse and is gunning it 70 miles an hour back down the steep, unruly track.

Somehow with every bump and turn the immediate threat becomes more unreal, and the 12-seater is divided between those who bury their heads in their laps and those who look on with sheer amazement.

As we approach a fork in the road Jack looks over his shoulder and, almost instinctively, swings a violent left. Perhaps it’s that he doesn’t know the roads well enough, or that he’s more panicked then he’s letting on, but adrenalin is replaced with a very real fear as we realise we’re at a dead end.

Jack later told us that it was mating season, and that judging by the salivation at the elephant’s mouth we were blocking him from a potential mate. Jack also told us that if the bull had decided to follow us down that fork in the road then we may have become the tragic characters of an international news story the following day. Instead, we spent the next two hours spotting herds of giraffes along a sun-kissed coastline, but you’d forgive us for saying it somewhat paled in comparison.