To all asking about the lions: me and my friend (an old ranger) were driving all over the Kalahari for three weeks and had several encounters with lions; the rain had been plenty and so were the game, so lots of lions too.
We were in the Khutse game reserve when we spotted a waterhole on the map and went there in the late afternoon to get lucky. We sat on the roof of the old Toyota watching the sunset when we heard those grunts that lions make to warn the desert that they are coming to have a party. After a while we spotted four queens lying 500m away, as if trying to attract attention. Knowing how clever they are we started checking out the surrounding bushes for "spies" and saw a couple lurching in the grass. Looking back at the queens they had gone and been replaced by some males. After 15min of this game we knew we were surrounded but didn't feel very unsafe. Suddenly I saw two queens crouching in the grass 100m from me, creeping towards me with their eyes fixed on my ass. I told my friend but he was busy looking at the others in his binocs. When I looked back at them they where 30m away and now I recognized the look I'd seen on lions hunting on TV, so I told him again to check them out (at this time I was on the ground, he was on the roof). He did - and told me to get the hell into the car as he jumped down on the other side. The second we closed the doors the lions were there: two inches from me on the other side of the window. Seconds later we were surrounded by 17 lions having a party around our car. The king was huge with black hair, lying in front of us. It was crazy, as they came up to the window, licking the tires, running around jumping up to 4m tall trees and finally gave a concert of roaring that made the whole car shake like a vibrator.
At that point some SouthAfrican kids came driving to us palefaced and shaking. They had just been chased out of their camp as the lions had trashed everything they had, and the asked us to escort them out of there. On the way to our camp 1,5km away we met another 10 lions blocking the way, but we managed to scare them off the track. We offered the kids to stay in our camp but they were too scared and drove off, and we went to bed with the pack "singing" us to sleep and woke up to a beautiful rainbow arching the sky.
Later we had more encounters with lions in our camp and all, but by then my senses had climbed to a high level of awareness preventing me from doing stupid things. We didn't bring guns, only knives and torches, and I believe that was a good thing. Nothing as dangerous as false security. |
