Finding Happiness on Safari

My happy place—the front passenger seat on a safari car, from my 2021 leopard safari.

There is a newfound purpose as the sun rises: it is the thrill of the chase, the chase of the Big Five. Every national park, every piece of wilderness, has five elusive creatures that make it their sole purpose in life to be hunted and sought out. Over the span of day-long safaris your only goal is to see those darned things. It doesn’t matter if you get smacked in the face by thorny branches as you rush through the underbrush to make it to them. There is a constant air of dullness, of nothing happening, and when you least expect it, you see something. Sometimes, you simply spend hours lying in wait, in silence, hoping for a mere glimpse, and occasionally hallucinating into existence some mythical creature that properly belongs to the domain of Herodotus’ flying snakes and not Aristotle’s creatures of Planet Earth. 

My first safari came on the cusp of my adolescent years and has become an annual family tradition since then. It was shortly after coming across  Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa and seated on the front seat of a solidly-built 70 series Landcruiser listening to John Barry’s monumental soundtrack to Sydney Pollack’s 1985 movie adaptation of Out of Africa,  that I came to appreciate the pomp and circumstance of being on safari. 

When you go on safari, none of that bland placelessness pervades. It feels like some place. Sitting at breakfast, having coffee and eggs and toast, or at night, trying out some local oddity that you secretly dislike but want to tell all your friends about, outside, in the open, with no one as far as the eyes can see, is magical. But this isn’t the tamed wilderness of the Granite Mountains: this is the wild. The leopards and the boars and the wild buffalos are out there, and if you’re lucky, while you dip into your soup, your spoon turning away from you before you bring it to your mouth, you’re going to see something, and then, the politeness dissipates, the naturalist calls out, and binoculars are lined up. 

There is something quite sublime about being out there. The thrill of the pursuit is very much part of the game, and it’s nigh impossible to cheat. You wait your time, and you hope that your naturalist has had enough theoretical knowledge to not bugger up, and match that to the phronetic pulse that runs through indigenous veins to make sure you see at least something. 

Today, going on safari is perhaps the last refuge of the young fogey who is also an idle romantic and bon vivant like myself. You wake up slightly before the crack of dawn and huddle into your safari jeep, trying desperately to guzzle your coffee before it falls victim to the ruts on the country backroads. There is something about having the wind in your hair that feels like freedom, like independence, the sort of thing you’re never going to find solace in. There’s no music, no technology, only nature and you. If there was ever a Luddite’s paradise, it is on safari. Elgar might not be bellowing from the speakers, but the steady beat of the thuds as you make your way through the carriage paths trodden by jeeps that came before is a darned good substitute. 

Safari is the last place on this planet where boredom and excitement simultaneously exist, completely unmediated by technology. This is what the premodern world would have felt like. You can’t read, lest you miss something. You most certainly don’t want to miss the sounds of the jungle: who needs music when you have the constant chirping and calls of birds and animals of all sorts? It is but you, your naturalist, and your fellow travellers. Nothing else matters. The purity of it all is rather sublime, as is the common purpose that you’ve now imbued yourself with. After you’ve had lunch in the bush, hopefully made by an entourage of cooks and staff who’ve set up a picnic table and are conjuring through some bushcraft a meal that is wholesome and yet inoffensive to the stomach, you set up shop again on the safari jeep, and you rinse and repeat. 

Sometime at the end, as the sun starts to set, you head back to base camp. You shower for the first time in the day, wash off the mud, and change into dinner wear. But one never really has dinner at base. A few years ago, I was driven up to the top of a hill that was identified as a mountain, where ten courses were cooked on the spot and wine was served in slow succession on fine china and crystal. I’ve also had dinner perched on a treetop. Both quite quaint experiences, I will admit. You still don’t have much to do, so you talk. Safari dinners are paradise for yappers. Back at camp, at lodge, you retire for another round of drinks, staying up late, talking to everyone else about their sightings, bragging about yours, knowing fully well you did absolutely zilch to contribute to it. This is the arena for the polite braggadocio. This is a little club that pops up in the bush, dissolving upon the departure of its members, and reformulated when a new cohort begins its five-day tour of duty. 

Four or five days of this sort of thing is enough: you don’t really get your eight hours, and by the end of it your body screams at you to stop, while your soul is renewed, fulfilled, and fresh. It is the city dweller’s annual communion with nature, a reminder of where man evolved from. It is somehow primal and yet polite and civilised, with its own code of behaviour. 

There are plenty of folks who decide that game drives are the appropriate venue for polyester-laden blankets that turn their bodies into amoebic shapes, devoid of soul, character, and silhouette. But they aren’t us; they were never us. And there are the well-kitted out safari connoisseurs, for whom the hill winds and granite boulders call out like the lark. The corduroys and the safari jackets, belted across the front with entourages to boot—this is a positively Edwardian scene, with the pomp and circumstance that comes with it. It is that pomp and circumstance that is so sorely absent from modern life, even though it seems pointless, even if it seems ancient and forlorn. 

I know that when I return from this one, there’ll be plenty to talk about, like there always is. But the pomp and circumstance will be gone, like always. The humdrum of everyday life begins again, exciting as it might be. I know what I’ll do: I’ll regale my friends with tales from the jungle, play Kipling for a week or two, and then wait for the next one.