h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm just stopping by to say thanks for visiting and that it is so nice to meet a fellow lover of africa! I like your safari tip entry and will try to think of tips that fit. My local SA experiences are very differnet from the 'just a tent and no fence' setting in your piece. The "never, ever get out of your vehicle unless in a fenced area" is the critical rule down here, where parks have have fenced-in camps, protected hides, and self-drive game viewing. The ubiquitous brochures and signs for tourists in 20 different languages do their best to remind visitors of this rule. Nonetheless, each year a dozen or so tourists, seeking great photo-ops or spiritual communions with another species, wind-up maimed, gored or just-plain dead from elephant, lion, leopard, hippo or rhino attacks . A very odd statisic is that the former tend to Japanese and the later, French. I think the signs and brochures should be to amended to drive the point home to these special groups.
Cheers

Hello again, thanks for stopping by . That's interesting about the fences. I've been to Lake Klye in Zimbabwe and Gorongosa in Mozambique and I remember now they did have fences. The Kenyan and Tanzanian parks I went to didn't. They still had the rule of never getting out the vehicle except in designated areas, such as the camp sites. I liked the lack of fences. Although sleeping in a tent six feet from river and 100yds from the hotel where they put food out to attract the crocodiles ( to entertain guests) from the same river was worrying.

Those statistics are odd, I've been trying to think of reasons but I have failed completely . I think many people from the developed world have lost some of their respect for nature, maybe they've been around pets too long. I was five when I first went to the Tsavo park in Kenya. I remember going out by myself in the dark, sitting on the veranda and as I sat I heard more and more noises, rustling, squealing, breathing, grunting and realised that there was a vast world out there that I was foreign to. Without meaning me any harm it could just roll over and obliterate me, maybe without noticing. I love these parks but I never take them for granted enough to feel safe there. There were no there, when my eyes got used to the dark I saw that the breathing noises were made by two giraffe grazing the tree by the side of the lodge. At which point I leapt off the chair and ran back indoors!

I'm not sure spiritual communion with another species is possible. I looked straight into the eyes of a leopard, six feet away at my eye level. I felt like a rabbit caught in car headlights. Hairs which I don't have rose on the back of my neck. It was terror not spiritual communion (just for split second of course, until I remembered I was in the safari bus ).

I agree, no fences make for a better experience but ya take what ya get, huh?

Your giraffe story reminds me of something that happened to Elder Brother and me when we were swimming in the Atlantic off an isolated beach on the central Florida coast. It was a gorgeous spring day and we were swimming out to a rise in the sand, where we could stand, about 75 metres offshore. As a joke, I started humming the theme to "Jaws" which seemed funny for a moment. Just when we were both getting noticeably spooked, a large dark shape loomed before us in the water. "What is that?" I asked. Elder Brother was out of there in a flash, yelling "shark!" My heart pounded and my muscles turned to molasses, as if in a bad dream. I noticed that the shark had a big lumpy mug with whiskers but this did not compute through the flood of flight hormones. I could barely swim back to the shore, I floundered, I gasped, I was certain that I would die. About halfway to shore it dawned on me that sharks do not have whiskers. I furhter recalled that manatees do. I started to breath once more and realised that we had just had just run from a rare (they prefer the intercoastal rivers, and only very occasionally swim up or down the coast) encounter with the truly gentle West Indian Manatee. In effect, my brother and I fled from an encounter with the Bambi of the deep! Thanks for reminding me!

Cheers!
Nandi