Safari into the Future - The Times Travel

It’s an hour after sunset on the Londolozi game reserve, just west of South Africa’s Kruger National Park and 25 miles from the Mozambique border. Above, the Milky Way is a white smear in the night sky, and it’s already so cold I can see my breath.

I’ve spent the entire day in the company of rare African wild dogs and leopards — Londolozi is said to be the best place on earth to see the elusive predator — but, with the setting of the sun, the dogs have gone to ground and the cats have melted away, leaving just their toothy smiles floating in the chill air.

Now the bush has fallen silent, save for the cries of “Good lord, deliver us” from a fiery nightjar and the nervous giggling of a distant hyena. In the luxury camps dotted across the reserve, the guests are back for the night, showering, dressing for dinner or sipping fine South African wines by roaring fires.

Not us, though. We’re still out. We left camp at 5.30am and won’t be back until the other tourists are tucking into their pudding. Half a mile from where we’re parked, a pride of lions is planning tonight’s hunting operation.

I know because I can see them through the night-vision binoculars, a huddle of green ghosts flickering like Taliban under the black boughs of a marula tree. I pan right.

A solitary buffalo is ambling towards the lions’ kill zone, 500yd to their east, and a black-backed jackal, its eyes as bright as headlights through the image-intensifying glasses, has crossed my front, unaware of my presence.

“Point this at the lions,” whispers guide Gavin Lautenbach, handing me a headset attached to a directional microphone — and suddenly I can hear the green ghosts talking. “Mavis is going to hide behind that thorn bush,” says the boss lioness (admittedly, it’s just wheezes and grunts, but I get the gist).

“Mildred and Barbara will sneak round the back, and your job, young Suzi, is to jump on that buffalo’s back and bite him. Me? I’ll be, er, right behind you.”

There are those in the business who will recoil at the thought of bringing such newfangled devilry into the bush, because nowhere in the world will you find an industry quite so beholden to the motto “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” as the safari game.

Most camps reckon they got the formula right sometime between the relief of Mafeking and the death of George VI, and the only innovation they’ve allowed is the swapping of rifles for Canons.

Everything else remains unchanged, and, frankly, it’s becoming a little stale.

If you’ve been on safari, you know the drill, and if you haven’t, here’s what to expect: wake up half an hour before dawn, have a cup of tea, then set off on a morning game drive. Tick off the Big Five — an abhorrent old hunting term — then return at 10.30am for brunch.

Thereafter, vegetate until 3.30pm before heading out on your afternoon game drive. Stop at 5.30pm for sundowners, then return to camp for dinner, thus spending just six hours admiring the wildlife and 18 hours loafing in camp in any 24-hour period. Call me obtuse, but isn’t that the wrong way round?

Dave Varty, whose family has owned Londolozi since 1926, agrees. “We’re taking the safari out of the hotel and putting it back into the bush,” he declares, and he’s using technology to do it.

In June, he introduced Africa’s first zero-emissions safari vehicle, a long-wheelbase Land Rover with an eerily silent 25kw electric engine. Last week, he took delivery of the industry’s first specialised photographic safari vehicle, and The Sunday Times was the first to try it.

The vehicle has four electrically operated, shock-absorbed swivel seats, each equipped with a Canon 40D digital SLR fitted with the superb 70-200mm image-stabilised professional lens.

If you have your own kit, you’ll be delighted to hear that it also has multi-adjustable Wimberley heads, Manfrotto camera platforms, beanbags and deep storage bins to keep your equipment secure.

There’s also a Sony high-definition video camera that either you or your guide can use to shoot the action, transferring the recording onto DVD to take home.

The dog-eared guidebooks are still there, but they’re supplemented by a PDA loaded with six e-reference books, covering mammals, birds, reptiles, flora and stars. Look up the rattling cisticola, for example, touch the picture and the electronic guidebook plays its call.

Then there’s the night-vision equipment and audio-enhancement apparatus. The kit I used was reasonably good civilian gear, brought in as a substitute while the military-spec versions ordered for the vehicle languish under the noses of perplexed South African customs officials. Importing special-forces technology to an address a short distance from the Mozambique border would, I concur, raise suspicions, but when they release it, you’re going to have a ball.

Yet technology alone is not enough to break the mould. That takes a human effort, and when guides Gavin and Tom airily ask what I fancy doing on my first day, I give them both barrels.

For starters, I announce, like a spoilt maharajah, I’d like a leopard on a rock in perfect light an hour after sunrise. Then I’d like to find the African wild dogs rumoured to be living on the reserve, before ending the day with a lion hunt.

As for returning for brunch, lunch and high tea? Forget about it. I want to stay out until sunset. “Lekker,” they say — it means “cool” in Afrikaans — but tearing up the timetable and heading out in a vehicle bristling with technology doesn’t guarantee the spectacular sightings Londolozi has promised.

For that, we need 48-year-old Renias Mhlongo, a Shangaan tracker with the deductive powers of a bush Sherlock Holmes.

Formerly employed as a labourer on the neighbouring Mala Mala reserve, Renias fled to Londolozi after driving the boss’s car into a tree and never looked back, rising quickly to become one of South Africa’s 16 top trackers.

His uncanny skills, ignored by his former employers, were acquired as a kid, looking after his father’s cattle in one of the apartheid-era bantustans, in a place called Dixie.

“My dad had 120 cows,” he says. “I could recognise every one by its hoof print and I never lost one.” He sighs. “Wish I was that lucky with cars.”

In the grey light of the false dawn, the bushveld is as cold as a ski resort. Renias sits on the front of the photo car, staring at the ground. Suddenly he raises a hand and jumps down. I join him. “See the print?” he says. I shake my head.

He plucks a stalk of grass and bends to point out a tiny scrape in the sand. “This is the Maxaben female.” He stands up and stares into the scrub, then wanders back along the track, leaning low to study what appears to be a featureless surface. “She’s got her cubs with her, and they’re heading north.”

He rubs his chin like Colombo. “I think what has happened is this. The Camp Pan male — another leopard — had a kill in a tree.” If he’d had a pipe, I swear he’d have puffed on it. “The Maxaben and her cubs went to try to steal it. They fought over the carcass and lost it to hyenas, which is why she’s gone hunting.”

It’s an unbelievably detailed deduction, I tell him, based on a barely visible smudge on the edge of a twilit track, but when we drop into the dry river bed where the Camp Pan male had dragged the fully grown, 120lb male impala into the heights of a leadwood tree, blood trails, bone fragments and the telltale paw prints indicate a hyena feeding frenzy. Renias gives me a Cassandra-like look before leaping off the vehicle and plunging into the bush.

We spend the next 50 minutes waiting for him. A white rhino with a three-week-old calf ambles past and a trio of muddy buffalo glare like yardies from behind a thorn bush.

Somewhere a lion roars — one of a gang of three males intent on infanticide — and in the middle of it all, alone and unarmed, is our tracker.

When he emerges, almost an hour after dawn, he does so with the nonchalance of a man back from the paper shop. “They’re on a rock,” he says, glancing at the sun. “The light is very good. What else was it you wanted today?”

Wild dogs and a nocturnal lion hunt, I remind him.

“Ah, yes,” he nods. “An easy day.”

Chris Haslam travelled as a guest of Steppes Travel

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