Safari for Beginners by Claire Gervat

Nathan had one hand on the steering wheel, leaving his other arm free to hang out of the window. The back seat was piled high with groceries. An unremarkable scene, you might think, from any British high street. But this was a tiny airport in Botswana; and the go-faster brown and orange strips down the side of our vehicle were finished off with a sign saying 'Mack Air'. I wondered for a moment whether Nathan was planning to fly the little Cessna in this relaxed position. But suddenly there was a clank as the window latched shut, the engines roared and within seconds we were airborne. My first safari had finally begun.

It was a relief after all the preparations. For a start, there was the health aspect. Once, when travelling through Southeast Asia, I’d met a nurse who had a book on all the gruesome diseases you could catch abroad. About 95 per cent of them were found only in Africa. So I dutifully checked my vaccinations were up-to-date - typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis A and all the rest -- and resigned myself to six weeks of malaria tablets. I also bought the strongest insect repellent possible, though it was slightly alarming to see the way it melted plastic.

There were other concerns, too. One might travel all that way and see nothing. Even worse would be if there was a camera-toting stampede every time a single scrawny jackal hove into view. Would every photo of mine have 10 other minibuses in the background? Then again, there was also the fear of having too close an animal encounter. Friends, possibly motivated by jealousy, took delight in telling me all about second cousins who’d been eaten by lions or had to fight off leopards in the shower.

However the initial main worry had been, But what am I going to wear? This wasn’t quite as frivolous as it sounds; the standard urban wardrobe of black with white and the occasional splash of bright colour wasn’t going to work in the bush. The only creatures that wouldn’t be scared off would be the mosquitoes, which apparently have a Goth-like passion for black.

I knew, from checking with the safari organisers, that dressing for dinner meant changing into clean clothes, not an evening gown. Visions of myself drifting around elegantly in neutrals like Meryl Streep in "Out Of Africa" were soon shattered, however, by a trip to various adventure travel shops. Again and again, I would be amazed by how many different trousers, shirts and jackets there were on sale. Then I would ask for the women’s section, and be directed to a tiny rail in the corner. It was even more depressing trying the things on, since everything seemed designed to make you look as frumpy as possible. Perhaps it was a subtle way of keeping travelling women safe from that eternal danger, The Attentions of Foreign Men.

Luckily, the high street shops were full of perfectly nice khakis and, having found a pair of trousers you could convert into shorts, bought two, plus some sludge-coloured T-shirts and a floppy hat. These, along with a fleece, some desert boots and a couple of long-sleeved shirts from the bottom of the wardrobe, would have to do. As it turned out, they did perfectly, though I didn’t know this yet, so I still worried on the long flight out from England that all the other guests would look as if they’d just stepped from a Ralph Lauren advert.

But now, finally, here I was, gazing down at one of the world’s most unusual sights, the place where the waters of the Okovango River spread out into an inland delta before being swallowed up by the Kalahari Desert. Any lingering apprehensions about the trip, even the one about being in a plane so small that the in-flight entertainment was chatting to the pilot, vanished at once as I gazed out of the window.

Only a few minutes before, the ground had been brown and scrubby. Now, you could see the dark blue waters of the main river channels, and the reflections of the clouds and powder blue sky. Scattered throughout were khaki-coloured islands - some barely the size of a plump bush and surrounding them the more intense emerald of the marshes. It seemed to go on forever, stretching out to the distant horizon. It was so breathtakingly lovely that I wondered whether, along with the malaria pills, I shouldn’t be taking something to protect me from an attack of purple prose.

Suddenly, among the acres of blue and green, there was a large black shape moving slowly along a waterway. I stared harder, and the silhouette began to acquire big ears and a trunk. "It’s an elephant, my first elephant," I wanted to shout, but I didn’t think anyone would hear over the noise of the engines, and anyway the woman in the seat behind me was too busy feeling airsick to be interested in wildlife.

On the 10-minute drive from the dusty little airstrip to Chief’s Camp, there were more sightings: a solitary Cape buffalo glaring from the bushes; a family of warthogs running away with their tails held up ramrod straight; tree squirrels scampering in the branches; and a small herd of delicate antelope. "Oh, impala," said my fellow new arrivals, an older American couple who were certainly not on their first safari. They sounded almost blasé, and I couldn’t understand it because everything was amazing to me. Didn’t they realise how difficult it was to spot animals in the wild? I knew, from watching TV programmes about how nature documentaries are filmed, that any sighting was a privilege, and how lucky you had to be.

If that really was the case -- and I still believe it -- I was given my entire annual supply of luck in one go during those few days in the Okovango Delta. Perhaps the concentration of game in the Mombo area – part of the Moremi Game Reserve on Chief’s Island was unusually high because the rains had been so heavy and a lot of land was under water. Whatever the reason, the first drive out in one of the camp’s four open-sided jeeps brought a herd of giraffe, grazing through the highest branches of the acacia trees, their camel-like mouths chewing constantly as they watched us watching them. There were enough impala that soon I too was saying casually, "Oh, more of them," but there were other antelopes as well: kudu, tsessebe and red lechwe, with their horns curving madly in distinctive shapes. There were zebras too, and baboons, and banded mongoose.

Ali, our driver and guide, kept us entertained and informed with funny stories as well as facts: the fable of why the dove is always cooing, for instance, and how banded mongooses work as a team to catch snakes. It seemed a good lesson in the value of co-operation. Then came a call on the radio; the other jeep, driven by the improbably named Custard (because it is my favourite food), had something we had to see, something called 'ditao' in the local Setswana language. We drove, we saw: a pride of lions panting in the shade by a waterhole. It was almost too easy. I devoured the sight, because it might be the only one I had.

It wasn’t. There seemed to be big cats everywhere; on every drive we saw at least one, whether it was three male cheetahs resting on a sandy mound or the female eating an impala it had just killed; the leopard that fleetingly crossed the track in front of us; or the two male lions we nearly ran over they were so close to the road. There were plenty of other birds and animals, too, for us to tick off in the little book of lists thoughtfully provided at camp, and though it seemed slightly nerdy I gleefully did it all the same.

But there was more to a safari than game spotting, I soon realised. For a start, it was a very sociable way of holidaying. Travelling alone wasn’t a handicap, even though the rest of the guests were couples of varying ages, mostly middle-aged and with more than one safari under their belts. We bonded over shared wildlife experiences, with the help of some sublime catering. I had packed a box of Imodium for the inevitable, so I thought, stomach upset. It would have been better to bring diet pills and hangover cures.

Food and drink provided the skeleton of the day. There was the early-morning tea brought to the tent, followed by breakfast before the first game drive and brunch after. Then, after a nap on the veranda or a snooze by the pool, there was tea before the second outing of the day. On our return, there was time to wash before drinks round the campfire, with a soundtrack of raucous frogs, and an invariably delicious three-course dinner. Just in case we should, despite this, still be hungry, we would stop for coffee and snacks in the middle of the morning drive and a drink and snacks in the evening. Not that I was complaining; drinking a cup of coffee in the shade of an umbrella acacia, with the smell of wild sage hovering in the air, was an unbeatable experience apart from sipping a chilled glass of South African Chardonnay as the sun set over the bush, of course.

There was only one small hiccup in the happy flow of events. The animal rumblings I had heard on my first night turned out not to be buffalo, as I had sleepily assumed at the time, but lions. The next night, the roaring started up the moment the outside lights were turned off; but this time it was louder, and the lions making it were definitely close by. To say it was nerve-wracking would be an understatement, and I wished there were someone else there in the tent with me. Then I came to my senses. This tent, after all, was about the size of an average London flat. Any lion that wanted to come in would have to have mastered door handles. In that unlikely event, I could always lock myself in the loo or the shower. At a pinch, I could hide myself in the laundry basket, that magic container which swallowed up dirty clothes in the morning, only for them to appear clean and pressed by dinner.

By the end of half an hour, I had talked myself down so far that my only thought as I tucked myself back into bed was; "I wish they’d stop making that racket and let everyone get to sleep.". So much for the peace of the countryside.