Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [41]
Breaking off a stalk to take a nap is not unusual behavior for lions. They habitually sleep eighteen out of every twenty-four hours. This penchant for dozing can allow careful sightseers to approach a somnolent pride quite closely. Nothing looks more like a housecat than a female lion sleeping on her back, rear legs akimbo and moving lazily back and forth in her sleep while one front leg rests on her chest. It’s the ultimate catnap.
The apparent lassitude is deceiving. Decades of acclimation to and acquaintance with tourist-packed safari 4x4s has led lions, with rare exceptions, to view driver, passengers, and vehicle as a whole. That’s why during close approaches they may seem to ignore the car in which you are riding.
Step out of the car, however . . .
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South Africa, May 2002
WHEN I WAS IN NAMIBIA in 1993, a deadly incident was reported over the wire services that originated from Kruger National Park in South Africa. Coming upon a pride of sleeping lions in the middle of the day, three male tourists from Taiwan got out of their car. (Kruger is liberally peppered with signs advising visitors in no-nonsense terms to STAY IN YOUR CAR.) Believing perhaps that Kruger operates as some sort of open-air subset of Disney World, two of them walked over to the slumbering group and turned around to have their photo taken with the picturesque pride. The lions, not unexpectedly, promptly woke up and ate them both. This outcome was shakily related to the press by the only survivor: the traumatized third visitor. Nominated by his friends to take the proposed picture, he had been close enough to the car to escape back into it. Once he was back inside the vehicle, the lions were no longer interested in him.
I had a chance to personally investigate this principle during my own exploration of Kruger. Though my visit took place years after the aforementioned incident, for all I know one of the same hulking felines that had exhibited a prior interest in Chinese food could have been the same one that ended up testing my friend and me.
Africa is home to many great national parks, from Ivindo and Loango in Gabon, to Etosha in Namibia, to the glorious but little-visited Ruaha in southwestern Tanzania. Along with the Serengeti, perhaps the most famous is Kruger. Previously the size of Switzerland, through the inclusion of congruent parks on its Zimbabwean and Mozambiquean borders, Kruger has been greatly expanded. Now known as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, it is possibly the best place in all of Africa to easily see a vast variety of wildlife in a comparatively natural habitat.
I say easily because Kruger’s immense size allows it to offer the visiting wildlife enthusiast a wide variety of inside-the-park accommodations. Good roads permit tourist buses to maintain regular sightseeing schedules. But if you really want to see Kruger, and spend some time listening to and observing wildlife as opposed to chattering primates from other countries, you need to get out on your own. Since for self-evident reasons setting out on a casual stroll through the park is absolutely forbidden (the rationale being one and the same with signs that say DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS), the best way to do this is to rent your own vehicle. While all visitors must be back in the numerous fenced camps by a specified early evening time, during the day you are free to drive where you will along the park’s many miles of roads and linger wherever you wish.
I was traveling with a friend, the late fantasy artist Ron Walotsky. Ron had never been anywhere outside the States save for a brief trip to Europe. Kruger