‘It’s so early and yet you’re smiling.’ Jimmy yawned. He stood in the car park, shoulders hunched in protest, wearing the provided puffa jackets with the game reserve logo on the breast. ‘Only psychopaths smile at this hour.’
‘I’m so happy!’ I squealed, jumping from foot to foot to keep warm but also because my body wanted to bounce and leap and skip. I was going to see all the animals!
Jimmy grinned and shook his head, his face half-disappearing into his hood as he did so. Other guests stood around the car park in various states of chilly wakefulness. There was the American guy I’d seen downing far too many beers at dinner and talking to his wife in an increasingly loud voice, only now he was sitting on a rock wall, eyes closed, resting his head on his resigned wife’s shoulder. Then the mid-range-awake people, like Jimmy, who were amenable enough but cross them and you might just get a finger in the eye. And then me: Tigger on laughing gas. A handful of open-sided jeeps suddenly swung into the car park and guides in beige shirts, army green multi-pocketed trousers and sturdy black boots jumped out of each truck. They’d obviously been prepped as to who they’d be driving, and each guide walked over to a group of guests with confidence.
‘Jess and Jimmy?’ A tall guide with a kind face offered us his hand.
‘Yes!’ I said, still bouncing.
‘I’m Ngoni,’ he said in a deep, comforting voice. A voice I felt I could trust to keep me safe from a charging rhino. He indicated for us to follow him to his jeep. ‘I’ll be your guide today and you can ask me anything at any time.’ He stopped at the jeep and opened the passenger door. ‘Sit wherever you like.’
The jeep was open on all sides, including the back, and had a green canvas roof. Behind the driver were five tiered rows of bench seats. My excitement got away from me and I launched myself at Ngoni, flung my arms around him, pinning his arms to his side in a hug, then flew at the jeep and propelled myself over the benches in a bid to get to the very back because the seats were higher off the ground and therefore further from the snakes.
‘She’s not normal,’ Jimmy said, getting into the jeep and clambering gracelessly over the seats. He made to climb over the last row and sit next to me but I slammed my hands down on the vinyl bench that was designed to fit about four people.
‘This seat’s taken.’
Jimmy looked around at the other guests all getting in their own jeeps. ‘By who?’
‘Me! I want to be able to move from side to side and see all the animals.’ I smiled ingratiatingly and slid back and forth along the bench seat to demonstrate.
Jimmy, only just coping with the extreme early morning, a time when his body clock was telling him he would normally only have been home from working at the bar for two hours, narrowed his eyes and sat on the seat in front of me. ‘This OK?’ His tone was leaning towards intolerance.
‘Actually, could you go forward one more?’
Jimmy looked at me, incredulous.
‘Your big fat head might block my view of something.’
While Jimmy moved forward not one but two more rows, Ngoni and the other guides finished up whatever they were discussing in a huddled group in the middle of the collected jeeps and jumped in the front of their respective vehicles.
‘It can get cold out there before the sun comes up, so you might want these,’ Ngoni said, passing us some heavy woollen blankets from the front passenger seat.
Watching animals in the African plains from under a woolly blanket?! The day couldn’t get any better. I gratefully took the blanket that Jimmy tossed over his shoulder, draped it over my legs, pulled it up to my waist, tucked each side in, then sat up, straight as an A-grade student, and waited.
Ngoni grinned from the front. ‘You ready?’
‘YES!!’ I literally screamed.
Jimmy shook his head and smirked. Ngoni chuckled, started the engine and swung the jeep out of the car park. In a convoy of six open vehicles we bumped down a hard-packed mud road, following the line of an extremely high wire fence and stopped at a set of gates. The driver of the front jeep pressed some buttons on a keypad at the entrance and the gates slid open. Once through, the jeeps dispersed in different directions and within moments the others couldn’t be seen or heard. A cool wind whipped up as we drove and I buried my chin in my jacket. The booking information Lana had sent along with her email had said to bring gloves, woolly hats and thermals, and when I read that information in the apartment in Cape Town, sitting in direct line of the air conditioning and still sweating along my top lip, I didn’t think it possible to be freezing in Africa. But freezing it was and I pulled the blanket higher and tucked it tighter. We lurched down a rutted track. Bushes with thousands of inch-long spikes scratched at the canvas roof of the jeep. The sky was still dark but you could sense the burgeoning dawn in the sounds of birds and the silvery glow coming from behind the far-off mountains. Ngoni deftly navigated the terrain while imparting his knowledge of the plants, the plains, the weather, the bugs, the origin of the game reserve and the conservation and anti-poacher policies they adhered to. After about twenty minutes the sky had lightened to a white-ish blue. Low streaks of wispy cloud lay like grey chiffon scarves across the horizon. Ngoni pulled the jeep over beside a bristly bush and pointed across the expansive scrubland. In the distance, loping across the plains, its silhouette blue-grey against the whitening sky, was a solitary giraffe.
The bristly bush was partially obscuring my view, so I clambered over the seats and sat in the one behind Jimmy. In unison we leant out of the side of the jeep. A breeze chilled the tip of my nose.
‘Oh my god,’ I breathed.
It was that single image that made me fully comprehend that I was in a very foreign country. Not the baboons, or the penguins, or the heat, or the beaches, or the weird accent I’d come to find melodic, or the other languages spoken in the streets that had clicks I found impossible to replicate, or the cheap yet delicious wine. A giraffe walking by itself, doing its own giraffe thing, on a vast scrubby African plain, was what made me realise where I was. And how lucky I was to be there. I breathed out the longest sigh of extreme content.
‘This is pretty cool,’ Jimmy said in a low voice, his eyes on the lolloping giraffe.
‘Over here,’ Ngoni said quietly, pointing in the opposite direction.
Jimmy and I spun in our seats.
The head of a giraffe appeared behind a huge bush, maybe only fifteen feet from us. Ngoni cut the engine, which gave me a brief internal panic. What if a rhino suddenly charged us and we wasted valuable seconds restarting the car? The giraffe moved slowly, elongating a huge blue-ish tongue and curling it around the spiky branches before swallowing down the leaves. Then next to him another head appeared. And then another. Ngoni spoke about the giraffe’s digestive system, how and why it dined on the most unpalatable of plants, and imparted various other fascinating facts, all delivered in a low, respectful voice. Within a few minutes six giraffes were moving around the jeep, eating from the bushes and glancing our way indifferently. I’d seen pictures of giraffes, of course; I’d read alphabet books where G was for giraffe, I’d watched Madagascar with Hunter and Katie, and I’d been to the zoo and seen them standing as far from the public as possible, eating hay from the ground; but being so close, looking at their exotic markings, their weird longs legs and their freakish necks made them a completely different creature to me. They were graceful yet ungainly and seemed the most polite of animals. The herd moved around the jeep and I tracked them with my gaze till I was looking at them over Jimmy’s shoulder. Inside I was a ragtag bag of confusing emotions. I was elated at being in Africa, so close to these incredible creatures; I was sad that Pete wasn’t with me, but happy that Jimmy was; I missed Hunter and Katie, and felt guilty for not being with Annabelle, but I also had a new feeling. A dizzying freedom of doing exactly what I wanted in that exact moment. I felt like simultaneously whooping and weeping and clapping and crying.
I looked at the back of Jimmy’s head. His hair curled at the nape of his tanned neck. If he lived back in London it probably would have been dark blond but here in Cape Town it had been bleached to a golden colour. I wondered how the trip would have differed had Pete stayed with me. I’d still have made him sit in front, not blocking my view, but would I have been so relaxed as I felt right then? Would he have been embarrassed by the horde of naive questions I threw at Ngoni? Would he have wanted to look like he already knew all the answers?
I leant forward and whispered in Jimmy’s ear. ‘I think giraffes are my favourite animal.’
Jimmy chuckled then turned his head and kissed me on the cheek. Startled, I looked into his eyes, smiled then sat back in my seat and looked out of the side of the jeep. Jimmy continued to face the front but I could tell, by the movement of his muscles, that he was smiling.
‘Ready to go?’ Ngoni asked us after a long while where we just existed alongside the giraffes. ‘You have enough pictures?’
I’d barely taken any, preferring to just watch the animals be themselves but quickly took out my phone and snapped a few more to send to Hunter, Katie and Lana when I got home.
‘Ready,’ I said.
I could have stayed there all day, close enough to hear the giraffes breathing rhythmically through their huge nostrils and crunching down on the barbed branches.
We drove on and stopped next at a wide-open flat area where a herd of zebra and a herd of buffalo were mingling at the edge of a murky stretch of water. From my seat I was straining to hear Ngoni, so I moved a row closer and sat next to Jimmy. Ngoni seemed to have an endless amount of knowledge. It didn’t matter what questions we (I) fired at him, he answered them all with a pile of information that always incited more questions. On my behalf, anyway. Within the hour we’d stopped at various spots to view buffalo, rhino, hippo in a lake from afar (because they were the most dangerous animal of them all), kudu, gemsbok, eland and zebra so often they became common. I’d clambered closer row by row until I was in the front with Ngoni, engaging in ceaseless conversation while Jimmy sat in a middle row enjoying the scenery. Ngoni mentioned that the springbok is South Africa’s principal member of the gazelles and I stiffened at the word that triggered images of French braids, pink gums and nice armpits. But as we turned a corner and a family of elephants came into view, flanked at a respectful distance by their rangers, I forgot all about Giselle and her plaits and watched the majestic, emotionally intelligent, community-minded animals protecting their young while pulling great branches from trees. They were huge. I loved them and wanted to jump out and hug them and take them home and feed them apple segments and have them sleep in my bedroom and cuddle me with their trunk. When we’d had our fill of elephants we drove with a bit more speed towards a set of gates. Beyond a fifty-foot-wide perimeter was another set of gates. It all looked very Guantánamo Bay.
‘What’s this?’
‘The lions,’ Ngoni said.
‘But we’ve got no sides to the jeep!’ I said, scanning the jeep for hiding places.
‘You’re safe with me,’ Ngoni grinned his uber-white grin. ‘No need to worry.’
I looked at his single rifle propped between the seats and tried not to imagine a blood-splattered, limbs-torn-from-torso-type situation where more than one lion attacked from more than one side of the jeep. But luckily no lions were visible as we drove though the dusty area. We made our way through another set of gates, parked next to an open-sided tower on stilts and were told to exit the jeep.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ngoni said, noting my hands gripping the seat with white knuckles. ‘This is an enclosure within the enclosure. Lions can’t get in here.’
Ngoni led us out of the jeep and up some steep ladder-like steps. At the top we were greeted by a man and a woman, and asked if we’d like coffee or tea. A white cloth was spread over a large waist-high centre table and linen-lined baskets held fresh croissants, pastries and fruit. From the top of the tower we could see the sun, pale yellow, rising above the mountains, turning the sky peachy-pink.
‘Listen,’ Ngoni said, coming to stand next to Jimmy and me with a white teacup wafting hot steam into the cool air.
At first, I heard nothing but birds chittering and bugs making clicking noises, but then a single roar echoed across the scrubland. And then another and another.
‘The lions are waking,’ Ngoni said with a grin.
He left Jimmy and me to appreciate the moment alone. The breeze was still cool but the coffee warmed my hands. I looked at Jimmy leaning against a wooden post.
‘This is probably one of the best days of my life,’ I said, resting my elbows on the edge of the tower wall and sipping my coffee.
Jimmy mirrored my position and smiled. ‘Me too.’
Shoulder to shoulder we gazed down from the tower and listened to the lions. We watched the sun change the colours of the sky and light up the plains, then ate fresh croissants and sipped coffee until Ngoni said it was time to go again. We drove out of the safety of the fenced-off tower and back through the lions’ enclosure, this time driving right through the middle of the lions. It was the only time Ngoni did not stop the vehicle but instead made a steady track through them and I found myself letting out a tense breath when we reached the double gates and left them behind.
We watched animals for another hour or so, this time Jimmy and I sitting side by side, our thighs pressed up against each other, then, when the sun was high in the sky, Ngoni drove us back to the car park. As we exited the jeep I felt like I’d experienced something meaningful. I hugged Ngoni again and this time he hugged me back. An early lunch was ready for us, which we ate by the pool. We were so tired we barely spoke. After lunch we were taken to the cheetah rehabilitation area. I loved learning all about the animals and again asked far more questions than anybody else; after some time all the other guests remained quiet, certain that I would eventually ask the same question they had in mind. At 2 p.m. Trust arrived in the car park; he’d stayed in the drivers’ accommodation somewhere on the grounds, and took the bags from our weary arms. Half an hour into our journey Jimmy and I were asleep against each other.
