The word "safari" comes from the Swahili for journey. When the word was adopted into the English language, an interesting shift in meaning took place, with "safari" now referring to a journey through the African bush killing anything that moved. This tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two cultures, and can perhaps serve as a potted history of colonialism They were a bloodthirsty lot, the original white pioneers. If you'd asked them about conservation, they would probably have thought you were talking about jam. As Karen Blixen, the Danish author of Out of Africa, describes it: "Many young Nairobi shop-people ran out into the hills on Sundays, on their motor-cycles, and shot at anything they saw." She even says of herself that when she was young, "I could not live till I had killed a specimen of each kind of African game." I have always wanted to visit Kenya, not least because my father was brought up there. When he was a child, the years of heading off on a killing spree at the weekend were already over, but for him, in his heart of hearts, a decent-sized garden is still around 10 acres, and should be home to several species of deadly animal.I was not, however, entirely sure how I would take to the safari experience. When I see pictures of overweight middle-aged people in khaki shorts and fishing vests peering out of jeeps through the most expensive camera equipment money can buy, my first thought isn't, "You look like my kind of people." Nor am I a natural animal lover.
In fact, the only pleasure I usually get from the company of animals is eating them. But from the second I set off on my first game drive, in the Samburu Game Reserve, I find that I love it. We have all seen nature programmes about big game, but one of the strange things about TV is that the more it shows something, the less real those images seem.We may all know exactly what a lion looks like, and how it walks, but that is no preparation for the moment when you drive round the corner, and there is a lion A real one Right in front of your car. Only rarely in life do you find yourself unable to believe your eyes. It simply doesn't seem possible that you can be here, sitting in your car, and a lion can be right there, almost close enough to touch. The feeling is reminiscent of the moment in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo when Jeff Daniels steps out of the cinema screen into the auditorium.I have barely driven out of the compound before I come across water buck, baboons, dik-dik (tiny, unfeasibly cute deer), gazelle, impala, giraffe and buffalo. By the end of the day, I've also seen crocodiles, hippo, ostriches, zebra, a pride of lions, two cheetahs, a family of elephants and an eagle It's not even as if you particularly have to look for them These animals are everywhere.
Any residual scepticism about the purpose of safaris disappears. You would not be human if a day with these animals didn't fill you with awe and delight.The highlights of my second day were a leopard asleep in a tree, tail dangling downwards in utter, beautiful nonchalance, and an adorable six-day-old elephant that tottered right up to the car for a sniff, his mother's trunk nudging him here and there to stop him falling over.Though these animals are wild, the feeling of a game reserve is closer to that of a zoo than I had anticipated In fact, there is only one difference. Here the humans are in cages (motorised ones) and the animals go where they choose. This is an inversion, but not a negation of the concept of the zoo.
