Nature doesn’t exist for our entertainment.

Carelessly allowing my phone to slip out of the Land Cruiser onto the road, shortly after we’d crossed the Limpopo river into Botswana may not have been the best start to a safari experience.

The road was little more than a ribbon of sun-scorched sand. Every passing vehicle sent clouds of dust billowing into the air before they settled in drifts capable of swallowing a mobile phone without trace.

To make matters worse by the time our party of seven, including Jou, our driver and guide, had arrived at ‘Tuli Wilderness’, dusk was rapidly approaching and I had mournfully reflected on the loss of my phone and the chances of me remaining in contact with my wife, Sue.

I had however, not reckoned on the phenomenon, that is Jou! Without a word of annoyance, he calmly informed me he would go back and find it.

“But, it will be pitch black!” I exclaimed.

He nodded sagely, as if to thank me for that startling information.

Whilst the rest of us headed out on our first evening drive with Judas, our guide and driver, Jou was thirty kilometres back along that lonely road in the darkness looking for my phone. When we returned to camp that evening, Jou was already there, and astonishingly, so was my phone! Gathered around a glowing fire-pit later we introduced ourselves and learnt a little about each other. I learnt I was the least experienced photographer there. I'd suspected as much, but for the next seven days, I'd have half a dozen experienced photographers on hand, dispensing their wisdom.

We spoke about that first drive; the brown hyenas, the spotted Eagle Owl perched helpfully, on a tree stump and we were introduced to Kennedy, our chef! His culinary skills will be referred to, later, but suffice to say, that boy could cook! Each evening, he prepared a three course meal for us and provided a detailed explanation of what we were about to eat. Sitting in the open air, eating good food and enjoying the company of our small group, formed good habits and warm friendships. If the conversation became a bit too technical for a novice like me, it was good to have Tamara and Sam; wives of Adam and Mike, switch the conversation occasionally.

Bedtime beckoned when it was still early, but with an agreement to meet at 6.00am each morning, we all needed our beauty sleep!

Our camp was completely unfenced and so it was reassuring that we were escorted back each evening by Jou or Judas and their torches, showing us to our lodges. I tried to adopt the same principle for identifying danger as I do when flying; checking the facial expressions of the cabin crew! Unhelpfully for me, it was always dark at bedtime and I could never see their faces!

My lodge buddy, was my nephew Simon, whose idea it had been to message me some 22 months earlier, asking how I would feel about ‘doing’ a Safari. He’d given me 24 hours to decide and so the ‘Fuck it, why not’ principle was used in arriving at my decision. Turns out, Simon had used exactly the same technique!

Our day began with what I confidently decided was the call of a rare African bird. My ornithological skills were every bit as impressive in Botswana as they are in the UK!

The distinctive 'whoop' belonged to a hyena.

The sound rose and fell in the cold morning air and appeared to be coming from directly outside our window, it certainly made for a more effective alarm than the one I'd set on my phone. Turned out it had mild laxative effects too, or at least the thought of the hyena being so close did!

Before long we had settled into a routine:

Alarms set at 5.30am, sometimes from our phones, sometimes from a nearby hyena or baboon!
Coffee, laced with Amarula, somewhere spectacular.
Kennedy's breakfasts, brilliant but also ‘bang-average’!

An afternoon break devoted either to saving precious images, or in my case, catching 40 winks and reflecting on the morning, just witnessed.

Then came the anticipation.

The almost childlike excitement as we climbed back into the Land Cruisers wondering what awaited that evening.

African skies, fiercely burnt orange and crimson by the descending Sun, would be the perfect backdrop to sundowners, before darkness enveloped our entire world. Only the moon, the Milky Way and a million stars remained visible, to the naked eye. On arrival back at camp, we were greeted like returning heroes to a roaring fire pit, all-inclusive drinks and Kennedy’s three-course masterpieces.

Meticulous planning by Adam and Mike; knowing where, what and when we would eat and sit and drink, were matters, we didn’t have to think about. There was something deeply comforting about the order of these days and it was in stark contrast to what lurked and hid outside the camp. The rawness of nature, the simplicity of our surroundings and the opportunity provided, to witness it at first hand.

None of us would have complained if our first morning drive had come at the end of the week. Thanks in no small part to the expertise and fieldcraft of Jou and Judas, we had only been driving for minutes when we encountered a small pride of lions. We’ve all seen their photographs, but nothing prepares you for the sheer size of a male lion, barely twenty feet away.

A lioness and his three adolescent cubs, were forever under his watchful eye.

It was one of those moments when everything and everybody in the vehicle, suddenly became very quiet and very, very still. At one point the lion slowly approached our car, and his eyes met ours. They never wavered for a second and like a ‘Who blinks first competition’, he won. Our encounter felt like we'd arrived halfway through an episode of an ongoing drama. What unfolded was an instalment in their complicated family life; adolescent cubs pushing their luck, the lioness exercising remarkable patience and, every now and then, the unmistakable reminder that Dad was very much in charge. We could have watched them for hours and so we did and were lucky enough to catch up with them, from day to day to witness their family drama unfold.

Our morning drives took us past more birds and colours than I can describe in this blog: Lilac-breasted rollers and Malachite kingfishers that had been designed by deranged artists with industrial-sized spray guns.

Ugly, yet still beautiful Southern yellow-billed hornbills.

Colourful bee-eaters perched in groups, on branches.

Owls and eagles, posing, as if party to our reason for being there!

Ostriches, storks and spoonbills, a variety of kingfishers diving repeatedly and silently into small pools of water, filled our days.

I had asked from day one, for the chance to see giraffes elegantly gliding across a savannah. Better still, silhouetted against a back lit sunset. I had seen plenty in zoos, but there was something reminiscent of the scene from Jurassic Park as they strode, majestically in front of us for the first time. Better still and a day or so later; the sun had began to set, when they entered our field of vision once. more, allowing even me to capture them in their full glory, back lit, just as I’d asked!

The Tuli Wilderness, is a wish-list of a gift.

A few days later our pride of lions were joined, albeit a short distance away, by a Mum and her four, 8 week old cubs and we watched in complete awe, as they ran ran, frolicked and wrestled with each other in the sandy banks of a dried river bed. Mum looked on, happy for us to observe but ready and able to engage if we came too close.

Sunrises and sunsets in the Tuli Wilderness, are captivating and we had the chance to photograph, wildebeest, impalas, warthogs and zebras with perfect backlighting. Botswana had offered so much promise to us and it provided its rewards in bucket loads, but our chance to see an elusive leopard, seemed to diminish with each passing day. It would have spoiled nothing, but all of us felt, it might just have been the missing piece of this spectacular jigsaw puzzle.

Cue day seven! And our last evening drive!

Whilst in the car with Judas, his radio burst into life, with news that one had been spotted a considerable distance away from us.

Did we risk driving at breakneck speed, with me in the buckaroo seat at the back, only for it to camouflage itself long before we got there?

Er Yes!

What followed was jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring and spectacularly memorable! We sat in silence, (save for whispered utterances, like, “It’s a fucking leopard look!”) and it delivered, like only a leopard can! Laconic, disdainful and carrying itself with the confidence of an animal that knew it occupied the very top table. It stretched luxuriously, scratched behind an ear and devoted several minutes to grooming itself, seemingly unconcerned by the camera shutters below. The rocky outcrop was its private balcony, as it paced slowly from one end to the other, pausing to admire the view, or to check if we were still admiring it!

We couldn’t have hoped for a more fitting finale to our incredible week. Or could we? Was there anything left on that wish-list? But then from Simon; who was fulfilling a lifetime ambition to be here, pondering over his evening meal, came:

‘All that was missing was maybe a kill or at least the remnants of one? Or even, and would that be asking too much? The chance to see the lion pride one more time and for them to be back-lit against an early morning sunrise?

You know that time at the end of a show at the theatre, when the whole cast comes out on stage and bows; allowing for the rapturous applause to engulf them? Think about that as we ventured out for one last short drive, before setting out for home on day 8. The Lion, lioness, the three adolescent cubs and the lioness with her four tiny cubs, came out onto our stage and breathed their hot breath into the cool morning air. They kicked up sand with their heavy paws, sat and gazed whilst adolescent cubs chewed on the remnants of the morning kill against a backdrop of what was the most beautiful of all sunrises we had witnessed. The tiny cubs played nearby in the sand under the gaze of their doting mother.

Like the most incredible encore on earth, they stayed with us, accepting our applause, for far longer than we could have hoped or even deserved. Our safari with Apex Adventures in the Tuli Wilderness, had promised so much, in the two years, since we booked. Yet it delivered, so much more. Botswana reminds us that nature doesn’t exist for our entertainment. We were just lucky enough to be allowed into its world, for a short while.

I’ve come home with thousands of photographs. Some will hang on walls, others will be posted on social media, some will sit quietly on a hard drive, occasionally revisited on rainy afternoons. Yet the images, I’ll remember longest, are the ones no camera could truly capture; the smell of sage on the savannah, the whoop of a hyena before dawn, Jou returning with my mobile phone and the silence that descended over us when a lion looked us straight in the eye.

If you’ve ever had the chance to experience true wilderness, you’ll understand. If you haven’t, then I hope that one day you will.

Best wishes Alex