Or: Why Rugby Should Come With a Health Warning and Leopards Hate My Schedule
This week’s write-up comes to you from Pretoria, where the All Blacks are currently facing off with the Springboks — and you know it’s rugby season when your father, blood pressure detonating, is yelling at a referee who is, inconveniently, 8,000 kilometres away. I woke up to this soundtrack and thought: either patriotism has gone too far, or medical aid premiums should cover international sport.
Anyway — let’s rewind to something slightly less stressful: the bush.
Last weekend I pointed the car at Pilanesberg for another round of safari chaos. The opening act? Leopards missed by mere minutes (standard), lions playing hide-and-seek in traffic jams (also standard), and that particular brand of magic Pilanesberg serves up when you’re too tired to stay annoyed. A frustratingly brilliant start.
After two days, I swapped sides and went up to Black Rhino for a pair of last-minute drives. Not my usual style — I like a plan — but when Tale and her cub — then two, now sadly one — have been avoiding you for months like the plague, you take your chances. By the time I got there, she hadn’t been seen in two days, last reported slinking into a Tamboti thicket. To the untrained optimist, that sounds like a dead end. To me, it screamed: she’s overdue for an appearance.
Cue an afternoon of combing the wrong side of the reserve — classic — before the radio finally crackled with the words I’d been waiting for: On loc Tale. Exactly where I’d been half an hour earlier. Of course. Still, a glorious sighting. Ten calm minutes, her and the cub, ten metres off the road, just existing. And honestly? Worth the months of being snubbed. Worth the hours of missed timing. Worth it because this time I got to sit in that sighting with one of my best friends — the very person I first bonded with long ago over a cheetah sighting. The circle of safari life, minus Elton John warbling in the background.
Sunday night upped the ante with a blood moon. A total lunar eclipse. One of those events where you can’t decide if you should photograph it or just sit there and accept that you’re a microscopic dot on a spinning rock hurtling through space. I did both. Reflection mixed with photography — which, let’s be honest, is just reflection with receipts.
The week that followed was lions. Lions everywhere. Central Pride, Eastern Pride, individuals with cubs, individuals without cubs, one lioness posing like she was on the cover of Lion Vogue. The Eastern Pride even attempted to unalive wildebeest, which is generous of them, since wildebeest are basically suicidal cows in drag. They crept closer, closer… until I realised one lioness was two metres from my car on the other side of where we have been looking. If we’d been wildebeest, we’d have been finished. Except, of course, the pride was hunting in a burnt clearing where even I could see them coming — albeit a bit late. Wildebeest escaped, lions sulked, heart-racing stuff. Seeing them again after so long, fully grown, strong, and still hopelessly bad at hiding, was something else.
Cheetahs, too, made a cameo. Two males from Tale’s last litter, gnawing the final scraps of an impala kill. We sat with them in the freezing dawn until they finally unfroze themselves and shuffled over for round two. Terrible light, stunning sighting. Exactly the kind of morning that makes you forgive the hours you spent sitting in dust eating biltong that tastes faintly of despair.
Then came the nostalgia hit: the Eastern Pride, who I’d practically lived with for a year on Black Rhino before they moved east. Seeing them again, bigger, stronger, hopelessly worse at hunting, was oddly emotional. There’s something grounding about watching cubs you knew grow into adults — like flipping through old photo albums, except the kids in question are now 180 kilograms and trying to eat wildebeest.
Sprinkle in two black rhinos, another Central Pride lioness with tiny cubs, a rock-perched lioness doing her best impression of royalty, and a brown hyena casually strolling past my car like a drunk uncle at a wedding — and you’ve got a week that kept smacking between absurd comedy and jaw-dropping beauty.
By Friday, I was back in Pretoria. Back to family. Back to rugby. Back to my father calling a referee words so inventive they’d make Shakespeare pack up his quill and walk out.
And yet — between the lions, the cheetahs, the hyena, and that blood moon — I caught myself thinking how absurdly lucky I am. Lucky that my “commute” sometimes involves dodging elephants instead of taxis. Lucky that I’ve seen cubs grow into adults. Lucky that I get to live in this messy, unpredictable, breathtaking chaos called the bush.
Still… if the rugby continues like this, I’ll take my chances with the wildebeest. At least when they collapse, it makes sense.
Wildlife Beyond the Lens 