I will now shatter the idyll of the African Bush. As a friend – who shall remain nameless but is a fellow hiking member – so articulately put it, “You want to see a charging Bull African Elephant in FULL MUSK with dripping, stinking, extended penis, green gunge and all on the hind legs charging you. THAT’S A ROAD BLOCK plus an INSTANT EMETIC! “

 Maybe these photographs will disabuse you of these naive idyllic notions..

The worst experience that I had ever had was whilst sleeping in a two man tent at Nxai Pan in Botswana beside a water hole. It was a clear moonlit night with the sky dappled with bright incandescent stars. While watching a family of bat-eared foxes frollicking beside the water, a fully grown male hyena nonchalantly strolled up to my tent. We starred at each other through the gauze being no more than half a metre apart. In the bright moonlight, I could imagine his nose wrinkling as he sniffed me. With one swipe of his paw, he could easily have ripped the flimsy gauze apart and enter my sanctuary, the tent. A ten year boy sharing the tent with me was shaking like a leaf but fortunately never screamed.

His inquisitiveness sated, the hyena ambled down to the muddy pool to sate something else: his thirst.

Imagine if he had not eaten for a week or weakened due to lion inflicted injuries, had perceived me as a soft target, an easy meal, something novel on the menu.

Python captured in Mkhuze, KwaZulu Natal:

It took 8 men to load this python on to the truck. It swallowed a man after it found him drunk and sleeping next to the N2 road in Mkhuze, KZN, South Africa on Saturday.  

Had it not been spotted, the python would have remained on the same spot for up to 8 months while it digested every piece of the man’s body, including skull and every bone in his body.