“You can know someone for years, and they have no effect on you. You can know someone for five minutes, and they change your life forever.” (Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild)
We got to Londolozi after a 40 hour plane trip at 3.10 PM one warm April day. This was going to be the starting point to one of the most consequential trips of our lives - definitely of mine. But let’s start with the beginning ...
The amount of physical and nervous exhaustion that our bodies were feeling when we landed, only an hour before we made it to camp, is hard to put into words. But once we did land at the small Skukuza airport in the middle of the African bush, our senses came alive. The minute we saw our escort in the crowded small room of the airport, holding the familiar black-and-white-leopard-eyes-in-the-center Londolozi sign, a sure indication that was our guy, all the exhaustion and tiredness washed away, like magic. Like an ice-cold bucket was thrown over us, swoosh! Tiredness - gone! Excitement and presence - on!
Advice, our driver, was full of life! He was determined to get us to camp before the afternoon safari scheduled to start at 3.30 PM. We found it too amazing to believe that we not only managed to arrive at such a remote place on the planet after more than a 24 hour delay, but that we might actually be on safari the very first day we arrived. This sounded too good to be true.
But the one thing we would learn during our stay here is that these people can keep a promise.
From the plane, all you see is a green, lush forest, and dirt roads - nothing but dirt tracking roads. Not a paved road or road sign, not even so much as a “real” house as far as the eye can see. I told my husband, well, I better not need a hospital here! Advice kept stopping here and there for wildlife viewing, even giving us our first intro safari as we were headed to camp. He told us that in his opinion the true king of the bush is not the lion, but the elephant, as we encountered a herd of female elephants with babies who were keeping one “naughty” (his word) young male elephant away from the younger females. The elephant can kill a lion. A lion cannot kill an elephant. Listening to the order of things here in the bush, right from our first minutes on the ground framed our new reality: the new order of things would all be about who kills who; the winner, at the end of the day, is the one who gets the hunt, and the loser would be the hunt.
Advice also said “the female elephants are usually the heads of the herds and the protectors of the babies and of the young ones; they won’t let the young brothers mate with their young sisters. Just think how our world would be if it was led by all these wise females, eh?” - I continued his thought by saying “maybe it would be better, because look what we’ve done to it so far.” He chuckled.
As promised, at 3.10 PM, only with 20 minutes to spare, Advice pulled into the Londolozi Varty Camp, our final destination. It was surreal. I had read Boyd Varty’s book, “Cathedral of the Wild” in 2020, in a time when the world was shifting hard towards a very dark place, during Covid and the threat of war, dictatorship and general derailment. Since then, I planned, in my head, that on my 50th birthday, if I make it that long, I would come to Londolozi to drink from the fountain of knowledge and wisdom that the African bush promised in the book. And here we were ... at the original Varty Camp, where everything, the whole Londolozi world started 99 years before. To me, it was sacred ground. And it will be for as long as I live.
When thousands of tourists around the world come to Africa on big-game safaris to (still!) hunt, we were there to hunt only for photographs, memories, and experience a totally new reality than our day-to-day comfort. "Londolozi" means "Protector of all living things" and they have turned their safaris into photographic adventures since the 1970s (https://www.londolozi.com/). And they truly live up to that name to this day.
We were greeted by an army of staff. Londolozi now has several camps and each one is staffed separately. Each one has a camp manager and assistant manager, wait staff, jeep drivers (or rangers) and trackers, escorts, housekeeping staff. You familiarize yourself with the same faces, and they work for you like your own personal support system.
Phil, the camp manager was there, Tresta, our waitress, Tammy, another waiter who helped her out, Jerry, our jeep driver was there, also, and I am sure I am leaving a whole bunch of people out. They gave us ice-cold washcloths to wipe our faces. I just held on to mine. It felt cool in my hands and cooled my whole body off. The day was just starting to get hot. There were some random white, fluffy clouds in the sky but not enough to shield the bright orb. My skin felt like fastly drying out under the sun.
They said they could hold the safari back for a few minutes, but we insisted that we needed no time at all, other than just to see where our room was, and we were ready to jump in the jeep and get lost in the bush. We were both so excited - I can’t remember last time anything made me this happy, and giddy with joy!
I felt distinctly like crossing over in another part of my life, in another dimension, where time is measured differently, where hours are longer, and more heavy with meaning ... The transition to the Londolozi pace was imperceptible and yet palpable and deliberate ...
After we saw our room (netted bed, big bathtub in the middle, shower with a whole-wall of windows, to give you the idea of being in nature at all times) and washed our hands, we walked back under the tropical vegetation, on the slated foot path, towards what they called “the car park” - a dirt pad where the jeeps were parked when they were waiting for guests to head out to safari.
We usually have a certain routine when we check into a hotel, how we arrange our luggage, how we sanitize the space, how we unpack what where - we applied none of our “rules” on this trip, other than “least amount of time in the room, most amount of time outdoors”. We did not want to miss one minute of anything, and everything was outside, not inside - outside of the few hours (4-6) of sleep every night. .
At the car park, we were introduced to TK, our lady tracker. She is one of the first female trackers of South Africa and the first one at Londolozi. Trackers are maybe some of the most important gifts in a safari experience - they read the signs. Not only the paw prints on the dusty roads, to learn what animals have passed before us, but also other signs - like whether the way the grass lays could indicate either sleeping leopards or passer-by elephants, the alarming song of a bird could indicate a snake got into their nest, or a lion pride or a leopard is approaching an impala herd and there is about to be an ambush. Trackers are the very calculated mappers of the safari trip. The drivers get us there, but the trackers show us the way.
We also met our jeep mates - four ladies from the UK who were to be the icing on the cake of this amazing trip. Our entire experience was punctuated by their recounts of their previous safari experiences, by their humor, and joviality, by their generosity in friendship and kindness.
I am not sure what kept me awake and moving on that very first day at Londolozi - after so many innumerable hours of flying and airport delays and dirt and frustration ... I felt absolutely zero exhaustion. I was all curiosity and excitement, driven by this thirst for what’s next, more than anything else. I needed no food, no water, no rest. Just images, smells, action to feed my senses ... Just experience and drive ... And boy, did Jerry, TK (both of the Shangaan tribe, a group of natural storytellers and trackers originally from Mozambique, per their own account), and the bush deliver!
The first thing that surprised me once we were in Londolozi (and even before, on the way form the airport) was how surprisingly familiar the vegetation was - like the fresh, thick but supple forest of low-lands in the American East - something you’d see on the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia or Florida - deciduous trees of various kinds. Not many pines, if any at all.
Our very first stop was what they will always refer to as “a watering hole” - it is a small lake, in the US it would be called a “pond”, perhaps, but in the bush, it is a place where animals come for water. We had been in South Africa for 24 hours or so and we had been exposed since we landed in Cape Town to the efforts for water conservation on this generally dry continent. The water source is almost holy here ... And animals and humans revere it. Hippos carve out special trails from the woods to the water and they always follow the same exact ones back-and-forth.
The watering hole was full of hippos and crocodiles. A tree loaded with some kind of a sociable weaver (a bird) nest was hovering in the middle of the pond. A gray heron was also sitting on the fallen tree, yawning in the hot sun. Other water birds were diving for fish and shrimps. The whole place felt alive although the air was lazy and hot, hardly moving, with the consistency of molasses ...
Our next stop, after catching a glimpse of a striped jackal (apparently, the striped ones are rare), was a pile of cheetahs in the bush - we had to take the jeep offroad for these. The British ladies were amazed that we’re getting to see cheetahs on our very first ever safari outing, because one of them had been to Londolozi 11 times before and had never seen them. Our luck was only starting!
We pulled the jeep feet away from the cats. They were sitting in the shade of a bush, with the momma tucked in the deepest under the bush, and three babies close by, playing, one of them more mischievous (isn’t that the case, of that one baby?) than the rest. I could hardly breathe with excitement. Here I was, what seemed like millions of miles away from my home, from my own cat (who I affectionately call my cheetah sometimes), in a strange land, with no civilization around, breathing the same air as these precious cheetahs, enjoying a lazy afternoon in the sunny bush of Africa ...
In the very short intro into the safari that we got from Jerry, our guide, one detail stood out: we were not to ever stand up in the jeep. Animals perceive us as a unit - jeep and humans, all together, so we cannot give them any reasons to believe we were individual entities - this would make us an easy prey. It was the hardest impulse to fight - to stand up in the jeep to get a better picture. Short as I am, my height was not always the best vantage point for the best angle to get the best shot. Because as much as the experience itself is what we’re there for, the ‘take home’ benefits are the pictures. The thrill of chasing the next animal and get the best shot became our motor.
That first cheetah viewing would pretty much set the stage for all the sightings we were to see in the days to come. We would learn to watch and listen and weigh in every move of the animal and every detail of the bush - the air, the sun shining from what direction, how the animals position themselves around the sun and the shade, or around other animals.
Communing with the animals - being in tune with every one of their steps, their breath (feeling the breath and the grunt of the elephant literally down my neck and arm made me feel so small), each of their wince, makes you feel like the sap of life of the world flows through your blood vessels. It makes you hum with the hum of nature ...
We sat in awe and watched every move of every animal. We felt the fear of the impala hearing the alarming of the birds announcing danger. We felt every step of the leopard, almost tip-toeing towards their prey, muscle by muscle and sinew by sinew - tip-toeing in perfect silence until the big fatal leap was due. We felt the pain, the quick pain and quick death of the baby nyala finally captured by the leopard.
There was this organic connection between heartbeat (ours) and heartbeat (the animals’) that rejuvenates and restores. Life is beautiful equally in peace and in the strife to survive - and we were exposed to both.
As remote as this place was, as vastly different than anything I call “home” nowadays, it also felt familiar and home-y. This is perhaps because we all, ultimately, come from nature. We are of nature. We will always hold its grain within us, for safekeeping. But the noise of the modern, civilized world mutes our connection to it.
There was passion as much as there was peace - the pain of an animal being killed after barely a month of life was as strong and as exciting as watching mommas and babies sleep and groom each other.
We witnessed the most intimate of their life moments: waking up in the wee hours of the morning (giraffes still sitting down, half asleep), cooling off during the hot days (hippos, buffalos and crocs submersed in the water), chasing for prey (leopards chasing impalas, for hours, to surprise them just at the right, most unexpected time), mating, fighting for territory (the wildebeests and rhinos), zebras looking after one another towards opposite directions, elephants playing, down to the culmination of death - the cruel but necessary death of a baby nyala - mixed emotions between understanding the need of the leopard to eat vs feeling sorry for the baby nyala who had a short life and for their momma whose months of protecting them in her tummy and then in life ends up in death after all ... But there is also a sense that these animals have a tacit understanding that this is just the course of nature and of life. There is no regret - there is just a clever knowledge that this is just the circle of life ...
We would learn about how predators hunt differently depending on their own abilities. While we were snapping pictures, Jerry, our guide, was narrating a whole chapter of our own personalized nature guide’s manual - he was teaching us to look at the animal’s natural abilities and understand their life and personality: cheetahs have the luxury of being the fastest runners in the animal world, so they can watch their prey from afar and sprint to get it in no time flat!
A leopard cannot run that fast, so they have to build towards “the element of surprise” - they almost have to act as if they were to “happen” upon their prey, fall from a tree, or hide in a bush to surprise the victims from a short distance; lions attack in packs, so they can kill things much bigger than their size in an ambush. Leopards are also incredibly strong and their musculature is evenly distributed along their entire bone system - so, they can climb a tree and drag their prey up there, safe from the hungry hyenas, while a lion cannot climb a tree, as they are too big and too “front heavy”, while cheetahs cannot climb at all, because their paws don’t have retractable claws, which makes them more similar to dogs, in that respect. Jerry said: “cheetah paws are not built for climbing, but they are built for running and speed.”
In the days to come, with every animal sighting, with every bug or bird encounter, we learned. We learned about creatures and how they survive, how every single one of them, as small or as big as they are, have a place and a purpose, a meaning in the bigger picture of life, and the world. We soaked up the teachings like young kids, opening up our eyes and senses to the world for the very first time. This was the best education, the most in-depth, and important education of my life, perhaps ... I am here to tell you that yes, you can live to be 50 and you can only then feel like you’re just starting to learn.
On the very first morning, at Londolozi, when the sun was still very much just a muted whisper below the horizon, and you barely started to hear the first calls of the ring-necked doves, and you hear the crystal-clear rush of the Sand River down in the valley as you start feeling the first flutters of wings from butterflies and mosses all around the Varty deck, you realize that this is what Heaven must have felt like on Day One. When the Garden of Eden was just designed, when it was new, and born fresh, this is exactly what it must have looked and felt like - fresh, rich, plenty, all creatures, the sky and the earth living in harmony. No interruptions, no wars, none of the muck that humans (after they were “blessed” with intelligence) added to it later ... Just peace and balance, and beauty and freshness ...
That feeling would stay with us throughout our vacation. Jerry, our guide, had the most amazing knowledge and imparted it with us like no other teacher I have ever known: he would describe animals and their behavior to a level of detail that you find only in very scientific documentaries and books. He would take us in front of a creature, a lion, a leopard, a cheetah, elephant, rhino and he would start observing their behavior and then explain what each step and gesture mean and then predict what step or gesture they would take next. And he was never wrong in his predictions. He knew to tell us when an animal was full or when they were hungry. He only failed once - when we had lions and wild dogs and impalas within kissing distance from one another, wild dogs as hungry as ever, and he predicted there would be a hunt, or at the very least a chase. And no one was interested in hunting down anyone that night ... That was both bizarre and thrilling...
Outside of that - he was mostly 100% correct every time in assessing animals and their behavior in the wild.
This closeness to the animals, only feet away, sometimes as little as 2-3 feet away from leopards or lions, this tense suspense of waiting, quiet and respectful, in the bush, to see what their next step would be, did two things for me: one, the hunger for knowledge became highly addictive; I knew that with each second, with each action the animal will reveal something new, something unexpected to me but something that makes perfect sense in the whole scheme of the universe, so I was always waiting for that “next step”; and two, it revealed to me the very essence of the universe, of this planet, and of life in general.
This simple-ness of the complicated life of the bush, which is completely logical and easy and yet so complex and rich is what this world is about: everything in the world has a place and an explanation. If we return to the primordial state, we will reveal the essence of the world - which is pure peace, pure joy and pure ... purity ... Humans, with our twisted, biased natures complicate the world, add pain and strife and struggle to it all. The animals, even the ones that know they will be hunted, have a distinctly deep peace about their lives that renders them calm and content ...
We learned that all animals are beautiful, no matter their roles and their purpose. I went to Africa convinced that hyenas are mean and grossly ugly. After watching them play in a watering hole and watching curious hyena babies almost wanting to climb in our jeep, I thought otherwise.
Looking back now, there are a few things that will remain with me - Africa is more than just a place; it is also a feeling, this treat for all the senses: it smells like aniseed, crushed under jeep tires, it sounds like the ring-neck cooing doves calling continuously during the day, from sunrise to dusk, it looks like a mess of colors - the lush green of the trees, the yellow of the tall grasses, the many, many ardent colors of the big sky, anything from gray to purple to deep reds and oranges. The big sky is like a church ceiling - punctuated by the big marula trees, standing tall, casting giant shadows on the vast land.
The bushveld changes personalities throughout the day. As lively and noisy as life is during the day, as quiet and motionless it is at dusk - not a molecule of air moves. The sun dips fast under the horizon, leaving a bloody and yellow canvas in the skies - an organized mess, like a painting, intentionally planned and put together. The day-time world closes the curtain and it opens the one for the night’s spectacle - one that we can only guess at and which we did not experience first hand; unless you count the harrowing roar of the lion, heard from tens of miles away, echoing in the rocky Sand River valley ...
If humans don’t know happiness it is because of themselves. Because they are complicating life with unnecessary burdens, biases, and streams of thoughts that are more often than not, against their innate nature. Were we to just listen to our natures, to our out-of-the-womb calls to humanity and livelihood, we would know happiness. We would know respect and we would know our place. We would find peace ...
In the African bush, you see the concept of Ubuntu ("I am because you are") in action. You see it through the respectfulness of the people and the careful, almost scientific, order of things in the natural world. A hyena never hunts because they know the lion will hunt for them and they will finish off the job. They know their place - their place is to clean up the bush from dead carcasses, to keep it clean. That is not the role of the lion or the leopard. That is the role of the scavengers and the hyenas. Oxpeckers keep the buffalos and the giraffes free of bugs (or try to). One animal relies on each other, in mutual understanding.
A hyena never wants to be a lion and a lion never wants to be an elephant ... When everything has a place, and a purpose and everything knows its place and its purpose, everything is in balance. Everything is easy, clean, and harmonious. This realization gave me the most fresh perception of life that I have ever experienced ...
When the world puzzles me, when my life puzzles me, I usually turn to books. But after Londolozi, I know to turn elsewhere now for an explanation - I know to turn to nature. Nature, its creatures, any one of them from the dragon fly and the fresh flies on the carcasses to the elephants, the rhinos, and even to humans, the unspoiled humans, has all the explanation one ever needs. Just strip everything down to its essence - what are their physical abilities, what are their God-given roles, what is their relationship with us and themselves and with the vegetation - and you make sense of it all. Everything has a place and everyone has exactly what they need to survive and have their own unique place in the tapestry of life and nature ... Not a hair off ...
Londolozi forces you to stay present. Not only during the safaris which are mad chases after the next animal, an addictive hunger towards the next thrill, but also when you finally do find the precious animals that so graciously agreed to share their day-to-day activities with you and teach you by example. The people at Londolozi also force you to be present. You will never see anyone in the staff stare blankly at a cell phone. I am sure they do use phones and computers for their business, but out in the open I didn’t see any of those. They all wrote on pieces of paper with a pen. I asked our camp manager, Kate, for their mailing address and she wrote it on a piece of stationary paper to me - she did not just email it to me, or texted it, or gave me an already printed business card. As much as they conserve everything (paper, water, electricity, refuse the use of plastic), I am sure a big pile of business cards would be seen as waste.
Their breakfast and lunch menus are written, but the dinner menu changes every night. So, the chef comes to the table and lists the items they have prepared for you and you must make a choice from the list they announce. It forces you to pay attention and to communicate with another human - something we so sorely need in today’s age of technology taking over and of working from home and forgetting how to look someone in the eye.
You are reminded of our shared humanity when you are forced to communicate with others, especially with strangers living across the world from you that don’t look or speak like you but are moved and touched by the same things as you are - a kind word, a good dish of food, a cold drink, a cool morning, or a breeze in the torrid mid-afternoon sun ...
You had to pay attention to everyone approaching you, shouting out their names and their roles at you. There was no brochure to teach you, there was no “program”. It was just you, your brain, your senses and other people communicating with you - that was all. That was enough.
There is a deep sense of diversity in South Africa - something that I absolutely thrive on seeing and experiencing ... I love how different we all are, and yet how we can find a common ground to stand on at the end of a day ... We have learned about Shangaan culture, about the cow dowry that grooms have to pay for their wifes, about the lack of respect that hugging one’s elders represents, and the lack of respect for shaking an elder’s hand. “This is backwards”, you might say, but to me, it is just beautifully different and I am grateful for now knowing it. Jerry, a Shangaan (just like TK) explained: “That was the main problem we had with white people: their customs and ours are exactly the opposite.”
Maybe it’s because I was raised by not one village but by many, but I have always believed that the best way to do something is the many ways you learn how to do it from different families and cultures are doing it ... We are alike in all our differences - we might take a different path but all of the paths lead to the same place at the end of the day - to the promise of a shelter, a family, sustenance, safety, comfort ... We all end up there, no matter our choices and routes ...
There was no TV at Londolozi - at least not in the rooms or the restaurant areas. We visited “The Living Village” - which are the staff quarters - all people who work at Londolozi live on site. We did see TVs in their gym and hang-out areas. But not in the guest areas and not in our room (thank goodness!). These people were not only generous to give us a tour of their “living quarters”, but they exuded a sense of pride of who they are and what they are about. They asked us every day if we had been to the village and they kept repeating “do go!”. One of our camp managers, Will, gave us the tour and showed us everything - where they live, how they conserve the water (from a well and from rain), their 80 gardens where they grow many of the veggies they serve at all their meals. He told us that there is only one main kitchen, in the village and each camp has a smaller kitchen only for the final plating and prep. What the guests don’t eat, it goes back to “the village” and it’s the staff’s meal the following day. All the leftovers are either in a compost bucket, or they go to the pigs in a close-by village where they buy their meats also for the guests and the staff later. He repeated time and again “nothing goes to waste.” Londolozi bottles their own (well) water in glass bottles, sealed by themselves. This is what we got for every safari outing - a cold bottle of fresh water.
Just a word about the Londolozi people, our guests. We have traveled in many parts of the world and stayed at various levels of hospitality establishments, but we have never felt like royalty like we felt at Londolozi! Everything they do is state-of-the-art: from the gourmet food, the premium linens, the turn-down service in the evening, to the attention to detail in every interaction with their guests. Everything is personalized. You feel seen and talked with, not to. And they do it effortlessly and kindly, without much fanfare.
They asked us how we found out about Londolozi and I told them it was after reading Boyd's book, "Cathedral of the Wild" and how I always wanted to come after that, because he made the place sound simply magical. After that, Shan Varty, one of the owners, the CEO of Londolozi, and Boyd's mom came to our table for breakfast one day to thank us for following her son and for wanting to come visit Londolozi. She talked about Londolozi, her family, her starting years there when she was 26 with a young baby and lived there with no electricity nor running water and her plans for the place for the future. I was stunned. Almost embarrassed with all the attention.
And if this were not enough, on my birthday, Boyd (who was not on site while we were there) sent a personal video to our camp manager, Kate, and she shared it with me - he was welcoming us to Londolozi and wishing us a good stay. They also gave me a gift for my birthday, multiple things, one of which was an autographed book, Boyd's latest, "The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life". Again - I was floored and felt almost embarrassed. I was just a girl who read a book, afterall ...
I wish more of us would learn to lift up our heads from our devices and really look at the world. Really look at each other and really learn from one another again ... Just a simple, unaltered exchange of experience and life lessons - no google. In fact, there was no cellular service and no wifi outside of our room. So, if someone would say something that we didn’t understand, we were forced to ask another human for an explanation and we got a real-life, live explanation of a new concept, a new animal, a new bird, or a new recipe for food ...
Personally, for me, Londolozi was a reminder to who I was when I was younger: I grew up in the mountains of Romania. We foraged for food and were taught how to avert danger - the viper in a bush of raspberries, the wolves and the foxes in the woods (the foxes kept eating our cats), the bears (you can climb a tree for a wolf or a fox but not for a bear) by knowing them. This trip brought me back to that ... It reminded me how primal and simple we are, truly, and how unnecessarily complicated we have been making our lives recently...
Humans are going to continue to complicate life and history. But I think as long as we keep in mind our essence and what remains at the end of the day, when we peel off our complicated layers and are stripped to our core: our purity and strength and place in the world. I think coming back to this might, just might, give us a chance to survive. As long as we don’t allow our minds and virtual advances to control us and our natural abilities to be ... I think we might have a chance to endure the test of time ...
Boyd Varty says it best in the book that brought me to Londolozi: “I’m not ignorant or innocent; I know full well that this is a dangerous and damaged world. But I’d found safety again in nature and in my own heart in the cathedral of the wild.”
I read that book about 5 years ago. It opened a door into this wild and wonderful and endlessly beautiful and rich world of nature for me. I knew then that I had to not allow myself to die until I experienced it. I made a commitment then that if I lived to be 50, I would step into my second century of life at Londolozi. I planned for this in my head a million times.
And this trip delivered what the book promised but so, so, so much more. Infinitely more. Someone asked me if this trip was everything I expected and it was not - it was better, more, richer, more intense, more real, more fresh, more lively, and infinitely more giving than anything I have ever expected and anything that I have ever experienced.
I think it is safe to say I am deeply, irremediably in love with Londolozi - a place that has been elevated, for me, to a lifestyle, to a new understanding of the world, to a new world concept, a new paradigm. The best part about this is that at Londolozi you only learn the basics. You can then, imbued with their richness, walk away and apply them into your everyday life, anywhere you are in the world. Your step will be more sure, your shoulders will be more relaxed, you’ll smile more, frown less, and really, really, detach yourself from the poison of others out there, while, at the same time, have a better understanding for why they do the things they do. You cannot stop them. But you can be prepared to answer them in a way that does not damage you to bits ...
I don’t think I’ll be “over” Londolozi any time soon. You can never be “over” something that’s always been ingrained into you, from the beginning of time. It only needed a reminder. And I am glad it received it ...
I will feed from just these four days for a long while to come. Four days that taught me more than 50 years of life perhaps! The sexiness of the walking leopard, the lazy motions of the sleepy lions, the gentleness of all the different antelopes, the grace of the herons in the sunset and sunrise, the familiarity and hominess of a family of cheetahs, the crocs patiently waiting for the river rapids to drop the fish into their open mouths - they will feed me, and remind me of what’s important for many moons to come ...
Our tracker, TK, probably delivered the best lesson of all. I asked her how they know what our days would look like, on safari - how much of it is planned and how much is happenstance depending on what the radio tells us we should go see. She said: “We plan a little bit, but most of the time, we let the bush surprise us.”
That made me stop in my tracks! That is such a beautiful metaphor for life - the bush always surprises us, but we’re too busy planning and trying to be in control to acknowledge this. Most of the time we are thrown around by forces outside of our control. And our unhappiness comes from the illusion that we could control them or that we should control them.
What I have learned in these four days from these amazing people and animals is that we cannot control anything, truly. The only thing we can do is adapt. Be ready to be surprised and know exactly the rules of how to meet the surprise. And just like in the bush we don’t run from the big cats, but we do run from the elephants and the hippos, we must learn to adapt our response to whatever the bush throws our way. But never try to control the bush. Just as the same Boyd Varty says, be comfortable in the uncertainty.
Thank you, Londolozi, for a lesson well-taught!
