Not one, but two leopards – a mother and her cub – padded through the gilded savannah, rosette-dappled fur glowing in the dusk. Okonjima's head guide, Martin Njekwa, had spent three hours tracking them, wafting a handheld antenna above his head. Each time he picked up a signal from the mother's radio collar, a VHF receiver had pulsed like a roused heartbeat. Golden eyes. Golden fur. Golden grass. For fifteen riveting minutes the cats sauntered alongside us, the eight-month-old cub tussling his mother; the pair rolling together in the sand and even posing on termite mounds, before slipping out of view into a scrub-choked riverbed.
“That's it, the show's over,” said Martin, his words hanging in the dusk like fading sparks spiralling from a campfire. I turned to my wife, Sally, sitting beside me. Euphoria at the big cat encounter was tinged with sadness. It was our final night. Our last African sunset. For two weeks, we had reset our lives to a circadian rhythm. It's what campers do. But this had been a camping trip unlike any we'd done before.
HOME ON WHEELS
“She's brand new, so you shouldn't have any problems.” Howard Sivertsen of Namibia Car Rental patted the bonnet of the Toyota
