BootsnAll Travel Community

Anyone have any funny/interesting/scary encounters with wildlife while on safari or otherwise touring in Africa? Just curious - I would love to hear some stories!

Hi Ponytail,
I was a professional safari guide in South Africa for 4 years and now own an adventure company.
During my time i had a number of "interesting" situations with animals but probably more scary moments with clients!

I once had a coffee stop during a morning drive and two rhino cam bounding past very close and i had to bundle the clients into the vehicle quickly!

Another time I was helping to release two new rhino onto the reserve (they were brought by big containers). We released one rhino who then decided to come back and destroy 3 of the vehicles parked around the lorry.... many thousands of Rand damage including the vets new 4x4!!!!

And i once got out of a vehicle and almost stood on two lions! I didnt realise they were there!

My favourite story is of a colleague who was asked the guide to stop the vehicle so the he could have a toilet break....when the client got back in to the vehicle the guide thought he was seated and pulled away, the client was standing, then half fell out the vehicle and grabbed onto the electric fence that was the vehicle was driving next to and the 3000 volts threw him back into the vehicle! The client was ok thankfully!

But people were much worse and i was forever having to retrieve clients who went wondering off into the push during the day or even at night! They thought lions would not be interested in them!!!!!


Antony
www.yomps.co.uk

on a morning game drive in the Masai Mara, we were busy looking thorugh our lenses/binocs at a young lion up in a tree "calling" its parent, little did we know until we felt our van get "bumped" that the mom was rubbing against our vehicle!

While on a Safari in Kenya (I was living in Ethiopia at the moment), there was a stop where we could actually get out of the car and stretch and eat. Well, I'm walking around and I see hyrax (they are a small animal as big as maybe a cat but kind of look like squrrels? Look them up I guess They are related to elephants!!) all over the cliff. So of course I start feeding them pieces of bread while leaning on the sign that says DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS! I'm the regular Einestein right?? So I hear the guide yelling something and I turn around (he was yelling stop by the way) and at the same time, I realize that these animals can jump really high and they have sharp teeth. So, Meanie the hyrax (yes I gave her/him a name) took the piece of bread I was holding and decided it would taste better with some blood from my thumb on it!! I was bleeding a ridicilous amount in the middle of a Safari.
All the way back I was scared the animals would smell my blood and try to break into the jeep to get me/us
I had to get more than 10 shots in Nairobi and think of this event everytime I get finger printed and the scar comes out crystal clear. I also tell this story fairly often and stick out my thumb as I do it to show my 1/2 inch scar!! Aaaargghhh!!

The zebras would not stop staring at me when I had to take a piss behind the Land Rover at Ngorongoro Crater!

When i was a kid i went to a 10 day children's camp at the Umfolozi Game Reserve... one of the days we were taken out on a walk with the rangers. We came over a hill and there was a lone buffalo standing there reasy to charge... the rangers stood their ground while we very carefully and quietly "ran" away, it was a pretty close encounter!

One early early morning when taking down our tents, one of my fellow travelers saw a round mound under his tent as he took it down. It looked like a large turd - round and coiled looking. He kicked it with his sandaled toe. It slowly and sluggishly crawled away. It was a pit viper.

while camping in samburu park in kenya our guides didnt tell us to padlock our tent. Monkeys invaded it and went through all of our stuff looking for food. they ran out with water jugs, packets of gummi bears etc. we had to follow the trail through the woods to get our stuff back.

later they raided the kitchen area and stole a jug of cooking oil and ran up the tree with it. it was never seen again.

As I sleepily stepped out of my tent on the way to breakfast, I bumped into an ENORMOUS male elephants, tusks pointed directly at me. (Before this incident, I never would have thought it possible to simply stumble onto an animal that size, but I digress...)

Being not so awake, I simply thought, "hmm.. there's an elephant on the path."

My husband, a much cleverer specimen than I, grabbed my arm and hissed, "walk the other way SLOWLY."

Good stories! I think the viper under the tent is the freakiest. Marisa, I wonder if the zebras thought you were staring at them as well?

My safari guide in Tanzania told me a story about an experience he had with a client a couple of weeks earlier.

They were in Tarangire national park I think it was and a lion jumped onto the bonnet of his vehicle! The client was freaking out, because the sun roof was open.

So the guide took a photo of them with the lion covering the windscreen.

It was an awesome photo!

Nothing so exciting happened to me. Other than a hawk trying to take my camera thinking it was food. I got a good shot of it:

This didn't happen in Africa, but it's dealing with the same train of thought.

While going up to a waterfall in Thailand, I noticed some monkeys off to the side ( macaque types). I went over to take some closer photos as it was under a thick,dark tree canopy. I started snapping away. There was a young one on a branch and I was taking its pic with a small flash. This must have freaked out the alpha male, because I heard a shriek. Then as I looked around monkeys were coming in from all angles.

I very slowly and calmly (completely scared inside!!!) found my way back to the path and felt that had I staid longer, I would have known what monkey teeth feel like.

I do work for one of the big environmental NGO's and my work takes me into the field in Africa from time to time. I've had four crazy experiences with animals while on trips in Africa

1) I was on a hike in the rain forest in Gabon with the anti-poaching team when we discovered that the density of the forest had camouflaged the fact that we had walked between a mother forest elephant and her juvenile child. The child suddenly came into view and he was looking straight at us, we then heard the mother moving in the forest on the other side of us but couldn't see her. We all dropped our packs and picked trees to climb, the local team has had people badly injured in similar situations. Thankfully the young elephant didn't cry out in fear so the mother left us alone, we had a very tense 5 minutes.

2) In Northern Cameroon I was hiking with three NGO team members in the savanna and we were being very cautious about making sure we didn't have a run in with a lion, they had come through our camp the previous night making mighty roars and leaving lots of foot prints. I was the second in our column as we hiked through 12-16 inch deep grass. The local guy in front of me passed by a taller stand of grass (about 3 feet) and when I came upon the same stand of grass the whole thing shook and as I turned to look at it a yellow colored flash was coming at me. The flash was about two feet from me and as I jumped to the side I was worried that I was about to be mauled by a lion and that the guys with guns would never have time to do anything about it. Thankfully it turned out it was a small deer like animal, it's antlers missed my left knee by about 4 inches.

3) During a four day trip into the rain forest our camp was overrun by several million termites at about 2AM. When we looked outside our tent it was impossible to see the ground there was just piles and piles of insects. The combined noise of all the termites made a deafening noise.

4) The anti-poaching staff and I came across a Gabonese Viper in the rain forest it was so well camouflaged that we almost stepped on it, the team realized we had an issue based on the noise the near by birds were making, the snake's head was bigger than my fist and it was right next to our path.

My husband said I ought to add the bit about when I got surrounded by baboons at the Wikiwiki Warm Springs in nothern Nigeria. We were down at the warm springs and I was washing clothes in the water. Lots of baboons hang around in the trees. When I was heading back up the trail to our camp, I saw a mother baboon with a baby on its back. I decided I just had to take a picture so I set down the bag of laundry and took out my camera. By the time, I had gotten the picture, the mother baboon was right at my feet and grabbed my laundry bag. That's why I discovered how very territorial we humans are too. I grabbed it back. Mama baboon reared up and scratched me. That's when I noticed I was surrounded by a troop of baboons. Not good. Fortunately, a fellow camper was coming up the path and he swung his wet red swim trunks round and round his head and scared off the troop. It was a bit too scary but I got a picture out of it. (By the way, he was the same fellow in my earlier post who kicked the sleeping viper.)