Savuti Marsh, Botswana III

Saturday, June 9, 2001

Savuti Marsh, Botswana III

I leave camp with lights out, driving by moonlight. I heard a lion’s roar near the campsite, and I drive south. Stopping the truck a mile or two out, I sit and listen to the African night. A jackel’s yelp. Bird song. Baboons squabbling in a distant tree. No lions.

And then I make out three shadows, padding silently through the sand, moving with quiet purpose. I feel a mix of wonder, fear and joy at the sight. I hear nothing but the odd growl and purr as they stroll into the night.

Further south, five sets of eyes reflect in my headlights, small golden coals lighting up with curiosity. Half-grown cubs play in the sand tracks, rolling around in the tall grass and setting up ambushes and leaping onto each other. A lioness’ call sends the cubs scrambling off into the brush with me fumbling behind.

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INTRODUCTION

For much of my adult life, I have been lucky enough to get paid doing the things I love most. My work as a itinerant travel and wildlife photographer has sent me around the world and across all seven continents.

Over the last two decades, I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the absurdities of life on the road, having once spent 27 memorable hours during my first trip to Kenya digging a bogged safari truck out using only a sauce pan. In addition to my work in Africa, I have traveled extensively in Alaska, Australia, Antarctica and Asia.

I hope to work my way through the rest of the alphabet in a timely fashion.

Each year, I spend five or six months on the road. Along the way, I try to make time to scribble something in my notebooks. More often than not, it’s about whatever mishap has befallen me on any particular day. This collection offers a random sample from those journals, notebooks and emails.