But in the modern Africa, a safari can be as simple as checking into an air-conditioned hotel with a good wine cellar and then, twice a day, driving around in a big Jeep to look for wild animals.
There's no jungle, either, at least not in this part of the world. We went to a lodge in Pilanesberg National Park, about two hours' drive northwest of Johannesburg, near the Sun City resort complex. Like most of the safari country of southern Africa, it is semiarid scrubland reminiscent of the American West:
This type of vegetation makes it much easier to see animals from the "game drive" vehicle, which looks like this:
It helps, as well, that the animals are generally habituated to humans in trucks and tend not to run away. This is at least partly because many of the parks and game reserves where safaris occur are fenced in, to keep poachers from killing the animals and to keep the animals from wandering outside the park and killing the local farmers. So the animals have had quite some time to get used to nonthreatening humans.
This results in close-up encounters like these:
We even managed to get close to a pride of lions, which can be hard to spot because they're exactly the same color as the grass:
They did notice us and sat up:
The guide told us that we were perfectly safe, in an open-sided truck 10 yards from the lions, because the lions can't conceive of a truck full of people; they simply see the truck and assume it is a big animal that they can't eat and that doesn't want to eat them. Of course, if anyone had gotten out of the truck, it would have been a different story.
The most amusing animal encounter actually happened at our hotel, though. We checked in and, not having been told otherwise, opened the window for some fresh air. The minute we turned our backs, a vervet monkey dashed in, went straight for the minibar, grabbed a plastic-wrapped cookie and then took it back outside to eat:
Clearly, he had done this many times before.
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