Why Africa?

Why Africa?

Never been to Africa before, or contemplating a visit? Wondering what it is that makes people want to return time and again? Safari connoisseur and life long lover of Africa Brian Jackman explains why you should visit this most seductive of continents.

Africa, changes you for ever, like nowhere else on earth. Once you have been there you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe it's magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are are elephant paths? Could it be because Africa is the place of all our beginnings, the cradle of humankind, where our species stood upright on the savannah of long ago? Maybe that was what led Karen Blixen to say, in Out Of Africa, “Here I am, where I belong”.

Africa is so huge. Here, far from the 21^st century, you come face to face with uncluttered space and distance on a scale no longer found in Europe. Many of it's national parks and game reserves – Kruger, Kafue, Serengeti, Selous – are the size of small countries, and you can fit the whole of Yorkshire into the outermost corner of Mt Kilimanjaro and still have room to spare.

I knew I would love Africa because it was the fulfilment of a childhood dream. Yet even then, having read Blixen and Hemingway and the rest, I was still not prepared for it's impact, which has left me reeling to this day. For a start no one told me Africa could be so green. I thought it would be all heat and dust and flat-topped thorn trees as indeed it can be in Samburu and Tsavo and the Kalahari thirstlands. But when the thunderclouds pile up in the late afternoons, and you smell the earth after rain, when the dust is laid and the Masai plains are as green as Ireland, you loose your heart forever. What I most wanted to see were Africa's storybook animals: zebra and giraffe, elephant and rhino, the pinstriped kudu with it's spiral horns and the menacing, black-as-midnight buffalo. And as every newcomer I was desperate to see a lion.

Nobody forgets their first lion. Mine was in the Mara, a solitary male sitting on an anthill with the wind blowing through his mane. It was a cold bright morning, and although he was a long way off I could see his breath condensing like a stream every time he roared.

How often have I woken to the rumble of lions greeting the sun. It is at once the most awesome and most evocative sound in Africa, and to live in lion country is to breath the air of a vanishing freedom. To rise at dawn when the bush comes alive to the endless chanting of a million doves and set out into the a world whose horizons are as boundless as the ocean – this is an experience that has no equal.

If you are enthralled by the natural world, you will never be bored. From end to end, wild Africa heaves, buzzes and pulsates with life. It's nights, lit by the brightest stars you will ever see, echo to the whoop of hyenas, the chiming of Scops owls and the chiming of frogs, like ice cubes shaken in a glass, and from first light to sundown there is always something amazing to look at. Not just the Big Five but a cavalcade of antelopes and smaller mammals; porcupines, honey badgers, wild dogs, serval cats. All these and more, together with chameleons and fishing owls, and baobab trees older than Stonehenge.

And what lavish backdrops Africa provides for your encounters with the wild. In Zambia the home of the walking safaris, it might be the oxbow lagoons of Luangwa Valley or the winterthorn glades of the lower Zambezi. Botswana offers the Okavango Delta, that miraculous oasis in the northern Kalahari where fish eagle's cry echoes across 26,000km2 of islands, floodplains and crystal channels.

In Tanzania the Ngorongoro Crater will take your breath away. Imagine walking on the crater rim and gazing drown into that lost world of flamingo lakes and giant tuskers 600m below. Or driving out from the Ndutu woodlands into the Serengeti when the plains are black with wildebeest, towards a horizon that feels like the end of the earth.

But when it comes to utter remoteness and desert landscapes on an epic scale, nowhere can touch Namibia. If you don't believe me, fly north over the burned-out emptiness of Kaokoland to the desolation of nameless hills overlooking the Kunene River. Mass tourism has no place here, but hardier souls will pay for the privilege of coming to such a wild land.

I love the stripped-down safari life, the comforts of soft beds, cold drinks, hot showers and same day laundry, the taste of bread baked daily in a bed of hot ashes, the noontide siestas when the wood doves are calling, the afternoon game drives that stretch into the golden hour before sundown, lengthen and cheetahs emerge to hunt for gazelles and the last moments before bedtime, watching the campfire sparks flying up into the vast African sky.

Where will you stay? Glitzy lodges with private plunge pools are all very well, but what can compare with authentic atmosphere of a Zambian bushcamp, like Kutandala in North Luangwa, with hot bucket shower and fresh bread baked in a hole in the ground.?

One of the best ways to round off a safari is to relax beside the Indian Ocean . Loll in a hammock on Mafia Island or stay at Kizingo on the island of Lamu and go swimming with dolphins. Where ever you go, from the Lamu archipelago and all the way down the Mozambique coastline you'll find barefoot beach lodges (a uniquely African concept) where all you need is a kikoi and a sunhat – plus an appetite for fresh lobsters and mangrove crabs.

On the coast or in the bush, one thing remains constant, and that is the innate friendliness of the African people. The camp staff who bring you early morning tea; the cooks and drivers; the bush-savvy guides and the poler who steers your mokoro, all are so welcoming, so eager to please; and like the women you may see hoeing in their vegetable shambas, and the Masai herdsmen with their red blankets and shining spears, they possess a natural dignity and respect for the elderly that is sadly lacking in our society.

And if you are like me, when your safari is over and safely back home, not a day will pass when you don't think of Africa. Looking out of my window at the green hills of England, I wonder if it's raining in the Serengeti and if the lions are roaring across the Musiara Marsh.