August 25th Kafue National Park

It had been a long drive yesterday.. I had set up camp and cooked a meal and had a few drinks.. yea well who counts.. Went to bed at about 9. At 3 am I was wakened by a lions roar,

more than one roar ..but it was across the river. ( see yesterdays picture) I guessed it was about 2-3k away ( a lions roar can be heard up to 8 kms away) and cats don't like water. So I was cool.

20 minutes later a lion roared from my side of the river my guess 70-80 metres away..

I had developed a defence strategy for camping.. I went to sleep with an axe and my car keys so if I got really scared I would set off the car alarm.. hooter and lights flashing from a big unknown beast would frighten most animals away. As Toyota had worked out that it was enough to get rid of humans, I was banking on it working on all animals..

For reasons later attributed to sentence 2 above, I had forgotten the keys and axe in the car, so I was scared..really scared ..S..tless. I lay in my tent very, very quietly.. the roaring went on for hours.. probably 10-15 minutes at about 3.45 I decided to make a dash for the car. only a few long metres away..Quietly I squeezed out of the sleeping bag..got my torch ready to turn on as soon as I could see out of the tent ..and unzipped the tent.

Have you any idea how much noise a tent zipper makes in the quiet of the night?

I nearly wet myself.

Checked for those golden eyes but none and bettered Hussain Bolt's dash record to the car.

Tried to go to sleep in the car.. but they are built for driving not sleeping.. at about 4.45am, armed with the axe and keys and after checking for those golden eyes I went back to the tent .. put three bits of wood on the still smouldering fire and climbed into the tent.

When the wood lit and there were flames I fell asleep.. I have no fear of hell .. you won't find lions there!!

So experiences are a learning curve..Now when camping and I get up for my midnight pee

I throw a couple of logs on the fire and a good sleep is guaranteed.

I awoke at 8.30 had a great breakfast.. fried eggs, bacon ,fried bread and fried tomato a good healthy start to a new day and chuckled about the previous night.

It's good to be alive!