The smell of the bush at 5am

The diesel turns over in the dark. There is no ceremony to it. A cup of rooibos pressed into your hands while you are still pulling on a fleece, the smell of cold ash from last night's fire, and the sound of the camp generator winding down because the sun has not arrived yet to justify it.

We do this thing every morning. We wake guests at four-thirty, hand them coffee, and put them in an open vehicle while it is still cold enough to see your breath. Some travel agents tell us this is too much. They want lie-ins, slow breakfasts, the kind of safari that begins after a yoga class. We understand the logic. We do not run it that way.

Here is why.

What changes between four and six

The bush at five in the morning does not smell like the bush at nine. By nine, the heat has flattened everything into one note, dry grass and dust and sun on canvas. At five, the air still holds water. You can pick out wild jasmine where it climbs through a leadwood. You can smell elephant from two hundred metres away, that warm, slightly sweet hay smell that travels further than you would think. You can smell a kill from further than that.

The light is the obvious thing. Photographers know this and so do filmmakers, that thin gold hour where everything has an edge of warmth, where the mopane leaves catch and a giraffe in silhouette becomes the photograph people frame on a wall back home. We get up early because the light is good, but that is not really the answer.

The animals are working

The honest answer is that the animals are still working at five.

A leopard who has hunted in the night will move back to her tree before the heat sets in. By eight she is asleep in a branch with her tail hanging down and her ribs going up and down slowly, and she will not move again until dusk. If you want to watch her drag a bushbuck up a marula tree, you have a window of about ninety minutes.

The bush will pay you back with smells you cannot get from a video. With light. With cats that are still working and elephants that have not yet found shade.

Lions do the same. Buffalo move in the cool, drink, and bed down. Hyenas come back to the den. Wild dogs hunt at dawn and dusk and almost nothing in between. If you arrive at the sighting at ten in the morning, you arrive at a still life. At five-thirty, you arrive at the work.

What it actually feels like

We had a guest in October last year who did not want to do the early drive. She had flown in from London via Joburg, she was tired, she wanted to sleep. We did not argue. The next morning she heard the vehicle leave camp at five and changed her mind by six, and she was in the car at five the morning after that.

What did she see? A young male leopard finishing a kudu calf in a tree forty metres from the road, with a hyena pacing underneath waiting for scraps. Two elephants drinking at the dam, one of them pulling water through her trunk and spraying it across her back in a way that catches every bit of sun. A herd of impala spooked by something we never saw, all of them going up at once, that one collective decision animals make.

She came back at nine, ate eggs, slept until lunch, and was in the car again at four. She did this for six days.

The argument we keep making

A safari is not a beach holiday with binoculars. It is a working environment. The guides start at four. The trackers start earlier. The kitchen team is already plating breakfast for when the vehicles come back at nine, which means they got up at three. The whole camp is built around the hours when the bush is alive.

You can absolutely have a slow morning if you want one. We will plate you breakfast in your suite, leave you alone, and put you in the afternoon vehicle at four. Some of our guests do exactly that for one or two days of a six-day stay, and that is fine. But for the days you are willing to set an alarm, the bush will pay you back.

It will pay you back with smells you cannot get from a video. It will pay you back with light. It will pay you back with cats that are still working and elephants that have not yet found shade and the sound of francolin calling across the riverbed before any of the other birds have started.

It will pay you back with the thing people actually come for, which is the feeling that they were somewhere most of the world is not.

A note on coffee

The coffee is actually quite good. We have been refining it for a while. There is a Bushman's tea blend Vikki found in the Karoo that we put in a flask for the vehicle, and a French press of Tanzanian peaberry that our chef makes for the late risers. The early-drive thermos has the rooibos in it because it travels best.

We will leave a flask outside your door at four-thirty. You do not have to open it. But it will be warm when you do.

Asked & answered

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