Sleeping with Lions

I am currently reading another old favourite of mine, Jim Corbett's 'Maneaters of Kumaon', which I have written about before - blog post here - and was trying to describe to Mrs MW my amazement at some of the foolhardy things Corbett did, like sleeping out in the open in maneater territory. I then realised that, while my situation wasn't anything like as supremely dangerous as Corbett's, I had done something similar, while hitch-hiking from Marandellas in what was then Southern Rhodesia to Mombasa in Kenya.

I had set out on this journey in the company of Michael Atkinson, top left in picture, with whom I was to hitch across large parts of North Africa a year later, on a journey described in a post - here - which took us through central Tanganyika along a road parts of which, I later discovered, were frequented by lions. Since we were doing the journey on a shoestring, we didn't stay in hotels at night but slept on the roadside, never in or near settlements because we feared being robbed, so usually out in the bush.

The worst section of the route ran through Tanzania, where the road passed between game reserves such as Ruaha and Selous.

In fact, lions were very unlikely to trouble us, and worried me far less than snakes and hyenas. I recall, when I went to sleep, burying myself as deep as possible in my sleeping bag and doing my best to close its entrance.

One of the worst areas for killings by lions is in the valley of the Rufiji river which passes through the Selous Reserve. When we visited the Selous in 2011 I recall passing through the village on our way to the coast where this board displays the human toll to lion attacks. 'Amekula watu' means people eaten; 'majeru' means injured. Part of the Rufiji district's problem is that it is so close to the Selous where lions are protected for the benefit of hunters and tourists - and the Tanzania economy - but easily stray into the villages.