Africa's Game

My experience of game parks started young, in the early 1950s, when our family would drive up from Mombasa to Tsavo East national park and spend a day watching herds of elephants and buffalo, and cantankerous rhinos and many other species, roaming across miles of African bush.

I didn't return to an African game park until 2009 when, with some trepidation, for we had such good memories of Africa and didn't want them spoiled, we decided to take a touristy holiday in Namibia. Our first stop was a shock, for the animals....

....were, effectively, caged. Our first sight was of a pair of cheetah pacing up and down high wire barriers. The last cheetah I had seen were a pair in Nairobi national park.

Photos such as this one were only possible because this leopard, like the cheetah, was caged; more, look closely and a radio tag is visible round his neck so he could be easily found and shown off to the tourists.

Happily, the next camp we visited, Etendeka, was everything we'd hoped for and more. Here we walked through the bush in close proximity to big game - this picture shows us looking for a rhino which, from the freshness of its dung, had passed through this little valley only a few minutes before.

The game in many of the parks in Africa has been depleted by poaching. Where there is still game to be watched, it is pressurised by masses of tourist minibuses jostling to give their passengers a good photographic angle. I feel privileged to have seen Africa's game at a time when, despite already huge losses to indiscriminate hunting, it could still be seen in large numbers, roaming free.