Every bone in my body jars with each pothole on the uneven road, my stomach lurches, I grip the sides of my seat for balance. There are some anxious faces around me, but I look across at my father – we grin stupidly at each other and laugh. We’re loving it! Like a fairground ride in some exotic park.

The sun rises a little higher, lifting the mist that has shrouded us for an hour and so I start to make out the acacia trees and small bushes scattered everywhere on the savannah, and far on the horizon the faint blue silhouette of Kilimanjaro jutting proudly against its pale pink canvas. I feel the air warming, even in the slipstream of air caused by the speed of the truck. Next to my father, there are two couples: one young, one old, at opposite ends of their married life. The young couple barely notice their surroundings,  she – tall and blonde all in white but tanned, nestled in those rugby sculpted arms as her husband tries to protect her from each bone-shattering jolt. The older couple are Londoners, enjoying every second of their newly-acquired retirement status: the business sold, no children, no mortgage, determined to grow old as disgracefully as possible. Alongside me, two men and another older couple - Americans. Nice enough, but the woman seems incapable of having a thought without articulating it at great volume to her audience. They ask a lot of questions, Daniel our guide up front is graceful and patient in his responses. The two men are quiet, from their appearance I suspect they are Scandinavian, one has some very expensive camera equipment alongside him - both seem unperturbed by the rough ride.

Though tired and thirsty and battered from being thrown about, I can feel the thrill in my stomach of this moment. That I’m actually here. I look around constantly, clutching my camera tightly in my hands. I try to drink everything in, commit it to memory. My throat is dry from either breathing too much or not enough. And then we stop.

The landscape around us is magical. The strengthening sun offers us more intense golds and greens in the vegetation, protected by a pink and yellow sky and distant purples and blues of the mountain ranges. The air is much warmer now, heavier. It is silent except for a clump of trees near to us. Intermediate shrieks echo across the savannah. Birds?  No –monkeys. Daniel identifies the species, I’m not listening as I frantically search the canopies in the hope of seeing them. Then Daniel whispers “Look over there”; his index finger to his lips indicating that everyone stay quiet then pointing behind me.

I raise my camera and scan the landscape with my zoom lens. My heart is beating, I stop breathing altogether – There! There she is! First her small yellow and black head is in profile, her ears twitching in all directions alert for any disturbance. She sits proudly in her domain, her line so graceful from her small head, to bony shoulders and beautiful long front legs framed by massive hind quarters that can propel her to speeds of upto 60mph  when she needs to.  Her head turns, she stares seemingly straight at me, her expression is indifferent. “ Go on then, have a good look, I’m not going anywhere – yet”. The tension in the truck is palpable, even Mrs America has lost the power of speech. Through my lens I feel I can reach out and touch her. A mixture of fear and excitement grips me., that something so wild could be so close.  Then she moves towards us, as if she too wants a closer look, picking effortlessly through the terrain. Through my lens she seems only yards away, I glance at Daniel to see if he’s ready with the rifle, he is relaxed looking through binoculars. Surely they won’t let her get this close, part of me wanted her to come closer but part of me says it’s probably not a good idea. I slowly raise my head from behind the camera and realise she is still about 150 metres away, I retreat behind it again and click away. The sound of the shutter seems deafening, I worry that I have startled her but she sits there unfazed, to her we are inconsequential. We do not figure in the urgency of life on the savannah.

Then suddenly her head shoots straight up, her ears fixed in a single direction and she’s gone. Daniel suggests that she spotted a herd of gazelles far to the left of us and was moving in. We wait a while for her to resurface. She doesn’t. We move on. As we move away, I gaze back at the spot where she had been, and then a little further ahead. I’m sure I can see a lighter patch of yellow in the grass. I fix on the spot till we are too far away for me to make any sense of it. I relive the experience again in my head, committing it to memory, the wonder of being in that animal’s presence, in her terrain, that we were so close. I look across at my father, his eyes reflect what I am thinking. We grin stupidly at each other. I vow never to forget this. But then we find the leopard asleep in his tree…