A neighbor makes a friendly visit at Chitabe Camp (Mediocre Photo: Richard Conniff)by Richard Conniff

For people lucky enough to afford it, an African safari is the trip of a lifetime.  I first experienced it in 1997, on a safari in the original Swahili sense of the word—a no-frills journey into the wilderness.  I was headed to a research camp for a story, and my directions were to drive north out of Maun, Botswana, into the Okavango Delta, and turn left after two hours.  In the wooded stand where the research camp operated, I pitched my tent on the ground and went to sleep listening to a leopard making a sound like a handsaw cutting through bone.  It was a strange twist on a baby’s white noise machine, but I slept soundly.

My work as a writer about wildlife has also given me the chance to observe wildlife at various high-end game lodges in a half-dozen African countries over the quarter century since then.  And there is an awful lot to be said for expert guides, comfort, and even luxury. At Chitabe, one such lodge in the Okavango Delta, I slept in a lavish tent with a bathroom better than the one at home, all on a raised platform.  Elephants, at eye level with the platform, browsed the trees a few feet away. I woke up on my last morning to a sound like puppies rough-housing. Bones cushioned by skin and fur thumped repeatedly on the deck in front of my tent.  I peeked out and found a couple of genets, cat-like carnivores with huge eyes and plush ring-tails, playing there. It was magical. Or rather, it was entirely natural.

Common genet (Photo: Foto-Ardeidas)

These lodges have unfortunately also given me the chance to see people spend massive amounts of money getting the experience of a lifetime wrong. So I’ve come away with a few suggestions, jotted down during slow interludes between game drives: