‘Please! Could you open the tent? I can’t find my way in!’ I yelled at the tent, panting loudly.
‘What happened?’ a quiet voice came from the tent, followed by a yawn.
I patted on the tent hard, ‘the toilet! I saw some green eyes!’ I couldn’t control my words, but I deliberately lowered my voice as if the thing I saw was beside me in that moment.
‘What? Just a second!’ I could hear the sleeping bag unzipped rapidly and someone tried to reach into the tent.
‘Sisssss…’ the tent finally opened. The second I saw the familiar face, I almost blustered into tears. I held tightly on Liz, almost suffocating her, as if she was a single floating log in the middle of the sea.
‘What are you talking about?’ She looked at me anxiously.
I couldn’t calm myself down or think properly. All I could see in my head was the pair of shiny green eyes glowing in the dark. The green colour was not like the colour of grass or trees which makes you feel refreshed and relaxed, but the kind of green that was full of power and could take your life from you in the blink of eye. Quiet and motionless, but it made me stiff, losing the control over my own body. I shouldn’t have left the tent at all!
It happened three years ago when I went on adventures. The adventure started in the city of Arusha (Tanzania) and continued going Northward. I started by myself but as the journey went on, I met more and more friends with the same spirit and when it got to Serengeti, we had a group of 8.
It was a calm safari trip. We had a local tour guide, Saren, who was also the driver. Saren was an intriguing guy. At the beginning of the trip, he followed the main road in the park, but since we didn’t end up spotting a lot of wildlife, he decided to go off-road, straight to the dried grassland which was almost half a meter high. It was the perfect spot for the ‘big four’ to hide, according to Saren. After ten minutes of the bumpy trip, Saren told us to stay really quiet.
‘I can sense something big.’ he said.
The car slowly moved to a big tree. It was enormous, where some colourful birds with ridiculously long beak that I can’t name of sitting on the huge tree branches, making a sharp and loud noise. I was excited to see what was waiting.
‘At your left!’ someone shouted.
I reached to my left, almost screaming! Brown hair and black spots, there were a family of leopards lying in front of me! They were so close that I could see every single hair of their fur gently moving with the breeze.
As the car went closer, they didn’t move a single meter but continued enjoying their afternoon nap. I could hear their tails tapping on the grass and the slight snoring noise that the little ones were making. They looked like big cuddly cats. It even made me think that if I jumped off the car and petted them, they would roll on their stomachs with satisfaction. We stayed for 2 hours before leaving.
As the sun went down, the sky became a paint palette. Most of it was pink and mixed with orange on the horizon. It gradually turned into light blue and then purple as the night went down. We arrived at our camp site as it turned pitch black.
We cooked and we drank. Everything was normal until I woke up in the middle of the night in urgent need of the toilet. What a freezing night! I put on my jacket and quickly went out of the tent. The toilet was quite far away from the tent, and it was cold and dark. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and walked towards the toilet. Through the weak light, I could still see numerous spiderwebs. Being a city girl for all of my life, I frowned deeply. I tiptoed, trying not to step on any disgusting insects and slowly choosing the cleanest loo.
Then I felt something. It wasn’t a spider or a snake. It was something much bigger. I turned my body towards the entrance of the toilet, where this sense of being watched was coming from.
I bit my lips so hard trying not to scream! I remembered Saren told us not to make any noise, keep the breath steady and not make any eye contact when you saw a lion. From the shady moon light, I could still see the long whiskers around the mouth, the green googly eyes looking through me. That was definitely a lion standing next to the entrance of the toilet in the bush! I couldn’t see the whole of its body but by the height of its head, I knew it wasn’t anything like the leopards I saw in the day time. A big lion! We had spent the whole trip searching for lions and now I finally saw one a few meters from me. However, I didn’t feel excited at all. All that was left was fear. I felt so small, in terms of both size and power. For the first time in my life, I understood the feeling of not being able to control my fate. The lion could jump out of the bush and tear me into pieces any second.
I looked on my phone: 2:36 am. I turned off the flashlight and quickly moved my eyes away from it. Trying to ignore the sight from the lion and biting my lips hard, I just wanted to disappear from where I was immediately.
2:41 am. I could feel the lion walking out of my sight. It was the longest 5 minutes in my whole life. I had to walk quietly and not too fast from the toilet to the tent. I tried not to look back. I couldn’t breathe.
2:50 am. I finally made it to the tent. I couldn’t hold my breath and my voice anymore. I started to shout.
As I reached to my sleeping bag, I felt like I was reborn. Liz gave me a big hug back. She looked out of our tent, ‘it’s not coming here I guess.’ The sky was full of bright tiny stars. Everything on the plain was completely covered under the starry sky.
‘We are tiny and powerless in front of the nature after all.’ I lay down and said to Liz, with a grin on my face.