 My wife was swearing, my 13-year-old daughter had gone pale and buried her head in her mother’s shoulder, and my six-surrounded.” Al fresco dining in the Tanzanian bush can be a visceral experience when there are lions around – all around. We managed to eat our dinner despite the distractions, but might have acted otherwise if we’d seen what our cook and guide had seen as we were going through our cartoonish panic: a large female lion walking a metre behind our open-sided mess tent.
The joys of an African safari! A ten-day spin through the wilds of Tanzania and Kenya offered up some extraordinary experiences. We watched a Masai ceremony in which a calf was shot with an arrow so its blood could be mixed with milk and given to the male children to make them strong as warriors.
We looked on in amazement as baboons raided our breakfast table and took off into the treetops with our powdered milk and listened to a hyena drinking from our washing-up bowl outside our tent. Then there was tracking rhino in the Ngorongoro Crater and being chased almost over a precipice in our 4WD by a female elephant fiercely protecting her young.
 The children loved the interaction with our guides and cooks, and bartering for trinkets in the village markets. They were a little less enamoured with the long-drop toilets in the safari camp, although the adventure of walking by torchlight to the toilet block, with red eyes peering from the bush, was something to savour.
Much of our time was spent in tented camps, but we also stayed in a lodge high on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater and in a four-star private lodge inside the Tarangire National Park, famed for its elephant population.
The children, of course, embellished every story on our return – according to them, we were almost eaten by lions and nearly killed by a rogue elephant – but having taken them out of their comfort zone, we could hardly complain.
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