It’s hard to tell from the photos how close you get to the animals. The answer is that you get quite close, which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing. I’ll start by showing you Vicky, Cory, and a few others in our safari vehicle. It’s really made for game viewing. It’s also completely safe, according to our guides, if you stay fully inside of the vehicle and its boundaries. We were told to not lean out of the vehicle or to stick out our arms or legs. If you do, then animals reacting to you can come into play.

In this photo, we were probably looking at 60 or 70 impalas. They didn’t seem too concerned about us. They moved off a bit to where you see them in the photo, but then they stopped walking away and started eating again.

In my other photos, which aren’t great, my camera couldn’t determine what I was trying to take in my photo, the person or the animal. And of course, I wanted both in focus, which was not to be. But at least it gives you an idea of how close we got. Cory got a lot of great photos of the lions and you can see why.

In the case of this group of elephants, we were too close. We came around a corner and through some brush and we found ourselves right in the middle of a parade of elephants. It might have been fine but some of the younger mother elephants with young baby elephants were not too happy with us. You can see the elephant in front of Cory but the group to the left of our vehicle were less than half that distance.

We also ended up in the middle of a tower of giraffes, though I could only get one in the photo with Vicky. The giraffes didn’t seem too alarmed but they did slowly move a little further away from us.