Julia Buckley

Safari guides offer a unique insight into the wildlife you see, as Sue Watt found out on a course in Kenya’s Maasai Mara

IT COULD almost be a scene from The Lion King. Four lionesses lie on the plain enjoying the last of the sun’s rays. Cheeky jackals, hoping for scraps, goad the lazy lions to hunt. Three curious hyenas slouch onto stage, all hunched shoulders and sly smiles, with flashing teeth that look too big for them.

“Can anyone tell me an interesting fact about the female spotted hyena?” Clint asks. “They have a false penis,” comes the reply. The Lion King moment is over.

But that’s what happens when you go on safari with guides. Because this is no ordinary bush walk; we’re actually on a refresher course for guides. The annual Pyramids of Life course is, technically, a training camp for the awardwinning guiding teams of Alex Walker’s Serian Camps, located in Kenya’s Maasai Mara and Serengeti in Tanzania. The course has now opened to guests too.

“The point of Pyramids is to take the passivity out of what safaris have become — just sitting in a jeep being driven from sighting to sighting,” Walker tells me. “We want guests to see through the eyes of a top guide, to open their minds to a lifetime of curiosity. It’s an invitation to dive deeper.”

Trainer Clint Schipper, sweeping his arms out to present the Mara North conservancy and our home for the next five days, says: “This is our classroom. It’s an immersive course. We spend all our time in the bush, let situations evolve and learn from them. Pyramids is primarily a guiding experience but it’s good to have guests along too.” You don’t have to be a safari expert, he’s at pains to say; but you’ll need to be interested in wildlife as a whole rather than simply ticking off the Big Five.

The guides at Serian have mixed skillsets. The older ones may not speak perfect English but the bush is in their