AA Gill is away

A reality check on the world’s most popular experience goals.

Okay. Things that are on the bucket list but will, I’m afraid, disappoint. One: walking through a rainforest. The clue’s in the name. They’re wet. Really wet, and full of dripping, green, slimy stuff. Two: changing the guard at Buckingham Palace. Dull, dumb and on the far side of the railing put up to keep the royal family from escaping. Three: climbing the Eiffel Tower. Exhausting, and now you’ve got to get down. Four: seeing a lounge act in Las Vegas. “You’re a wonderful, wonderful audience.” You look around and see that you’re sitting in a bouillabaisse of the fattest, ugliest flotsam that’s ever gathered in one over-air-conditioned room. Actually anything and everything in Las Vegas dashes even the meagrest expectations. And five: the Big Five. I don’t know who was actually responsible for marketing the idea that all of creation and a whole continent could be whittled down to five animals but I’d like to meet him and see what he looks like. It is the most radically absurd reduction, like slimming civilisation to five artists. “Okay, you’re visiting Europe on a cultural tour, make sure you tick off Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, William Shakespeare, Homer and Michelangelo. After that you can relax by the pool.”

The big five African mammals are used by all PRs for safaris. They can’t guarantee you’ll see them all, but they can promise that they’re out there somewhere, and it’s what everybody will ask you about when you get home. Individually they are splendid and interesting. You’ll never get tired of watching a leopard, though you will only ever glimpse one fleetingly and probably at night. And rhinos are pretty rare; you’re unlikely to come across a browsing-lipped black one.

But you could do the big five in a couple of days and then you can cross Africa and nature off your list. They come via big-game hunting. They were the most dangerous and expensive animals to hunt on foot.

It’s a strange turnaround from trophies to conservation, but at the top of everyone’s list are lions, the kings of the jungle, although you won’t find them in jungles. The animals that are most anthropomorphised by art and culture to epitomise our highest martial and majestic ambitions. England’s votive heraldic familiar, though they never lived here, the bronze and stone guardians of neoclassical palaces, libraries and town halls. Lions are what we aspire to be at our most noble.

But in truth when you actually get around to seeing a real lion in his own backyard, you realise that they are the Las Vegas of the animal kingdom. Nothing in the whole creation is as compellingly dull as a lion. Few things so insouciantly fail to live up to their artistic and mythical reputation. Lions are old, fat, absurd, satin-jumpsuited Elvises. They do very little. They spend most of their time lying about being eaten by flies they can’t be bothered to flick off.

And when they do do stuff, it’s generally unpleasant,like killing their own children or fighting old men. Watching lions making the beast with two backs could easily put you off sex forever. They have a grown-ups eat first rule, which means that the cubs that aren’t killed by their stepfathers quite often starve to death. No animal has had better PR and has lived off such a big marketing lie.

I brought my nine-year-old twins to Africa and asked them what animal they’d most like to see. Isaac said a warthog. Edith wanted a giraffe. Our guide, who knew better, said, “I know what you want to see: lions.” And we spent a day tracking them, which was fun.

Tracking is one of the best things you can do in wild Africa because it makes you look at the floor where an enormous amount of the really interesting stuff lives: amazing ants and termites, antlions (the more interesting lions, with their carefully calculated traps), dung

beetles and armoured crickets, huge baboon spiders in webbed dens, and, most excitingly, any amount and variety of turd. There were middens and pellets, there were pointy ones and squidgy ones, vegetable balls and neat glistening black pearls all left as warnings or invitations, as decorations and signposts. The identification of excrement is endlessly riveting. When we finally got to see a lion, it was far less exciting than lion poo, which was decorated with the most glorious butterflies.

This was my first time to Zimbabwe, doing a travel feature on safari camps. I like safaris. Over the years I’ve been on a lot of them. The word is from the Swahili and Arabic for a journey, but it doesn’t really get used in English until the turn of the 20th century and it became specifically African to mean a unique form of trip without a destination where everyone wears special clothes. You sit in a car and Africa slips past.

After the dung and bugs, my favourite things are birds. There are few familial pleasures like sharing a pair of binoculars with your children while watching a sand bank full of nesting white-fronted bee-eaters hunting the shit-eating butterflies. Bee-eaters should be on everyone’s bucket list.

I started this piece meaning to tell you about something that wasn’t on my bucket list before I saw it, but now it’s in the top three. It may even be the top one. Victoria Falls. Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders. Nothing I’d seen or been told about them came close to encompassing the staggering power of Victoria Falls. The biggest in the world. The great curtain of spray that spouts 500 metres into the lapis air and there turns into cloud. The ever-present rainbows.

The vast roaring bellow of the Zambezi as it flows obliviously across a perfectly flat plain before careening down a basalt cliff, 108 metres deep. It takes you an hour to walk around them. And there’s nothing I can write that comes close to describing their wonder.

For almost the first time in my professional life, I find my words to be too small to encompass what I can see.

The romantic poets had another word for this: the sublime. Beauty was a man-made construction, a human aesthetic, an observation and a skill. But the sublime, the sublime belonged solely to god and nature, to things unmade and unmakeable. The Falls are sublime. When Livingstone came upon them (he didn’t discover them. He wasn’t the first man to see them. There are human remains and tools there that are three million years old), the dour old chap was flabbergasted, and in a very Scots way, found something to say. I’m happy to give him the last word. He said, “Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.”