What's that Smell?

Spotter Smith and I were on a game drive chasing the elusive leopard when we were hit by a familiar smell. After a number of game drives on which we had honed our vision looking for movement in the bush, the reflection from an animal's eyes or a mis-fitting shape in the distance, we were now testing the full range of our sensory capabilities.

Before the debate could get started, the smell had disappeared and we were within metres of a leopard chomping on an antelope, the curiously named Damara Dik-Dik, the smallest and cutest antelope in Southern Africa. I consider myself of average-to-mediocre immunity to squeamishness, having fainted aged twelve watching an educational film on a woman giving birth amidst a school class of 22 peers (my brother fainted too three years later with the same video), but the sound of crunching bone brought on a bout of rapid acidic burps. This sound also makes you realise that little old homo sapiens erectus is pretty useless outside of the specially designed Land Rover.

Having said that, most of our guides give you the "They are more scared of us, than we are of them" speech. This is utter pony from my perspective. I usually sleep through the sounds that Africa's nights generate. I have always nodded along, lemming-like, when Urs from Switzerland asks the communal breakfast table "Did yuu hear zee lionz at four in zee morning?". The only time I did hear anything, several ululating hyaenas, I was convinced they were in our tent and that if I turned to the flimsy/nylon/gauze "window" that there would be a salivating, large cat-cum-dog, which has the bite power of 16 rottweilers, staring at me (a similar experience to when I first read The Hounds of the Baskervilles, also aged 12).

As well as eating warthogs, hyaenas also eat bones which is why their dung is often white as a result of the calcium present. Whilst Spotter Smith and I were being told this on a game drive in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, we were hit by that smell. As the specially designed Land Rover was stationery, the smell lingered. Spotter and I debated its genesis amongst ourselves. I plumped for Danish Blue, Spotter for Swiss cheese fondue. It was a cheese for certain. We asked our guide, Newman, what the smell was. He replied in clipped tones, "That is the smell of death".