I'm terrified of wild beasties. The Big Five may look cute while leafing through National Geographic - but up close and personal they're SCARY.

My aversion hasn’t been helped by being snapped at by crocodiles, charged by elephants, chased by rhino, capsized by hippos, and ostriches giving me the hairy eyeball. If anything larger than a cane rat approaches I bolt like Seabiscuit. Click here to check out the gallery.

“Lovely” Man-Eaters

At her insistence - and against my better judgment- my London friend Jane and I headed to Hluhluwe, South Africa's oldest game reserve, with the biggest concentration of the Big Five after Kruger.

Jane, god bless her, sees Animals That Prey On Humans as 'majestic' and 'lovely', while I perceive them… not as such.

Added to that, I was a gibbering mess after reading “Death in the Long Grass” the week before. The book’s a catalogue of all the African man-killers, and their modus operandi. I give you the following extract:

” Of course, nobody knows for certain exactly how many people are eaten, the very nature of man-eaters having a decided tendency to make evidence somewhat scarce. Man-eating lions, if undisturbed, commonly eat almost every vestige of their victims, even the blood-soaked clothes and shoes as well as the bones. “

Big Five Blinkers

Home was Hilltop Camp, a cluster of chalets and bungalows atop the highest point for miles around.

The bungalows were clean if uninspiring, and there's a bar and restaurant at the camp entrance, with grinning friendly staff, who seem to know they work in a beautiful piece of the world.

The car park teems with herds of bino-toting, Reebok-shod tourists, who are loaded onto and disgorged from game-viewing 4x4s at clockwork intervals by amiable game rangers.

A ranger and I talked about the unfortunate ‘shopping-list’ been-there-seen-that game-viewing mentality that’s taking over, especially with foreign tourists. People just want to tick off the Big Five, and are blinded to the subtler beauties all around them.

Wilbur Smith Décor

That night, as a (ill-advised) treat, we dined at the restaurant.

The interior was a bad cliché of stained wood, sleeper furniture, and animal skins; imagine if H. Rider Haggard opened a chain of steakhouses.
The buffet food was pure boarding school; the stringy grey meat and boiled veg mainly discernable only by texture.

The night walk back to our bungalow was a consolation; with the stars so many and so close it felt you could reach up and brush them away like dew-jewelled cobwebs.

Sleeping Rhino

Jane and I woke before dawn the next morning, for a game drive in our rental car: a Citi Golf that felt as rhino-proof as origami.

The sun rose playful and bright as the first day of school holidays.

We rattled along dirt roads through scratchy savannah stippled with scraggly stunted thorn trees that looked useless for hiding from peckish predators in. At that height you'd just be a meat treat on a stick.

Nosing gingerly round a corner, we found three slab-like rhino asleep cheek by jowl, peaceful as dogs nestled in front of a fireplace.

Jane and I stared - our breath stopped as we listened to the rhino snore - til another car shoved into view and broke the spell.

Walking with Elephants

At the end of the long dry day, we drove around the corner and saw an elephant grazing close by in a flat field on our right, calm as a dairy cow.

I switched off the car and we walked outside into the sunset, the breeze cool and nice on hot skin.

Nothing around but the indifferent elephant, big and slow as whale.

No sound, just the munching of the elephant, and the tick of the cooling car engine.

Whispering in the twilight, so not to break the hush, it felt like we were the only people in the world.

The reverie was ended by a frightened squeal from me as I looked over my shoulder at the bush and saw a family of seven elephants 'get-in-the-[censored]-car-NOW!' close to us.

Jane (who can run faster than me) insisted we stick around; so we stayed, close enough to hear one wee loud as a ruptured rain tank.

The family eventually crossed the road in jumbled single file, like a gaggle of school kids trotting past a crossing guard.

The mom elephant prodded the baby one along with her trunk, the teenage one slouched along at the back, several yards behind. The troupe vanished one by one into the bush, til we were staring at an empty road. We were left breathless and grinning, clapping our hands with delight.

At its best, Hluhluwe is enchanting: an affordable, accessible weekender mainline into the stuff of Africa.

The animals are a little more accustomed to humans and calmer than the tetchy brutes I’ve encountered in Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Hilltop Camp itself has something of a three-star feel that’s more than compensated for by the friendly staff, relatively un-sociopathic wildlife and an enveloping, sweeping landscape.

Scary or majestic, decide for yourself with one of these Kruger package deals.