Taking pride in tracking lions

The lions were not far away. They had been trailing a buffalo herd and guide Nik Vounnou was trailing them.

“As you can see,” Vounnou says in a loud whisper, “it’s an incredibly fresh print.”

All I can see is a nondescript patch of muddied dirt, I’m tempted to quip. But we’re on foot in the greater Kruger Park area and apparently not far from buffaloes and hungry lions. That calls for focus rather than flippancy.

Realising my uncertainty, Vounnou adjusts his rifle, crouches on his haunches, and uses his free hand to outline what I’m not seeing. Like an organic Rorschach test with a suggestion implanted in my brain, it becomes clear that at least one very large mammal had walked our intended path. But that it did so recently, in pursuit of a buffalo herd, in the direction we were travelling, and trusting that we’d be safe trailing them, is something I’ll have to leave to the expert.

And, as you’d expect with a guiding and tracking team from Royal Malewane in the Thornybush private nature reserve, there’s no shortage of experts. The lodge has the most qualified guiding team in Africa, in keeping with the level of detail found across its three lodges there.

If nothing is spared on the hospitality front — from bespoke cocktails, orders placed by radio towards the end of your game drive to Victorian-style baths, each matching the suite’s colour scheme — then the same philosophy applies to the real reason most people visit: the wildlife experience.

In the two days before, from the comfort of the Land Cruiser, Vounnou and tracker John Motubatse have delivered a smorgasbord of sightings — not just through luck, but through skill.

With a single set of prints, they plot the course of a wild dog pack, which they find on the move, several kilometres away from where we started. And with an almost indiscernible roadside scuff mark, noticed while driving, Motubatse corrects a guide from a competing lodge, who had just declared the area devoid of wildlife.

None of this is surprising given the experience of Royal Malewane’s guiding team, which includes master trackers, professional guides, and what many consider the pinnacle of guiding qualifications in the country, if not the continent: scouts.

Until recently, only 12 people in the world had achieved this qualification in its three decades of existence. Vounnou, my guide for this trip, is number 13.

Achieving any level of guiding qualification is undeniably hard work — but none comes close to scout. Working through the Field Guides Association of Southern Africa, most guides reach apprentice level in two years, field guide in five, and professional status with additional specialisations beyond that.

But earning scout status is, in many ways, a lifetime calling. It took Vounnou 17 years. Its difficulty lies in its combination of two key skill sets that are often kept separate in the bush: the highest guiding qualification and a specialist tracking qualification.

As a Joburg city boy, Vounnou grew up on an annual diet of Kruger Park family holidays and later during regular timeshare at Mabula. With the wildlife bug biting early, after leaving school he studied nature conservation and game ranch management at Tshwane University of Technology.

“I was very much on a path towards science and ecology and intended to work with the university. But as part of my studies, I had to get placement somewhere in the country to do an ecological management plan,” he says.

With his preferred placements already taken, Vounnou contacted a family connection: South Africa’s second scout, Juan Pinto, who was working at Royal Malewane.

Pinto saw potential and set in motion what would become Vounnou’s career, using him as a guinea pig for Royal Malewane’s field guiding apprenticeship programme. For two years, Vounnou lived alone as a young man in an unfenced, 3mx3m tent in the greater Kruger — no electricity, no hot water, several hundred metres from the lodge, earning minimum wage.

“It was a proper little baptism of fire,” he says as we chat about his journey over sundowners deep in the bush one evening. “But I think Juan’s method behind the madness was to show that though being a field guide is often romanticised — the rifle, Land Cruiser, short shorts and animals — it’s an incredibly tough job, too.”

Royal Malewane’s apprenticeship, which continues today in a similar fashion, has a dropout rate of about 50%. Vounnou wasn’t one of them.

“I just loved it ... being with Juan, the photography, the guests, the questions, the walking, the advanced rifle handling, and just developing a great relationship with the team. At the end of the apprenticeship, they asked me to stay. I accepted, and I never left.”

Still, that wasn’t enough for the man who cut his teeth walking in the footsteps of some of the country’s greatest guides and trackers. He set his sights on joining his mentor and several others who have worn Royal Malewane uniforms since in the elite scout club. After pushing through the required guiding qualifications, he faced what he calls “the Everest” of scout training — specialist tracking.

“You don’t learn the art of tracking in school or university, so most of us start late. I had to chip away at it for several years,” he says. “That’s where teamwork comes in. I relied heavily on trackers who grew up in the bush, took me under their wing and taught me.”

For Vounnou, this meant carving out any spare time. He’d finish a three-hour morning game drive with guests, return to the lodge for a quick meal, then turn to his tracker and ask: “Mind if we go out again?”

He says: “We’d walk for hours, circling tracks, looking at details, working on spoor recognition. The tracker would mark every print I hadn’t seen until I could spot them instinctively.

“We’d get wet, tick-bitten, and burnt, because it’s entirely practical — there’s nothing a book will teach you about this. The only way you’ll hit the mark is through dirt time with trackers willing to share their knowledge.”

And then, in the afternoon, he’d return to guests for the sunset drive.

The dedication paid off. In 2024, after a gruelling test which most applicants fail, Vounnou achieved scout qualification. The emotion of that day is still palpable as we talk into the growing twilight before it’s time to head back to camp.

“Tomorrow,” he says as I drain the last of my gin and tonic, “we’ll put some of this to the test and trail some lions.”

True to his word, the next day it was my turn to stare at a blank canvas.

“Right,” Vounnou says, standing after another patient attempt to impart two decades of knowledge to his wide-eyed guest. “Let’s go and find them.”

Thirty minutes of silent walking later, just as Vounnou had described the night before — circling prints, stopping to listen, examining every possible clue — I sense a shift in Motubatse’s body language. Seconds later, I hear a low, rumbling growl.

Through the dense thickets, barely 20m away, I spot the source — one of at least three lionesses, eyes wide and chins dipped.

“They may have cubs with them, so let’s slowly step back behind this termite mound,” Vounnou says. “We’ll also get a better view from there.”

It’s a growl unlike any other I’d heard or felt before, and an experience ably qualifying as “Type Two Fun” — not particularly enjoyable in the moment, often because death feels imminent but that afterwards is something you look back on with nostalgia, accomplishment, or, in this case, sheer relief. It helps that part of Vounnou and Motubatse’s expertise isn’t just in finding the lions — it’s about making sure I don’t panic when we do.

There, standing at a safe distance under the guidance of two of the best and feeling my heart rate lower, it strikes me how often the wildlife is seen as the hero of a safari. But really, it’s the trackers, guides and scouts — those who have spent decades in the bush and are willing to share even a fraction of their knowledge — who shape an experience like this more than anything else.

That I had a royal blue Victorian bathtub and a fully stocked minibar waiting in an immaculately appointed suite, just to help take the edge off, certainly didn’t hurt, either.