My First Encounter with a Lion in the Masai Mara

All my life I've held a deep love and curiosity for lions, which I attribute to reading about Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia books. I now spend a significant amount of time in jungles, savannahs and mountains, exploring them for myself and creating experiences for people who want to slow down in wild places. 

On my first trip to Kenya, I arrived with genuinely low expectations. Safaris in South India had taught me to keep my expectations low, the jungles are dense and if you're lucky you might get a fleeting glimpse of leopard or tiger, but in my experience it was a lot of driving around, hoping & praying today’s your lucky day. So I deliberately didn't research what safaris in East Africa were like. I figured if I saw nothing, I'd at least get to enjoy a few days out in the African Savannah, taking in the colours and the vast, undulating expanse. 

The Masai Mara is an open savannah, which means wildlife is visible across long distances, unlike jungle safaris, where an animal can be ten metres away and you'd never know it was there. On my first drive through the plains I couldn’t help but recall what Mufasa meant when he told Simba that their kingdom extended to everywhere the light touches. I felt like Simba. I was yet to meet my Mufasa.

During our first game drive that evening, we spotted herds of Zebras and Warthogs trotting across the track, Ostriches, Topi, Thomson's and Grant's gazelles scattered across the plains as far as we could see. At one point we stopped by a stream, where on the opposite bank a few giraffe heads floated above a grove of trees, their bodies completely hidden by the canopy, grazing on the treetops. It took me a moment to work it all out. 

Then as the sun began to dip we found a herd of elephants and stayed with them until it was nearly dark. Eventually it was time to turn back for camp, fifteen minutes down the track we saw a leopard just sitting in a small patch of grass, as though she'd been waiting for us. And this was our first day in the Mara!

The next morning, our guide asked us which animal we most wanted to see. I told him that it was my dream to see a lion in the wild. I didn't care if we didn't see anything else, but I would really, really love to see a lion, even if it meant driving around in circles for days. He laughed, but promised he would do his best.

We soon discovered that the radio in our Land Rover was broken, which meant no communication with other guides on the network. Not ideal, but we decided to make the best of the situation. Every sighting was entirely down to our guide reading the landscape while Matt and I did our best as assistant spotters and between the three of us we were doing pretty well and the sightings kept coming.

We'd covered so much ground by then - we saw hundreds of zebras moving across the plains, gazelles, cape buffalo, elephants, giraffes in numbers I hadn't expected, and birds in colours I couldn't name. Our guide would pause at every sighting and share something about each animal we spotted and I found myself realising how little I actually knew.

By the last evening, I'd stopped thinking about lions. Not because I'd given up, but because I had already seen so much over the last few days, the sheer diversity & concentration of wildlife & birds we spotted had blown my mind. If we found a lion then that would be absolutely wonderful, and if we didn't, I was taking home something I hadn't anticipated and memories to last a lifetime.

The next day on our last morning, we got into our jeep & our guide announced "Today, We find them!"

I did my best to assure him it was okay if we didn't, but he wasn't having it. So we spent two hours covering ground - we drove around watering holes, riverbanks & clusters of the orange croton bush that lions favour because they repel the flies that plague them. We had no luck and the odds seemed bleak. There was something I only noticed in hindsight: The further we drove into that stretch of land, the quieter the savannah became. The animals that had been everywhere the previous days were largely absent. I couldn't piece it together at the time.

The Talek River runs through the heart of the reserve, and its banks are among the most consistently productive areas for lion sightings year-round. We were about to find out why.

Near the river, we came across a small herd of giraffes standing in the shallows. The morning light was still low, coming in at an angle and catching their silhouettes from behind, their reflections broken across the water below them. We stayed and watched them in silence for a few minutes, then drove on to continue our search for the lions.

Not far from there, near another stretch of the riverbank, our guide slowed the vehicle as we turned the corner of a patch of bush. And finally, on the side of the track, sitting beneath a shrub was a mature male lion. His mane was the colour of dry hay with streaks of black running through it. His snout bore fresh cuts alongside a collection of older scars — a face that had clearly seen many battles. Matt and I were up on our feet, phones out and completely unprepared for what happened next.

He looked up. And he looked directly at me with his yellow eyes. The weight of that stare... I'll never forget it.

The eye-contact probably lasted 3 seconds, but it felt considerably longer. In those moments I understood with complete clarity, that if he decided I was to be his next meal, he could reach me in ONE lunge & there would be very little anyone could do about it. I leaned back ever so slowly and silently tried to telecommunicate to him that I was no threat & would very much prefer not to be lunch. But he looked away and never made eye contact or looked in our direction again.

Then, to our absolute surprise, from around the bush, a second male appeared. Then two lionesses. It was mating season or honeymoon season, as the guides call it. Lions separate from the pride during this time, and for several days do little except eat, sleep and mate - roughly every 20 to 30 minutes. A few metres away, the hide and bones of a zebra were all that was left of their hunt earlier that day.

To our luck, no other vehicles arrived. We had close to two hours with the four of them — just us, our guide, and the four cats.

The Masai Mara holds an estimated 850 lions across the wider ecosystem, one of the highest densities in Africa. That morning, we had four to ourselves.

I went to the Mara with no expectations and left knowing I had to go back as often as possible for as long as I can.