Lion cub

I look forward to seeing the photos from your trip Alice!

Alice, I booked through a company called Worldwide Experience that offer wildlife volunteering experiences around the world. I spent 6 weeks working on a private game reserve in Eastern Cape, South Africa on a lion monitoring project, but in reality most days we only spent an hour or 2 locating & observing the pride, the remainder of the time we spent on more routine tasks around the reserve - repairing roads & electric fences, digging drainage ditches, macheteing alien flora - all the things the paid workers there didn't fancy doing in the sweltering heat! We also spent a day or 2 each week working with the kids at the local AIDs orphanage, painted the local school, did the weekly game counts & overnight anti-poaching patrols. It was a fantastic experience but if you are interested I would recommend you get brochures from a few different companies that that specialize in this kind of vacation, decide what you want to do, but to contact the reserve direct as we found out we would have saved about 40% of the cost that way!

Thanks Carol! The cubs will be about 5 years old now & I often wonder how they are faring!

Thanks Sachin! I chose the first one as the main photo because at that point he was so close I could have almost reach out & touched him though obviously I didn't!

I don't think it was friendliness! You are right of course though I think the main concern was for the safety of the safari guests. As volunteers on the project we were permitted to get much closer than the safari vehicles so we could observe & report on their behavior. The safari vehicles weren't supposed to approach closer than 50' & the concern was that this cub was showing far too much interest & might attempt to jump onto one of the vehicles.