This special South African safari is for the cat ladies (and boys)

Dear Greta Gerwig: If you’re looking to cast Barbie in a Safari sequel soon, may I suggest South Africa’s Heather Wollon.

Oh, excuse me, she’s currently busy fearlessly changing a flat tire on her Toyota Landcruiser mobile, not 10 meters from two ear-satiating lions, post-coupling, fresh from a 17-second roar that now looking to lift.

Let your people call that people.

However, the comparison to Barbie begins and ends with the 26-year-old’s hair and cerulean eyes. Heather is a scavenger, a “brain box” – hunting (if necessary) strays in the 73,800-hectare Phinda Private Game Reserve in the country’s south-eastern KwaZulu-Natal with antlers. provincial – home to a unique dune forest ecosystem.

With the help of her “Ken”, if you will” Muzi Phumlani, a 43-year-old native of Hluhluwe area and master tracker. bird your heart desires.

Come see everything from a majestic giraffe tower and everyone’s favorite emo cat, the teary-eyed cheetah – who coolly make a splash of any red duiker dumb enough to cross them – to splash surprisingly and deadly hippopotamus and black rhinoceros with shaved horn (for their own good).

Heather can make them happen.

And all the while steering and simultaneously leaning back in the driver’s seat in order to chat lovingly about it all with her passengers via a PA microphone, the danger of leonine desire still in the air.

Wollon even accepts requests. I wanted a crocodile, so wouldn’t you know it, we got together on one bread (local to lakes and ponds), and she produced the scaly-nosed meanness, along with an impromptu G&T party for us, like it was nothing.

Just don’t be a sage and ask for the 1 in a billion pangolin look. These little armored wonders, sadly heavily trafficked, are the unicorns of the bush as far as safari cameos go.

This is not how safaris are supposed to work. They cannot be forced. They cannot be staged. They are not on demand. Typically, the rule is: What you see is what you get.

However, Wollon and Phumlani are preternatural in their ability to spot even a 3-inch chameleon—on a larch—hidden in a bush of the same color because, duh, you jokingly flirted with the notion over lunch.

“Over hee-yah,” she says in a thick South African accent, “you’ll find his beady eyes staring back.”

Wait, where? Super-Zoom Binoculars: Oh, there! How did you guys notice what is basically the size of a marble while driving, no less? This is their secret.

Heather seems to do the impossible. But I think the bush creatures just love her, as do her jeep guests – she’s basically a whisperer of everything that lives and breathes.

As enchanted back seats, we were longingly and shamelessly begging for an elephant watching on a lazy Tuesday morning. The problem was that the electrically-surrounded Phinda was no match for the herd, given their tendency to stamp and crush, well, everything in sight—vegetation, human structures, other animals, us.

So off the reserve we went and ended up sneaking a live male into the neighboring community owned Makhasa Private Game Reserve busy hacking every tree in sight with “not an axe, of course” just her father the body.

But forget all that. On our last day of travel of the week, we spotted an even more elusive creature: an elephant pronghorn. That happy accident pleased our ranger even more than discovering his current pachyderm with a loud name!

But to our surprise, the favorite creatures of our guides are hyenas, which, in the form of a rough baby, have round ears like bear cubs. You forgive their tendency to roll in their own urine, given their so-cute-it-hurts curiosity and fear. Also, they are matriarchal, which is a welcome exception to the brother-run otherworld here.

In human society, (groan), it contains three types of rooms, with 16 suites, six villas and one family suite.

And when you think about it, the less discreet e-bike around the reservoir and the ball toss in the pool were our odd ways of entertaining these wonderful animals in return.

Villas start at $836 per night.

Low fall

Fly: Emirates – you’ve always wanted to fly it, here’s your excuse. Even its coveted coach section spoils its residents rotten. And you’ll likely connect through its crazy Dubai-based mall with a hotel: the sublime realm of a rat mall comes to a different world occupied by Amazon (from $1,199/round trip).

Stay: On the way to the resort, you will fly to Durban. Stay at the wave-struck Sala Beach House in Thompson’s Bay, South Africa’s version of Big Sur; big little lies not included (from $450).