The Difficult Art of Seeing Less

A list is a comforting thing to take into uncertainty. It gives a journey shape before the journey has begun. Five animals, perhaps. A sunrise. Something with teeth.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to see a lion. The trouble starts when every other sighting becomes the interval before one.

On safari, disappointment can arrive in a landscape that appears abundant. A vehicle pauses beside antelope, yet attention is already directed elsewhere. A bird lands within clear view and loses to a rumour on the radio. The afternoon is being judged against an animal that has not appeared.

This is a peculiar way to experience somewhere unfamiliar: to spend so much of the visit mentally absent from it.

Photography can make the habit worse. A long lens allows an extraordinary degree of selection. It can remove the surroundings until an animal fills the frame, apparently alone. The resulting portrait may be beautiful. A whole day made only of portraits, however, can leave remarkably little sense of place.

A wider view asks more of the eye. The subject is smaller. The grass matters. So does the awkward branch, the space ahead of the animal, the patch of shade it might reach. Instead of demanding that the landscape produce a spectacle, the photographer has to make a composition from what is there.

That is useful discipline for a traveller too. Notice where the track bends. Watch the change in the ground as the vehicle moves. Ask a guide about the animal already in front of you, rather than requesting a more prestigious one.

An ordinary sighting is only ordinary if you have stopped looking at it.

Of course, if a lion appears, the cameras will rise. They should. Anticipation belongs to safari as surely as dust does. The point is to give the hours before that moment a chance to exist on their own terms.

A good journey can survive an unticked box. It is harder for it to survive a traveller who sees nothing else.