It was a misty, rainy afternoon in Sonoma County, California. As we sipped hot chocolate beneath a thatched roof, our midday reverie was punctured by the sounds of Radar and Momma, two black-and-white ruffed lemurs who were having a hissy fit somewhere between the bathroom painted in rhino motifs and the cage holding Buba, the African serval cat, who was pacing and marking his territory with urine.
To those who have spent time in the real African bush, the one without the gift store selling giraffe visors and the "5k adventure trail run" that lets you "run wild through the Serengeti without leaving California," a weekend at Safari West, one of the country's half-dozen or so overnight safari lodges, is bizarre indeed. Over here is Delilah, the resident great Indian hornbill with clipped wings and an enormous banana-yellow beak, who hops around like a pogo-sticking prima donna while seriously entertaining having your pinky for dinner. Over there is a flotilla of open-air safari vehicles -- some with eBay stickers -- the guide an ebullient 25-year-old part-time student nurse who explains that "ostriches are, like, needy -- they're like little wild children."
Philosophically, of course, there are some profound problems with simulating Africa, a wild place where animals roam free, encounter predators and kill each other (and potentially you). But if you are willing to click your heels three times and suspend rational judgment, the experience of spending the nighten famille in a tented cabin and the day rumbling through muddy puddles to observe wildlife from an open-air jeep has a certain weird, campy charm.
The sight of safari guides wearing khaki, a couple of them speaking Afrikaans while readying Desert Storm-colored vehicles, was almost Kiplingesque. "We can pretend we're 19th-century aristocrats!" said our 14-year-old son Jacob, shortly before learning about the slobber on giraffes' tongues.
Essentially a private zoo, Safari West has 50 species on a 400-acre former sheep ranch. It is the verdant, funkily aromatic province of Peter Lang, 64, a former cattle rancher, builder, contractor and developer. His father, Otto Lang, who died last week, was the director of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,Sea Hunt and most notably Daktari, the 1960s television series about a veterinarian in Africa. Lang and his wife, Nancy, a former curator of ornithology at the San Francisco Zoo, who live on the premises, started their Isak Dinesen fantasy with three eland and graduated to other animals, opening it to the public in 1991.
Like others of its ilk, including the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Glen Rose, Texas, and the Vision Quest Safari bed-and-breakfast in Salinas, California, Safari West, they say, is intended to be educational -- a place where animals, born either there or in zoos, have the acreage to follow their bliss in a more natural way than in a zoo.
Our guide, Kelly Baker, cautioned us to watch out for low-hanging branches as our open-air safari vehicle passed Bongo the giraffe, who has a passion for wallowing in mud, and then a group of eland, the largest antelope in Africa, which Baker called "super-buff."
She told us about the "big five" -- the five most dangerous animals to hunt in Africa, though the only big cats here are two cheetahs, which are kept separately in a wire enclosure and taken out for special US$150 photo-ops. (They are held by handlers while guests pose and "learn about the plight of the wild cheetah," with 10 percent of the proceeds said to go to cheetah conservation organizations.)
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