Weekend escape: You give me fever

A lion lingers in the shadows, primed for a kill. Or so I heard.

Because while some people roared along the veld on a three-hour game drive, I was padding through a grove with a lass named Mary-Jane.

"This is a paripinnate leaf. Not to be confused with the imparipinnate leaf," says Mary-Jane Masisi, a field guide who leads tree and bird trails at Legacy Hotels & Resorts' Kwa Maritane Bush Lodge in the Pilanesberg.

She smears yellow powder off a Fever tree (Acacia xanthophloea), like a dusting of turmeric, enthralling me with tales of fortune-telling Marula trees and the trickster Tamboti.

There's hardly time to join tourists sipping mocktails on the lodge terrace. What with a dung display, outdoor chess, bush putt-putt ... and a 180m tunnel that residents storm along like bomb-shelter evacuees, gripping binoculars and soggy sweatbands after abandoning workouts at the lodge gym.

"G'day," says Betty to Bo, "have you seen an ellie? About yea wide. Big ears." "He went thatta way." The tunnel leads us to an underground hide with a 24-hour webcam TV feed, which means you can pop salted peanuts in your air-conditioned room while watching warthogs have a mud bath.

Chef Jürgen Kilanowski and his 27 staff churn out more than 300 meals a day. Dorah Sebego has flipped eggs here for 25 years. All day there are oozing towers of éclairs, mountains of mousse and cheeses and honey-drizzled melon. In the kitchen are a couple of melted salt and pepper shakers - mementos from the inferno that destroyed parts of the lodge in 2008.

Twice a week, trucks groaning under the weight of potjies of oxtail and Moroccan tagines bump along dirt roads to a bush boma. I'm told I can walk there - "if you want to get eaten by wild animals". I catch a truck.

Around the fire we listen to guides swapping stories. "It's dark. I don't know where the hell I am and I'm driving a truck full of poep-drunk people who need to use the loo," says Masisi. "Once I had a group of Americans. Two lions. And a flat tyre. Have you seen the size of those tyres? Try change that." I tut in sympathy. About the Americans.

Sometimes she's more excited by a sighting than her guests. "Once some people asked me: 'What's that?' I'm, like, 'It's an aardwolf people'."

They can be fussy too. "Someone told me, 'If you stop for one more ellie, I'll kill you'." And there'll always be those who snap their fingers at wild animals. One of her guests slapped an elephant bull on the rump. "I'm, like, seriously?" she says.

A highlight of holidaying at the lodge is its staff. Masisi flits from helping kids build volcanoes (an activity in the lodge's junior rangers programme) to removing snakes. "You get a call. 'Hurry, there's a snake in my room.' You get there. It's a millipede."

She was lucky then. "I've had to remove a metre-long black mamba." She shrugs. "We're rangers. We love it." That night I check under my pillows.

I hear stories of residents finding cobras in bed instead of mistresses and cleaners getting a nasty surprise when they do the laundry.

Some snakes, the lodge keeps. "Feisty bugger," field guide Francois Maré says as he grapples a forest cobra at one of the lodge's regular snake demos - he was once bitten by one of his snakes. "Don't worry," another guide tells me. "This one's only neurotoxic. If it bites, you just won't be able to breathe."

Maré wears a Stetson hat lined with the teeth of a beast you imagine he wrestled himself. His truck registration plate says "Swift". On a game drive, he points out rocks left from a volcano that popped, he says, like a giant bowl of boiling porridge.

Sometime between the snake and geology talks, Maré straps my husband into a harness so he can scramble up a 6m climbing wall. Men throw themselves onto that block of rock like fleas to a hide.

That night, Maré hauls out R2-D2: an eight-inch telescope. At a helipad where VIP guests like Patrice Motsepe zoom into the bush retreat, we shiver in the dark hunting Andromeda. Don't panic. We're only inside a volcano, surrounded by venomous snakes and detonating stars. "If we're hit it'll be like the main switched off," Maré says. "We'll be done. Dusted. Vaporised. And we won't even know it." We head back to the lodge for tea and shortbread.

Back at the boma, we spot a flock of black-crested Kiwis - All Black supporters here for the Ellis Park game. A few Glühweins down, one staggers towards us saying: "I flew for bloody miles to get here and I haven't seen any lions."

Lions shmions. Have you checked out the Fever trees?

.Hunter was a guest of Kwa Maritane Bush Lodge