Guide overcomes slim chance, logs 11 500 hours
A South African nature guide who was given a 20% chance of walking again after a childhood car accident, has now spent more than 11 000 hours leading walks in dangerous game areas of the African wild.
Bruce Lawson, (45) a senior camp instructor employed by Nelspruit company EcoTraining, completed his eleven thousandth logged hour of trails guiding at Makuleke in the northern Kruger National Park in late 2013.
“I was in a bad car accident when I was three years old which shattered my pelvis and femur. This led to complications later and I developed Perthes Disease in my right hip joint,” Lawson says.
Lawson was given a 20% chance of ever walking again. Chances of full recovery from doctors was under 10%, with only a 5% chance of walking normally.
Lawson spent the next year in a hospital bed with both legs in Plaster of Paris from his hips to his ankles. A further year in a wheelchair was followed by a year of walking on crutches before he could start learning to walk again.
“I was going to the bush for as far back as I can remember. I have pictures of me on crutches walking in the bush with my father,” says Lawson.
“Starting to walk again was not hard, the problem my family had was getting me to slow down and take it easy,” Lawson says laughingly.
Lawson led his first unofficial walk with a client at the age of 17, and took on his first professional trail at the Timbavati Game Reserve outside Kruger.
Since then, he has led walking safaris in the Manyeleti and Sabi Sand game reserves in South Africa, Caprivi National Park in Namibia and wilderness areas in Zimbabwe, before bringing his boots to EcoTraining’s Makuleke camp.
Lawson says that his most hair-raising encounter was being trampled by an elephant cow in 2007.
“I fired my rifle as she lunged and hit me on the left hip. This propelled me five metres through the air into an apple leaf tree which hurt my shoulder. All I remember was the elephant dropping her head towards me when my back-up guide was forced to shoot her,” Lawson says.
His landmark ten thousandth logged hour was walked with his wife Dee and old student, back-up and now good friend Paul Viljoen.
“What made the walk memorable wasn’t the wildlife, which was prolific, but rather the company of the people who were with me,” says Lawson.
Lawson has now logged 11 500 hours of walking in dangerous game country, equating to 479 days.
Lawson says that only a small handful of guides have achieved this number of hours on foot in Big Five areas while guiding clients.
“What is more impressive is if you look at the kilometres walked for these hours. You can basically multiply each hour by three kilometres,” Lawson points out.
The number excludes unlogged walks with friends and family, anti-poaching patrols and tracking animals for other guides and their clients. Lawson also spent two years walking across Africa from Cape Town to Cairo from 1998 to 2000, and is planning his next great excursion for May 2014.
“Dee and I are heading to Australia to do a 1200km trail from Cape Jervis in southern Australia up into central Australia,” says Lawson.
“Will I keep walking? Absolutely. Walking is the way forward and every walk is a unique and wonderful experience,” he concludes. – The Write News Agency