Silver lining in fruitless hunt for spotted lion!
URBAN Explorer Duncan J D Smith has been on the trail of the legendary spotted lion of East Africa. But he never spotted it once!
Duncan - he uses the initials so he won't be confused with a former Tory party leader of the same name - decided to hunt down the beast more than 70 years after a forgotten British traveller was on its trail.
Sheffield-born Duncan, who now lives in Vienna writing guide books on Central European cities but whose parents still live in Brincliffe Edge, followed in the footsteps of Thirties travel writer Kenneth Gandar Dower.
"He visited the region in search of the mythical spotted lion. He didn't find it and instead returned to England with a dozen cheetahs which he raced on greyhound tracks up and down the country," he says. While Duncan drew a blank with the lion he did find these two amenable Maasai warriors, pictured here with him.
"They were disappointed that I didn't own any cattle. Cows are still everything to the semi-nomadic Maasai," he says.
Duncan, aged 47, collects old travel books for a hobby and has all of Penguin's original Travel & Adventure series published in their cerise jackets at sixpence (2p) each.
In between writing about European capitals (he's ticked off Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Prague and Munich and will shortly 'do' Hamburg) he's now using the old travel books as his gude books.
"I'm planning my holidays around the journeys of these forgotten travellers," he says.
He stayed at a camp in the Maasai Mara used by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford during the filming of Out of Africa.
He suspects he knows the reason for the spotted lion's reticence. "The warriors said it was probably a story fabricated to attract wealthy European hunters to the area," says Duncan.
- Details of Duncan's books can be found at www.onlyinguides.com while his website devoted to old travel Penguins is at www.penguincerisetravel.com
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Friday 25 May 2012
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