There are two things you can pretty much guarantee about a safari guide. One, they’ll have a selection of stories that’ll blow your mind. Two, you’ll have to all but prise those tales out of them.

Taciturn, guarded, conditioned to receive information rather than transmit — these are the hallmarks of top guides. Frankly, I’d be terrible at it.

So it proves with Julius. I work on the 46-year-old Zulu for a full two days before he cracks. Then, in a mellifluous voice barely audible over the thrum of the Land Cruiser, he begins to dispense nuggets from his illustrious 25-year career.

A Tiger encounter on the open plains of the Eastern Cape (the world’s greatest-ever golfer, on the trip in which he got engaged to poor Elin); driving Brad Pitt around the bush; chaperoning the Thatchers on safari (“I made sure to pack a second bottle of gin on the sundowner drives for Denis”). And, most eye-openingly of all, the big-game encounters.

Such as the day he found himself in a face-off with an adult male lion pounding the dust 15ft away. Sitting in the out-of-reach bakkie (four-wheel-drive vehicle) were his weapon — and a group of clients who suddenly found themselves ringside at the type of match not seen since the Colosseum was in its pomp.

Or the time he inadvertently came between a fully grown female elephant and her offspring. She flipped the game-viewing vehicle as if it were a drinks tray, sending the occupants scrambling up the hill towards the illusory haven of the nearest tree. Warning shots were fired but the furious, four-tonne beast kept coming. “I was running out of options,” Julius says softly.

Both near misses, for the record, happened years before and some way from Klaserie Private Nature Reserve, the exuberant swathe of the Greater Kruger that I’m exploring in Julius’s endlessly capable hands.

The “greater” here is quantitative rather than qualitative — referring to the super-park created when the fences of the 695 square miles of private reserve to the west of the Kruger National Park came down in the early 1990s, swelling a natural sanctuary to roughly the same size as Wales.

But in safari terms, the experience in these exclusive tranches is indeed a step up. Strict limits on lodge and vehicle numbers; no day-trippers; no demoralised guides in stagnant coaches passing off distant silhouettes as big-five sightings, as per my previous Kruger trip.