Leslie Bibb of The White Lotus on Witnessing Wild Maternity on a South African Safari
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Sara Singh
This past July I went to Sabi Sand Game Reserve and Kruger National Park for the first time. My boyfriend, Sam [Rockwell], was shooting a movie in South Africa, so I joined him and we spent five days on safari. The whole trip was magical, seeing zebras, giraffes—animals I'd dreamed of seeing since I first picked up National Geographic as a kid. I mean, on the first day, I immediately got to see lions. The male lion, with that huge mane, was awesome, but what was even more incredible was the lioness. She was feeding on a Cape buffalo that had died naturally, and she had these three adorable cubs with her. One of them seemed as if it was tattling on its siblings to their mom because they wouldn't let it feed on the buffalo too. And the mom was, like, huffing, almost talking back, telling her kid to grow up or keep up. It was insane how close we got to them. One of our guides—named Kruger, funnily enough—said the only reason that the lioness let us get so near was because her cubs were feeding and she was full. She was so relaxed, just chilling with her babies. It was a majestic moment; the sun was setting and I felt so...I'm starting to cry just remembering it. That was the first of many mother-and-child moments I saw on the trip: a mama hyena roaming with her pups, an elephant with a two-month-old calf playing around and learning how to use its trunk. I saw the circle of life, how these mothers were teaching their kids, letting them learn to fend for themselves. It all reminded me of my mom. My father died when I was a small child, so my mother raised me and my sisters. She always listened, but she never mollycoddled us. She would be like, ‘You've got to figure this out. You will.’ She passed away in 2018, so coming to South Africa six years later, finding the mother-child bond everywhere I looked, and feeling connected to the bush and the land made that little girl in me who grew up in the Virginia countryside very happy. I was very happy.”
Leslie Bibb stars in the third season of The White Lotus, premiering on HBO on February 16, 2025. This article appeared in the March 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
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