As the saying goes, life is short. And if your idea of a good time involves trying to make it even shorter still, pack your bags. Gretchen Kelly has your adrenalin-fueled itinerary all picked out.

It's 5:30 p.m. at the C.C. Africa Ngala Game Reserve, and we're chasing the sun down over the South African Savannah in an open four-wheel-drive safari Jeep. "Are you getting hungry?" I whisper to my seatmate. "Starving," growls the 40-something CEO of a luxury car brand. Marlon, the ranger, points to the top of the hill. "That's the stopping place." "I hope it is," says the CEO. "I could eat an antelope, and I want my gin and tonic."

The car stops just long enough to glimpse a tangerine sun slip behind the trees, trailing feathers of purple clouds. "Another s**t day in Africa," jokes the CEO's platinum-blond wife. "Lion tracks!" calls Adam, our tracker, sitting in the jump seat on the hood of the car. "OK, we're going for it!" Marlon revs up the motor and drives headlong into what looks like a solid wall of thorn. The sun is still glowing from beneath the horizon. It's just past what photographers call "magic time," but still light enough to see.

"The lions are hunting," Adam whispers. "You see their tracks?" Everyone looks over the side of the Jeep, just missing a nasty smack in the face from a camelthorn bush. "Listen," says Marlon. There is a faint cry in the distance. "The pride is waiting somewhere out there. A lioness has gone to track the prey into an ambush." "Something tells me we're not stopping for sundowners," moans the CEO.

Our Jeep pushes steadily through the scrub, and two young Johannesburg executives in the front seat talk about the pride they saw last night. "Some big, black-maned males, ten females and some cubs. It was awesome." We stop. "Now we wait," says Marlon. I'm getting antsy, yearning for something, anything to fill the gnawing hunger in the pit of my stomach—even biltong, the dried game jerky Afrikanners swear by. "There," points Adam, leaping from the hood into the safety of the front seat, behind a rifle secured on the dashboard. A lion is crouched 20 feet ahead in the long grass. A shake of his majestic mane betrays him. Several feet away, four females come into view. They pace in a line, their massive heads slung below their bony shoulders, tawny haunches tightened to spring. We sit without words for what seems like an endless pause. Marlon eases the Jeep a little closer, into the darkening thicket.

The tall grass whispers—seventeen flicking, blacktufted tails twitching just above it. There is a pounding of hooves. Half a dozen antelope, cut off from the herd, bound into the thicket from behind us. "No one move," barks Marlon. I'm rigid with a intoxicating combination of cold fear and childlike excitement. My heart is pounding. My back is ramrod-straight. Even before the pride rises in unison from the grass, the antelope know they've made a lethal mistake.

Now it happens the way all deadly encounters go down—suddenly, but viewed in pieces, like a flip card game. I see leaping antelope. They scatter in all directions. All but one, who for an awful moment knows he's not getting out. The lionesses leap, and then the whole pack descends.

More lions come in for the kill, swarming around our Jeep, which stays miraculously uninvaded. Four-letter words erupt, while Marlon insists, "They won't hurt us. We don't smell like meat to them. They won't breach the Jeep. Just don't stand up or put your limbs outside the vehicle." Hard to believe—we feel like sitting ducks in a metal takeout tray, with the big cats close enough for us to smell the blood on their breath. They are growling, gnawing on flesh and bone. It's the sound the Christians must have heard in the Colosseum. The males warn each other off the big pieces with massive swipes of their oversized paws. The sound of teeth crunching bone mixes with rumbling purrs as the pride beds down in the grass with their meat. We watch till darkness falls and a light rain starts to wash the scent of death from the air. "Right," says Marlon. "Sundowners, anyone?"

After the thrill of the kill, my companions and I share a sumptuous candlelit dinner at Ngala's luxury tented camp. Over brandy and cigars on the veranda, we talk safari. "Nothing beats life in the bush," says the eldest of the Johannesburg pair, drawing deeply on his Romeo y Julieta. "I've tried shark diving, skydiving and fast carÐdriving. Nothing gets my heart going like a game driveÉor a good, solid game of golf." Golf? "In South Africa, it's a natural extension of the game drive," says the CEO. "At the Hans Marinsky course, two hours from here, there are crocs in the water hazards and hippos crossing the green." Combining golfing and game-driving is a tradition among adventureseeking executives in South Africa. Many top-rated courses, like the Hans Marinsky or Leopard Creek, are cheek-byjowl with the best game parks and are natural feeding and watering places for big game. "A lion kill and a hole in one," sighs the CEO. "That's paradise!"

C.C. Africa, which manages the Ngala reserve ("ngala," aptly, means "lion"), is so keenly away of the lure of the combination of golf and game that they've created an entire golf/safari division, promoting golfing extensions to safaris like the Hans Marinsky Course near Ngala, and the Windhoek Country Club—an hour away from their Namibian desert dune lodge, Sossuslvei, by single-engine Cessna (a thrilling ride in itself).

African safari options are almost as vast as the continent itself. Where should a potential golfer/gamer start? "South Africa is probably the best place on the continent to combine game drives and golf," says Marcia Gordon, travel director of the NY-based luxury safari outfitter F.M. Allen. "The courses are world-class, and the country has a long social tradition of the game." For CEO-level golf and gaming, Gordon recommends custom-made "bespoke safaris" in small private plane charters, which can take adrenalin junkies in Indiana Jones style to and from a variety of great gaming/golfing retreats. Gordon favors the Leopard Creek Golf Course, near both the Kruger National Park and the C.C. Africa Ngala Reserve.

Leopard Creek is an 18-hole Gary Player course where crocodile, hippo, antelope and wild boar are commonplace on the green and next to the river that runs alongside several holes. Tswalu private game reserve, near the town of Kuruman, where Dr. Livingston set off into his trip to "darkest Africa," is also one of Gordon's recommendations. Twelve thousand species of animals (including lions) roam this range—and it borders the nearby Sishen Golf Course, an 18-hole course that winds through a 500-hectare camel-thorn forest on the edge of the Kalahari.

Andrea Dobbe, of Nairobi-based Micato Safaris, sends her golfing/game-driving clients to time-honored, colonial-era clubs in Kenya—the kind of club that invented the gin and tonic, where players would have been likely to rub shoulders with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. The 1915 Nyanza Club, for instance, is a 10-green, 18-hole course on the shores of Lake Victoria. The club has a long-standing rule that states, "If a ball comes to rest in dangerous proximity of Safari Ants, Hippopotamus, Crocodile or Snake, another ball may be dropped at a safe distance not nearer the hole, without penalty."

C.C. Africa Golf Safaris

(27 11) 809-4400 or 888-88-AFRICA (toll-free)
www.fmallen.com
212-737-4374

Micato Safaris

800-MICATO-1 (toll-free)

From turf to surf

Watching a lion hunt is an unforgettable adrenalin rush, but top-of-the-food-chain encounters are not limited to the land. Great white sharks are the apex predators of the sea, and they're finally getting some good press. "We know a lot more about sharks now than we ever did," says Hans Walters, the animal department supervisor at the New York Aquarium and a self-confessed "sharkaholic." "For instance, they are not, on the whole, aggressive animals. In fact, there are only about 100 reported shark attacks worldwide annually. That's a whole lot less than the [number of] sharks killed by people."

It looks like the biggest bully on the ocean block is finally getting some respect. "You gotta respect a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth," says Patric Douglas, the chief excitement officer of San Diego, CAÐbased Absolute Adventures—Shark Diver. Douglas regularly takes high-level executives of the Fortune 500 into the briney deep for close encounters with these much maligned but fascinating creatures. "I've got a CEO from Northrup Grumman signed up for my next great white dive," he says. "And three NASA divers have also gone out with me this season." Absolute Adventures specializes in great white shark cage dives off the coast of Mexico's former prison island of Isla Guadalupe, where ex-cons still fish and dive the area. (Says Douglas, "These guys are tough hombres. Cages? They don't need no stinking cages.") Absolute Divers go out on the five-day cruise and descend into shark-infested waters protected by 100-foot titanium cages.

"Nothing beats that moment when you see your first Great White," recalls Dave Ramirez, a West CoastÐbased sales manager. "First, you see that huge open maw of teeth. Then there's that great black eye rolling around, sizing you up, and you know he's scanning you as prey. It's not a place for the nervous."

"It's the ultimate encounter," affirms Phil Colla, a 40- year-old photographer who is going back for more dives this year. "You're looking at a pinnacle animal. There's a constant buzz of excitement and energy. My heart was pounding the whole time. Not out of fear, but with exhilaration."

Absolute Adventures - Shark Diver

415-664-7344 or 877-820-6589 (toll-free)

The need for speed

If ever there were an alpha occupation, it's racecar-driving. What kid doesn't dream of tearing around a racetrack like a fireball? Remember Speed Racer and Hot Wheels? The car kid in all of us can safely come out to play at Skip Barber Racing Schools.

"Wanna go real fast?" asks Bruce MacInnes, senior instructor at the Lime Rock Park Skip Barber Racing School, above the deafening rev-up of a Dodge Viper SRT-10 motor. "Sure, push it as far as you can go," I reply, sounding brave, but wondering if the velocity will make me lose my breakfast on the black leather seats. The speedometer climbs from 100 to 150 mph as we flow around the track like mercury. "Yeah! Isn't this fun?" "Totally," I call out over the hornet's nest of motors—ours and the engines of the corporate group racing each other in 2.0 liter Formula Dodge racecars. "Can you go even faster?" "Racing is about control," MacInnes admonishes. "Not just about speed. We have a name for what happens when you get too happy with the speed and lose control. It's called the Red Mist. When the Red Mist starts working on you, it's time to watch out." He takes on the deepest curve in the road, driving the monster machine as if it were a hang glider on the crest of a breeze. "The challenge is to look ahead, so it all feels slow."

I'm wondering what MacInnes' other students—including Tom Cruise and Paul Newman—were thinking while driving next to this cowboy of cars, who is as at home in his own small aircraft as he is on the racetrack. "In the early years of the sport, racing used to be for brave people," says MacInnes. "Now it's for smart people."

Smart people, including Paul Reisman, the owner of the nearby Interlaken Inn, who invested in the property because of its proximity to his favorite racing venue, Lime Rock Park. "A lot of racers will tell you it's about speed," says Reisman. "For me, it's all about control. To be able to harness that horsepower and to do it in a safe way is exhilarating. But in the back of your mind, you keep thinking what you are doing is extremely dangerous. All of that combined is such a rush."

The corporate group finishes their last lap around the track, and I see them walking a little crooked and sideways, like drunken crabs, to their tented catered lunch on the grass in their red racing-team jumpsuits. "How did it feel?" I call out to one of them. "Awesome. Totally awesome!" he crows, holding his silver helmet under the crook of his arm, and smiling like he's just won the Indianapolis 500.

Skip Barber Racing School

800-221-1131 (toll-free)