Cheetahs are probably the least deadly of the big cats. Yes, they have
razor sharp claws, but they're very light, and very agile, which means they
have less bite force and strength than your average German Shepherd.
That's not to say I would be entirely relaxed were one to get that close to
me, but having been within reach of one before, I was perplexed when the
people in the car were relieved when it left. I would have sat there for
hours watching it (Maybe they did. After the first edit, the sun did seem
lower in the sky)
It definitely saw a high point where it could scan the horizon for miles
around, and it turned out to be fairly comfortable, once it got used to the
people around.
Regarding the traffic jam, I don't think it was a traffic jam, just all of
the drivers have radios, and cheetah sightings are *extremely* rare.
I've been on hundreds of game drives like that since 1980, and I
can count on one hand the number of cheetah sightings I've had.
A cheetah that stayed out in the open for that long, well, probably every
tour bus driver within 20 miles started heading in that direction.
(Funny factoid: When we started driving around game parks, we would find
big cats by looking for vultures circling over kills. Now we just look
for tour buses)
For those of you who are curious why I've been on hundreds of game drives
like that, I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Tanzania and Kenya, and
even when I grew up, my parents only moved back to Canada from Nairobi in
2004 or so. So every time we had visitors, we would go to Amboseli, or
the Serengeti, or Masai Mara, or the Ngorongora Crater. My dad loves
driving, especially in challenging conditions, so we've driven 4x4s around
most of the parks in that part of the world.
Sometime in the 90s, we got blase about the whole thing: "The tyranny of
the charismatic megafauna" is the phrase my sister used to refer to the
usual game drives, and it's true, there's about 10 animals people go on
game drives to see, and once you've seen them a bunch of times, well...
Then we discovered bird-watching, which was endlessly fascinating. There
are hundreds of different bird species, and they're harder to find. So
while all of the tour buses were circled around a pride of lions, we would
be staring fascinated into some tree trying to determine whether something
was a kingfisher or a honey-eater, all the while the person who was
visiting would be giving us funny looks.