When sleepy lions woke up to a jungle safari in Bangalore

Wildlife safaris are usually safe.

A group of visitors in Bangalore's Bannerghatta National Park would beg to disagree.

Well, three lions in the safari park scared the bejesus out of them recently. They faced the unusual attack while travelling in two safari vehicles - the big cats first stopped their cars, then tried to climb on the vehicles, walked beside them, even tried to open the doors and finally gave chase.

Maybe the lions were just having some fun of their own, but the cars' occupants sure didn't seem to share their sense of humour. It did look like a deadly attack and was captured on camera by Durga Nandini, director of communications at Change.org and shared on Twitter by Dhanya Rajendran, Editor-in-Chief of The News Minute.   

The videos show the lions running at the vehicles. Dhanya narrates the experience in tweets - "Some really crazy ***t happened to us when we went to Bannerghatta national park safari today. We had hired 2 cars," she says.

She explains how she "freaked out" seeing the big cats block the way for the Toyota Innova (seen in the video) which her son occupied.

She tweeted: "...so he also hit the tyre and bonnet. But we could get only this much on camera. Too much excitement already by then."

"The car had scratches; holes actually. The scary bit was when two lions just blocked it for sometime," she adds.

Dhanya says that, "apparently its (such incidents) normal in a safari. But never happened in Bannerghatta before as I had seen animals almost always sleeping (sic)."

The national park is just 22 km from the city and is a popular tourist destination housing a biological reserve, a zoo, an animal rescue centre, a butterfly park, an aquarium, a snake house and a safari park.