Catherine Lanz - Travels with a Roadkill Rabbit

CATHERINE LANZ

Children, it seems, are born with a passion for entomology. This realisation came to me one Sunday morning at a beach cottage deep in the Capes crayfish country. The adults, most with a look of too much Tassies the night before, were sitting around, sipping coffee, dipping rusks and perusing the previous days newspapers. The children were down at the beach, making sand fleas hop.

Good grief, commented a parent, whose powers of concentration were limited to the Game advertorial. Do you see how much a Nintendo Wii costs?

Whoops of delight drifted up from the beach, where my two toddlers, Thomas and Kira, had just found a hairy caterpillar. Fascinated, they watched it crawl and then built it an obstacle course out of mussel shells. Who needs virtual reality, I mused, when youve got a hairy caterpillar? One day, I determined, Id show them the other hairy creatures of Africa.

Those Sunday-morning musings were not my first thoughts of travelling with my children. I suspect that my first lucid utterance, after giving birth to two babies in successive years, was, We really should take a year off and go travelling, see a bit of Africa. I said it repeatedly after every bad day stuck at home with two demanding tots. But I said it secure in the knowledge that it would never happen. In the end it was the travel gods who decided we had to do it.

Before I had my first child, I had spent 10 years as a photojournalist with Getaway, southern Africas leading travel magazine. The swap from gnu migrations and tropical atolls to leaky nappies and pured butternut (often simply variations on the same theme) didnt always sit naturally with me. My husband, Byron Hofmeyr, was a corporate slave, tied to a stressful and time-gobbling IT executive sentence. I knew he was far too responsible to resign, so secretly I prayed for intervention. The answer to my prayers came in the form of a management reshuffle. After an exchange of notentirely amicable letters between his employers and a prohibitively expensive labour lawyer, Byron was free and with enough gold from the final handshake to keep us in low-budget living for a year or more.

I dreamed about doing the southern circle of Africa; youd be crazy if you didnt, said David Bristow, my erstwhile editor at Getaway (who also expressed an interest in featuring the trip in the magazine). We made noises about selling our house. A neighbour made a good offer. We thought about a vehicle. After much research, Byron set his mind on a Toyota Fortuner. Byron is a man who does research; I, on the other hand, tend to walk into a dealers showroom and say, Ooh, I like the look of the blue one.

Trouble was, such was the popularity of the Fortuner that there was an eight-month waiting list for a new one. So I phoned an old marketing connection at Toyota South Africa and told him my woes. Leave it to me, he said. A month later he had found us a slightly used metallic-gold Fortuner. The travel gods were surely in cahoots with me; I hoped theyd stay that way.

The shift from comfortable suburban life to gypsy caravan was initially all about packing. Elegant shoes, down duvets, hairdryers and other trappings of city life disappeared into cardboard boxes. Unfortunately Spiderman couldnt be persuaded into a box, so he came along too, in all his permutations of hats, T-shirts, camo pants, mug and bowl. Winnie the Pooh and Paddington Bear were smuggled aboard as stowaways. Chances were good wed find Surfer Barbie hitching up to J-Bay.

Its a romantic notion: a family, a 4x4 and the open road. Romantic, yes, when its not a looming reality. Dont get me wrong, I love travelling in Africa: a candlelit dinner on a Mnemba Island beach, skimming over Selous in a four-seater Cessna, a cosy night in a Berg hideaway, a Mauritian seafood feast, a chilled glass of sauvignon blanc as the sun sets into the Zambezi On the other hand, I hate wind, whingeing kids, sand in my food, sand in my bed, sauvignon blanc with sand, warm in a tin mug, buzzing bugs, biting bugs, bugging bugs

Courtesy of a limited budget, as well as Thomas (four and a half) and Kira (three), our planned trip had nothing of the former and everything of the latter. Add the almost inevitable possibility of regular bouts of earache, midnight vomiting, amoebic dysentery, cholera and the drone of kids deprived of their favourite toys for too long, and you get the picture. And if youre still jealous, just imagine a year of public ablution blocks.

Then there was the threat of malaria. Were we mad to take two children into the malaria belt? Yes, said the pessimists. What about the millions of children who live in malarial regions? pointed out the optimists. After much medical consultation and lay advice, we decided to take on the anopheles mosquitoes. Byron fortified himself with Doxycycline and the kids were put onto a low dose of Larium. Deciding I was the only expendable member of the travelling party, I winged it with homeopathic boosters and Peaceful Sleep. None of us got malaria.

Our ambitious plan was to circle southern Africa slowly. From Cape Town, we would head east, taking in the Garden Route, Eastern Cape and Wild Coast, Lesotho, Zululand and Swaziland, and heading into the Kruger National Park. After stocking up on malaria muti, we would cross into Mozambique, go up the coast and into Malawi, and then travel back through southern Zambia, Botswana and home through Namibia. That was the plan, but, as we know, the best-laid plans of mice and travellers I knew of a family from Queenstown who built a yacht in which they planned to travel the world. It took seven years to build the yacht. As the last child matriculated, they set off from East London. At Mossel Bay they hit a storm, put into port and never went sailing again.

That too might have been our fate. But it wasnt. On the eve of our departure, as I sat in the comfort of our recently signed-away Hout Bay home, I could only imagine the highs, lows, dangers and delights the next 10 months would bring.

This book, an expanded version of the 14-part Spiderman Safari series that appeared in Getaway, is testimony to the fact that we made it past Mossel Bay. It brings you the lighter side (mostly) of my year of sand and sun in southern Africa with two children, who were still wearing nappies when we set off for our Southern Circle adventure, and a husband who gets the jitters when hes deprived of Internet access for more than 24 hours.

It rained twice on the day we departed for our southern African safari. For the final hour of a three-day packing operation the part involving roof and bike racks the Cape Town skies emitted a misty, continuous drizzle. It was more of a middle-finger salute than a fond farewell from the Mother City.

Two weeks and four hours later than our intended departure date, the travelling circus finally lumbered out of the driveway. Its a trick of the human brain that the longer you go for, the more stuff you seem to need. So, of course, we had too much stuff: a gleaming new Conqueror off-road trailer, four bicycles, a double fold-up sea kayak, a surfboard, two boogie boards, 15 locks not to mention the camping paraphernalia. Pulling this lot along was our diesel Toyota Fortuner, sporting five new Cooper off-road tyres, a long-range tank, a dual battery system and the essential roof carrier. For guidance, we had TV Bulpins