As far as family vacations go, African safaris run original.
Someone else does the driving (no wrong turns!), plans the menus and cooks the
meals. There’s constantly changing scenery, from snow-capped mountains to a
sandy beach on the Indian Ocean. And, of course, there
are the animals: lions, elephants, hippos, giraffes, zebras, baboons, warthogs,
rhinos and a bevy of bird friends.
My husband and I chose a 12-day budget safari to South
Africa for us and our two children,
18-year-old Max and 15-year-old Allison. While luxury safaris typically cost
$500 per person per night, this one was about $150, including local travel,
lodging, meals and our guides.
While the more expensive safaris tend to lodge in private
nature reserves, we stayed in cabins in national parks or small, time-share
apartments in towns—often where middle class South Africans holiday. And
instead of having multiple guides and cooks, we had a driver and guide who also
did the cooking—and we helped chop vegetables and wash dishes as a team.
We met the rest of the group—five fellow Americans and two
British women—at our Johannesburg hotel
at 6am, the first of many early
mornings designed to maximize our chances of spotting wildlife. Piling in a
van, we set off to national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, a seaside resort, a
canyon, and war battlefields remnant of the native Zulus and British
colonialists.
Most nights we stayed in cabins with proper beds and hot
water. In Kruger National
Park, round huts with thatched roofs called
rondelas provided warmth. Our camps in the national parks were surrounded by
fences, keeping the wild animals at a safe distance.
For breakfast, we had cold cereal, bread and jam, and
instant coffee. We’d drive for a few hours, naming animals along the way, and then
have lunch in a park or roadside. Some days we’d hike through a canyon or on a
wooded mountain trail or grasslands. At night, we would grill sausage or steak
over an open fire and cook cornmeal mush and vegetables in a cast-iron Dutch
oven.
We saw the new South Africa,
20 years after the apartheid’s end. What struck us was the country’s staggering
beauty, its progress and the problems still unsolved. In some respects, it is a
First World country glued on top of a Third
World nation. The tourist infrastructure is highly developed. The
highways are as wide and well-paved as any in Switzerland
and the supermarkets were as well-supplied as an American suburb. We had great
cappuccinos and croissants in the coffee shops along the way.
But step outside the mostly-white world of the prosperous
middle class, and the astounding poverty hits you. One day we went to a village
where the HIV infection rate was 30 percent. People live in thatched roof huts
with a hole for a chimney. There are no jobs, so people travel long distances
to work in the city; some are struck and killed by cars as they hitchhike on
the super highways. But in spite of all this, there were signs of progress. A
new school had just been built. Free lunch was provided, so the AIDS orphans
could get at least one meal a day. For our kids, raised on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side, it was eye-opening.
I asked our guide whether he ever has young children on
safari. He takes children as young as four, and customizes the trips with
kid-friendly excursions to water parks. The camp we stayed at in Kruger had a
swimming pool and plenty of places to run around. Younger children would enjoy
the side trip we made to Cape Town
to see a penguin colony or the wildlife preserve where we petted cheetahs.
Still, we were glad we waited until our children were older
to make the trek. With 11 official languages and a tortuous history, South
Africa is a country that’s difficult to
understand. We’re happy our children were mature enough to begin to grapple
with the complexities of this corner of the globe.
Clara Hemphill is the Founder
of insideschools.org and author of three authoritative books on the best public
schools in NYC.
