If you were to tell me that you could find a tourist destination without a single photo on the internet, I would call you crazy. In this digital age of oversharing on social media any place travel worthy has been facebooked, instagrammed and tweeted to death, in addition to being marketed on its website and myriad accommodation booking sites. Everywhere can be found on Google’s image search. At least that’s what I believed until I went on a cyber mission to locate somewhere nice to stay around Vanderkloof Dam in the Northern Cape.
Back in January, we wrote an open letter to the universe, putting our 2017 travel dreams into writing in the hope of turning them into reality (#17Adventures). Top of our whole family’s list was somewhere tropical. We weren’t too fussy exactly where – it should just be somewhere with warm turquoise waters teeming with fish, white sand beaches and palm trees swaying in the breeze. Although getting a family of five to these kind of places works out tearfully expensive, there was no way that we were going to let minor details like a lack of sufficient finance stand in our way of visiting a tropical beach this year.
To hell with it, we thought…let’s just drive there. And so began our 19 day, 6000km road trip from wintery Port Elizabeth all the way to Mozambique’s tropically warm Vilanculos via the Kruger National Park.
And boy do we have a lot of stories to tell! We saw and experienced so much, its hard to know where to start. After mulling it over, I thought the best way to begin is with a summary of where we went and why, how we got there, where we stayed and what we did.
The well-worn leather bound South African National Park Visitor’s Book at Narina Bush Camp in Addo National Park is such an entertaining read that it is reason enough to visit this delightfully rustic camp.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a multitude of other reasons to visit Narina and it remains one of our all-time favourite SANparks spots. But each time we arrive, the very first thing I do after settling in is head for the gas fridge, on top of which is a trio of books. The first is a recipe book where campers can add their favourite fireside concoctions. The second is a comprehensive list of all the flora and fauna in the area and the third is the bee’s knees in camp side entertainment.
One of the things we love most about travelling are those rare moments when the world seems to shrink in on itself around you. The times when you end up in a place that literally sucks the reality out of your being and leaves you feeling teeny tiny but at the same time hugely significant. Those places where time ceases to exist, where your spirit takes charge and where the meaning of life is within your grasp.
Travelstart asked us to share what we love about travelling. For us, travel is about more than just seeing new places and doing new things together as a family. It is magic in its simplest and most humanly accessible form.
There are certain places where the fabric between magic and reality is torn. Places where people gather and become still and contemplative. These places recharge your spirit and make you content, they strengthen you emotionally and remind you what an amazing gift it is to be alive.
Here are 9 of our most magical places in our beautiful rainbow nation, South Africa:
When we wrote our open letter to the Universe on 1 January, the kids were adamant to include #13 – Something Fast. They weren’t too fussed with exactly what it should be, as long as it was fast and furious. Although I must admit to secretly hoping Something Slow, or Something Tropical would be dished up first, it was exhilarating to see how thrilled the kids were when we were invited to try out Misty Mountain’s brand new quad biking adventure.
