Chapter One: South Africa: Going Back, Going Forward

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4d (edited) • 📝 Field Notes & Trip Reports

A Journey in Many Parts

Before We Even Left

There is a particular kind of madness that descends on a household approximately three weeks before a long-haul trip to Southern Africa. It arrives quietly, disguised as organisation. First a note on the back of an envelope. Then a sensible list. Then several competing lists. Then a full-scale domestic archaeology project in which every cupboard, camera bag, coat pocket and kitchen drawer in the house is upended and examined with the forensic intensity of people who are absolutely, definitely, completely in control of the situation.

We were not in control of the situation.

But we were going to South Africa. And that, as it turned out, was more than enough.

Two Photographers, One Destination, Fifty Years of Reasons

It is worth, before the bags are even opened, introducing the two people making this journey — because understanding who we are explains rather a lot about how we travel.

Gareth was born in Durban. He grew up in Amanzimtoti, moved to Port Elizabeth where he spent his boyhood outdoors — a Boy Scout in the proper, muddy, self-sufficient tradition — and then to Cape Town for schooling, by which point a camera had already found its way permanently into his hands. Photography began in 1974 and has not meaningfully stopped since. In 1977 and 1978 he served in the army, which sounds like an interruption to the story but was actually where, through a friend named Roger Ellis, an already keen interest in birds became something closer to a lifelong calling.

After the army came a stint as a volunteer game ranger, spending spare weekends at the Karoo National Park — unpaid, entirely by choice, which tells you something important about the man. A career eventually intervened, carrying him to Johannesburg, but the outdoors was never entirely relinquished: birding, camping and travel filled every long weekend and holiday, accumulating into a knowledge of Southern Africa that is genuinely encyclopaedic.

In 1995, life pivoted, and Gareth moved to the United Kingdom — Milton Keynes first, Eastbourne eventually — where British birding became a new and absorbing chapter without ever replacing the original.

He had last been back to South Africa two to three years ago. Long enough for the absence to have its own particular weight.

Fiona was born and raised in the UK. She is a wildlife photographer of serious ability and even more serious commitment, and it was photography — specifically the shared language of people who understand why you will stand in cold mud for an hour waiting for the right light — that brought her and Gareth together. She was in Eastbourne; he was in London. They got on instantly, which anyone who has spent time with them will confirm is entirely unsurprising. Their friendship and partnership has grown steadily stronger ever since, built on a foundation of shared obsessions, complementary skills, and a mutual willingness to get up before dawn without complaining about it.

This was Fiona's third visit to South Africa. Her first two trips had been primarily to Cape Town — and while both had been wonderful in the way that a first and second encounter with an extraordinary place always are, this time felt different before the plane had even taken off. Streets she had walked before. A mountain she had photographed in different weather and different seasons. Restaurants, viewpoints, the specific geography of a city that had been quietly filing itself away inside her. What had begun as tourism was, she was beginning to realise, quietly becoming something more like belonging.

So here is what we carried between us onto that flight, beyond the camera bags and the holdalls and the carefully contested packing lists: one person returning to a country that made him, that runs through his blood and his memory and his instinct for which bird is singing before he even looks up. And one person discovering, with some surprise and considerable delight, that a country she adopted is starting, gently, to adopt her back.

Two photographers. One destination. Between them, over a century of reasons to go.

The Staging Area

The spare bedroom had been designated what we diplomatically referred to as the staging area — a military term deployed to impose the illusion of order on what was, in practice, a knee-deep landscape of zip-lock bags, lens cloths, USB cables of uncertain parentage, and clothing in various states of probably clean, definitely fine.

Clothing, at least, was philosophically straightforward. Southern Africa in late January is deep summer — heat shimmer off tarmac, afternoon thunderstorms that arrive like a standing ovation, mornings that smell of red earth and possibility. Light layers. Breathable fabrics. Neutral colours that won't cause a kudu to reconsider its life choices at two hundred metres.

One of us — and we shall be entirely diplomatic here and say only one of us — also packed two fleeces and a light waterproof. For a summer trip. To a country currently averaging thirty degrees in the shade.

Just in case.

Just in case of what? A freak cold front over the Winelands? An unexpected detour through the Drakensberg in a blizzard? These questions were raised. They were not answered. The fleeces came.

The Camera Gear Crisis

And then there were the cameras.

When both travellers are photographers — serious photographers, the kind who think about glass weight and focal length the way other people think about which coat to wear — packing for a wildlife trip becomes less of a practical exercise and more of an extended negotiation with reality.

Every lens feels indispensable. Every lens is indispensable. The wide angle for landscapes. The mid-range for camp life. The long telephoto for the moment a leopard decides to be obliging at a hundred and fifty metres. The backup body, because the bush is not a place to discover your single camera has developed an opinion about dust. The filters. The remote triggers. The sensor cleaning kit. The spare batteries — charged, all of them, including the batteries for the backup batteries, whose origins were frankly mysterious but who were given the benefit of the doubt and charged anyway.

Memory cards were assessed with the seriousness of a financial audit. The ones we had seemed, in the particular anxiety of pre-departure, suddenly and catastrophically insufficient. More were purchased. We would not run out of storage capacity. We never do. But the fear is primeval and apparently non-negotiable.

Then came the moment — two days before departure, staging area at peak entropy — when it became apparent that the wrong camera bag had been packed. Not a wrong bag. The wrong bag. The configuration that looked right from the outside but contained, on closer inspection, a completely illogical arrangement of bodies and lenses that served neither of us properly, left critical kit unprotected, and couldn't be closed without the kind of force that voids warranties.

Everything came out. The lenses were laid on the bed in a row. A brief but pointed conversation occurred about what actually needed to be accessible versus what was wishful thinking. Bags were repacked. Weights were checked. The scales crept toward the kind of number that makes airline staff make that face — and one telephoto lens was transferred, with some ceremony and a certain amount of muttering, from hand luggage to hold luggage, swathed in fleece clothing that was, it turned out, earning its passage after all.

We do not speak of the weight of the camera bags at check-in. What happens at Gatwick stays at Gatwick.

The Accommodation Constellation

Most people planning a trip of this scope and ambition would have, at this point, a folder of hotel confirmations, booking references, and cancellation policies. A spreadsheet, perhaps. A colour-coded itinerary.

We had something better. We had people.

South Africa, for Gareth, is not simply a destination. It is a web of relationships accumulated across an entire lifetime — family, friends, connections forged over decades across a country spanning the full dramatic length of a continent's southern tip. Pull that web out and hold it up to the light, and the itinerary practically writes itself.

Cape Town — Gareth's mother. The trip would begin where it mattered most: at a kitchen table, with tea, with the shorthand of family, with someone for whom his return was not a travel experience but a simple and long-awaited fact. Cape Town sorted itself out the moment it was mentioned.

Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal — Gareth's daughter. Up in the Natal Midlands, where the air comes in off the Drakensberg with a cool edge even in midsummer, and where no hotel in any bracket can compete with the warmth of a home where someone has been looking forward to your arrival.

Durban — Cousin Kevin and his partner, who offered their home with the easy generosity of people who mean it. Durban in January is subtropical and gloriously alive, and having family there rather than a hotel room gives you the city rather than a postcard version of it.

Mhlanga — Cousin Jane, who went one further and offered her own bedroom. Mhlanga sits just north of Durban on the KwaZulu-Natal coast where the Indian Ocean presents itself in a shade of blue that feels slightly implausible. There is a particular intimacy to sleeping in someone's own room, surrounded by their things and their life, that is entirely unlike any other kind of hospitality. It is the most trusting version of welcome.

For the gaps between these anchors — the wild places, the remote parks, the long stretches of road between one remarkable landscape and the next — we would improvise. Camping when the wilderness demanded it. A B&B when four solid walls and a proper shower felt like luxuries worth paying for. A national park rest camp when the light at sunset made leaving an idea we simply couldn't entertain.

This was not a plan in any conventional sense. It was a constellation. And constellations, as any navigator knows, are rather more reliable than spreadsheets.

The Gatwick Question

Let us speak plainly about airport parking, because every travel writer conspicuously avoids it, and yet every traveller spends a disproportionate and frankly embarrassing number of brain cells on it.

Gatwick. January. Long stay or short stay. Meet and greet or shuttle bus. The comparison websites were consulted with the same rigour we apply to choosing a safari camp. A brief but substantive discussion occurred about whether to drive at all — the train from Eastbourne to Gatwick being a perfectly reasonable option — which was resolved in the efficient manner of two people who had already privately committed to their respective positions before the conversation began.

We drove. We parked. It was, in the end, completely fine. It was the most logistically normal part of the entire preparation and consumed a quantity of mental energy we will never recover.

Such is the airport parking tax on the soul.

The Night Before

The bags were packed. The staging area had been dismantled and its contents distributed between two holdalls, one extensively debated camera bag, and a backpack that had seen better continents. The house had been placed in that particular state of suspended animation that signals imminent departure: fridge emptied of anything that would develop opinions in our absence, mail redirected, neighbours briefed, plants either watered or quietly written off.

Alarms were set. Multiple alarms. You never trust a single alarm before a long-haul flight regardless of how many hundreds of times you have successfully caught one. This is not anxiety. This is wisdom accumulated through experience.

We lay in the dark and did what all travellers do the night before a journey that has been building for weeks: we ran through every conceivable thing we might have forgotten, identified several plausible candidates, dismissed them as manageable, and then thought about the camera bag and its hard-won final configuration and felt, fractionally, better.

Outside, January in Eastbourne was committed to being January in Eastbourne. Grey. Damp. Resolute. The sea, 150m away, was doing its flat winter thing with complete indifference to our plans.

Nine thousand kilometres to the south, Cape Town was baking, and very, very windy. The Winelands were golden. A mother was expecting her son. Somewhere in the deepest remotest South Africa, in the last heavy light of a Southern African evening, something extraordinary was almost certainly happening to a creature neither of us had photographed yet.

We were going to all of that.

Tomorrow, we were going to all of that.

First, though. Gatwick.

Next: Chapter Two — The Flight South, and the Particular Feeling of Smelling Africa for the First Time in Too Long.

About this series: This is the story of a six-week journey through South Africa told honestly — not curated, not sanitised, not stripped of the moments where things went sideways or the emotions arrived unexpected. From Cape Town to the North Coast of Natal, from family kitchens to wilderness camps, from the coast to the Natal Midlands, through the Karoo to the Garden Route. Two photographers, two very different relationships with one extraordinary country, and everything they found when they went looking

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