How we got to Cape Town

People ask how I came to know Africa the way I do. How a British woman ends up planning family journeys from Noordhoek, with opinions on which camp suits a nervous six-year-old and which border post will test your patience. The answer is that it began in 2010, with a wedding, a Land Rover, and a decision that most people we knew thought was faintly mad. James and I had just married. Rather than a fortnight somewhere restful, we packed our lives into a Defender we'd named PAX and set out to drive home to Africa — from London to Cape Town, the length of a continent, however long it took.

It took thirty-eight weeks and 41,525 kilometres, a distance longer than the circumference of the earth. We crossed roughly two dozen countries, wore out one set of tyres, drained a tank of petrol that should have been diesel, and arrived in Cape Town knowing, with complete certainty, that this was where we wanted to build a life. Everything Journey South is today grew out of that drive. This is how it happened.

Leaving one world for another

We drove from the UK through Europe as winter ended; France, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, then a seventeen-hour push from Bosnia into Bulgaria, Turkey and on into the Middle East, where Syria and Jordan gave us our first taste of the open-handed hospitality that would define the whole journey. We stood at the lowest point on earth beside the Dead Sea, and weeks later at 4,300 metres in Ethiopia's Simien Mountains, the highest ground we'd cover. Between the two lay Egypt and Sudan, the hottest driving of the trip at 51°C on the border, and the long, humbling emptiness of the Sahara.

We weren't travelling only to look. We were raising money for Hope and Homes for Children, and along the way we visited the charity's work — in Bosnia on the way out, and later in Rwanda, where their country manager showed us how a small, careful team supports three hundred families, among them children orphaned by the genocide. Kigali was the most affecting stop of the whole journey: a morning at the memorial museum that neither of us has forgotten, followed by an afternoon that left us full of admiration for how a country carries its history and still builds forward. Rwanda remains, to this day, the cleanest and one of the kindest countries I have ever driven through.

A sunset BBQ in the Western Desert, Egypt

Into the wild heart

If the north taught us history, East and Southern Africa taught us wildlife — and how much there is to learn about reading it. We reached the Serengeti at exactly the right moment, driving in to find the migration already moving: wildebeest and zebra stretching to the horizon, giant crocodiles waiting at the Grumenti River for the crossing. You cannot plan that kind of timing, and I've never forgotten the lesson — that the wild rewards those who arrive with patience and low expectations, and then overwhelms them.

Soysambu school children testing PAX suspension, Kenya

Botswana was where the trip quietly changed our lives. We camped for three nights on the Makgadikgadi salt pans, with a new moon and a sky so thick with stars it cast a shadow, we learned that James had won a place on the MBA at the University of Cape Town. We had a destination now, not just a direction. Days later, in the Okavango Delta, its waters at a forty-year high, we chose a mokoro, a dugout canoe, over a vehicle, and spent two nights poled through the reed channels by our guide, Jeeby, camping on an island shared with elephant, hippo and, on the first evening, a snake that passed a few feet from the tent. I have stayed in beautiful lodges in the Delta since. Nothing has ever matched the feeling of being that small and that awake in a place that wild.

Sunset over Lake Kivu, Rwanda

Namibia was the trip's great lesson in landscape and light. We watched sixty elephants gather at a single Etosha waterhole, drove three days of corrugated gravel to reach the Skeleton Coast, and stood at the rim of Fish River Canyon, so vast and so layered with colour that the eye can't take it in at once — and we had it almost entirely to ourselves. In the Brandberg, using the telescopes of a visiting German physics professor and his students, we spent an hour learning to actually read the southern sky. Namibia is where I first understood that knowing why a place looks the way it does — the geology, the emptiness, the history written into the names — changes how it makes you feel.

A curious stare, Namibia

The long way down South Africa's coast

Crossing our final border into South Africa at Upington, we came down through the Karoo to the Wild Coast — the old Transkei, home of the Xhosa and the country that raised Mandela. This is a part of South Africa most visitors never see: round houses painted blue and pink scattered singly across green hillsides, each family on its own land rather than gathered into villages. It is the poorest province in the country and, in the same breath, one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline I've ever driven, never without a pod of dolphins or the dark shapes of whales offshore.

Then came the adventure of the Garden Route and the winelands. We climbed into the forests of Hogsback, said to have shaped Tolkien's imagination. We were fed oysters and crayfish by near-strangers in Port Elizabeth who gave us a real bed and real sheets for the first time in months. Outside town, a man pulled his car alongside ours at speed simply to offer us his beach house for the night — he'd done the same drive years before. That open door, again and again, is the thing I love most about this continent and its people.

In Robertson we stumbled into the Wine on the River festival and, through a introduction to a vineyard owner named Gideon, found ourselves at dinner with twenty locals — sixteen vineyard owners, two winemakers, two exporters and, for reasons never fully explained, the owner of the local Wimpy. We learned more about South African wine over those three days than any tasting menu could have taught us. It is, I think, the whole trip in miniature: knowledge handed over around a table, freely, by people glad you asked.

The end, and the beginning

We reached the southern tip of the continent at Cape Agulhas, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, and rode horses along Africa's most southerly beach — white sand, turquoise water, no one else in sight. At Hermanus we watched ten southern right whales breaching within twenty metres of the shore and shared five very funny minutes with the town's whale crier. And on our last night under canvas near Gordon's Bay, we booked a municipal campsite through three separate offices and a three-page printout, then had eight hundred metres of empty beach to ourselves — the whole character of overland Africa in one evening, bureaucracy and wonder in equal measure.

Then Table Mountain came into view under a hard blue sky, and it was over. We climbed it on our final morning and opened the last bottle of our wedding champagne, carried the entire way from London, and by then thoroughly shaken. We toasted thirty-eight weeks on the road, PAX, who never once let us down, and each other, still married and still laughing. From top to bottom, we had done it.

Celebrating the finish line on top of Table Mountain, South Africa

How this became Journey South

We came back to Cape Town the following year to live, and we've raised our own children here since. But the drive never really ended, it turned into the thing I do now. Every recommendation I make carries something from that year: the knowledge that the moments that make a great trip happen when you least expect it, that the wild demands patience, that the deepest experiences come from the people you meet rather than the places you tick off, and that Africa's hospitality will meet you more than halfway if you arrive open to it.

In the end, that is what Journey South is.

Not a call centre, not a catalogue, not a faceless agency. Just two people who drove the length of this continent, fell in love with it, and now help other families arrive the way we wish everyone could; curious, unhurried, and ready to be changed by it.

Ready for your own unique African adventure. Get in touch and let's start planning.