INTO THE WILD Laura Bailey shrugs off the cares of the modern world on a liberating family safari
Laura Bailey and her children are moved to wide-eyed wonder by the majestic creatures of Africa
Ihave often been a lone traveller in Africa – hiking, camping, writing, running away. I’ve watched, awestruck, the epic grandeur of the migration across the Maasai Mara, and picnicked by Lake Nakuru with 1,000 petal-pink flamingos. Four-months pregnant, I dizzily traversed the Virunga volcanic heights on the Rwanda/Uganda border, playing follow-my-leader with a silverback alpha-male gorilla and his extended family.
But I have long dreamt of taking my animal-crazy, David Attenborough-worshipping children (who are now 11 and eight) on their first safari and, for a while, the whispers of those who know more than me had led me to Singita. I wanted them to experience the raw, exhilarating thrill of nature up close and wild, but of course to avoid the risks I might well have taken solo in the past. I admire the Singita mission, spearheaded by the visionary founder Luke Bailes, who has sought to combine an extraordinary tourist safari experience with a long-term goal to safeguard vast swathes of wilderness in Africa. A holiday with the Singita family is an experience of a lifetime but also an investment in conservation and community.
A relatively new concept, Singita Private offers six exclusive-use properties, including Singita Castleton, located deep in the heart of Sabi Sand (45,000 acres of private reserve bordering the Kruger National Park) in South Africa, and formerly the Bailes’ family home. Castleton exudes the rustic charms of farmhouse living, plus the luxury bonus of a pool, tennis court and gym. The individual cottages are seemingly basic, yet furnished with empathetic flair, from the stash of extra blankets and ponchos to the jar of homemade granola flapjacks beside the bed. They are dotted around a vast garden that slopes down towards a popular waterhole, meaning that even when we were ‘home’ we were on constant lookout for wildlife.
On arrival, the children visibly exhaled – excited squeals accompanying the first sighting of an approaching elephant, wide-eyed giggles as brazen monkeys impatiently awaited our leftover crumbs from lunch. We enjoyed culinary spoiling, from an open-air hot-dog-and-popcorn-fuelled movie night for the children while we sipped on grown-up cocktails, to a traditional feast night in the candlelit bola as the local tribesmen and women of Justicia, the next-door village, victory-danced for us in celebration of love and hard-won harmony.
I had travelled there with my friend, the fashion designer Alice Temperley, who is godmother to my son, as I am to hers. Slowly we came to the joyous realisation that we might actually finish a conversation or a train of thought, in contrast with our manic, snatched work and school-gate London rhythms. Alice’s boyfriend (and my old, beloved friend) the photographer Greg Williams, whose children had been counting down to our trip (150 sleeps…), relished swapping his usual filmstar subjects for the wild dogs and wildebeeste of South Africa. And my boyfriend, who should probably have been at work in LA, showed up unexpectedly and surprised us all by having the time of his life.
‘I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up and I was not happy,’ wrote Ernest Hemingway, and it’s true. From the very first ride in a Singita Jeep with binoculars and camera jangling round my neck, I knew we’d all remember this trip for ever. The children, notebooks in hand, diligently recorded fantastical-beast sightings as they learnt the name of every bird and bug en route to the big cats, and endlessly debated which animal would
Sunsets spent chasing a cheetah
or watching a lioness nuzzle her cubs felt precious
as a prayer
eat which first, extolling the virtues of speed versus strength, while hugging flasks of hot chocolate to their chests.
I could praise our guides Claude Visagie and Ross Couper (who happens to be an internationally recognised wildlife photographer – a bonus for my camera-mad son) for their remarkable expertise, but that would be to overlook their patience, kindness and ability to simultaneously teach city children to shoot a bow and arrow while magicking up the perfect picnic breakfast of steaming sausages and lemon cake in the dappled morning light. Co-ordinating via walkietalkies, they would ensure that we hardly ever saw another vehicle or human on our expeditions, except occasionally when the lion cubs were putting on a show. They reliably delivered the ideal rosypink vista for the last half hour of light, at which point we’d talk deep into the dark over icy gin and tonics as the children lured primitive baboon spiders in sci-fi slow motion out of their holes with twigs.
I relished our 5am dawn drives, even the stumbling around in the dark, gathering children and hats and glasses, but those unforgettable sunsets spent chasing a glorious cheetah across the prairie, or silently watching as a lioness playfully nuzzled her cubs, felt precious as a prayer, giving me goose bumps born of adrenalin and a sense of immense privilege. The children’s favourite moment, shot in terrifying close-up by my son with a telephoto lens lent to him by Singita, was a sated leopard, balancing on an elevated branch with her prey, mouth blood-red as she cracked and gnawed the limbs of the lifeless impala a few feet above our heads. Everyone has a safari wish list, and here, everyone saw everything they dreamt of, the Big Five and beyond (bar my contrary daughter, who regrets not spotting a porcupine).
Up high and safe in a guided Jeep – our tracker poised and perched in front, scanning for prints and clues – proved an ideal vantage point, but a highlight for me was one morning spent on a walking safari, as a quartet of adults on the ground with a gun. Every breath and whisper intense, each distant roar or whinny a warning or a sign. Nature’s invitation to drop out and tune in, to truly listen
and react via instinct, rather than noisy instruction. The wind changed and two giantess rhinos clearly sensed us a little too near. Tiptoeing backwards in single file, I could hear our collective heartbeats quickening. Safety reached, we paused to catch our breath beside a fabled buffalo thorntree, avoiding its characteristic zigzag branches of mixed hooked and straight thorns – mythologised in South African culture as symbolic of both where we are going (the straight arrow) and where we have come from (the twisted hook).
Five days and five nights and then bittersweet farewells. As if Disney-directed and choreographed, the lions and the elephants, buffaloes and butterflies danced their last dance for us, circling the waterhole, parading two by two with a flourish. A stretch of giraffe. A dazzle of zebra. Alice and I sat on the lawn, cameras laid down, children hushed, wishing to be present, and to remember, and to make this last.
Before flying back to Johannesburg we loitered awhile at Castleton’s sister-camp Ebony, a James Bond oasis of style where we swam in a rock pool and bribed the children to behave in the library. More perfectly polished than Castleton, Ebony is the stuff of honeymoon dreams and other lives; a rope bridge over untroubled waters, all teak and linen and adult cocktail chat. A treat to spy on, if less suited to our ragtag gang.
At the airport, souvenir shopping for keyrings and kitsch, and starting to reconnect with the idea of home, all the children, who had been almost strangers before our travels, had fallen into a giggly shorthand born of the kind of bonding that a safari holiday
The lions and
elephants, buffaloes and butterflies danced their last dance with a flourish
dramatically fast-tracks: the intensity of the experience, the high of the chase, the little hand that reached for mine when the lion’s nostrils flared or as the vultures descended on the hyena’s rich pickings. For me, the soothing rhythm of routine – from the pre-dawn wake-up call to the long, lazy lunches, before returning to the bush – had reassured and reset my internal clock to a more natural cadence and appetite, in tune with the light and the simple movement of animals in search of water.
No one had to do anything at all. No one chose to miss a moment. To quote Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame: ‘If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.’ I will, I promise…
Elegant Resorts (01244 897515; www.elegant resorts.co.uk) offers five nights at Singita Castleton on an exclusive-use basis, from £7,475 a person all-inclusive (based on a maximum occupancy of eight people) until 31 December 2017. Rates include a private guide, house host, staff, return airstrip transfers, private game drives, walking and mountain-biking safaris, tennis and archery.