A family adventure through Africa: Travelling with kids
My husband, Andrew and I own Gravity Adventures in Cape Town and we specialize in wilderness rafting trips on the Orange River Gorge. Andrew is also a river guide instructor and has done many trips to various parts of Africa to run courses and lead kayak expeditions. We decided to take a few months out of office and school life to explore southern Africa in more depth, taking our kids, Camdyn (11) and Summer (7) to some of the great places we’ve visited, and hopefully some more along the way. We didn’t do too much planning, as we knew our key stopovers along the way would be the Kunene River in northern Nambia, Livingstone and the Zambezi as well as south Luangwa in Zambia, Lake Malawi and the Quirimbas in northern Mozambique. For the rest, we wanted to decide as we went along and met and spoke to other travellers.
We learned early on that the kids could mange about 5 hours of driving in a day – after that everything tends to go a bit pear shaped! We use the driving time to attempt to keep up with schoolwork – this has worked really well for Summer in Grade 1, especially for maths and reading (although the reading does get fairly annoying for the other passengers!) It’s more of a challenge to find the time to do writing work – once you’ve arrived at a destination after a few day’s driving, the last thing you want to do is sit down and write! Both kids are keeping a scrapbook and journal and we are trying hard to keep up to date with these, as we know that they will treasure them in future.
Cam has discovered that he is a birder and can now identify species I haven’t even heard of, by their calls alone! Summer has fallen in love with elephants and has made up an‘ Elephant Song’, which she sings to attract them. In true 7 year old style, some of the words concern the ellies’ toilet habits, which, to be fair, are truly impressive.
Although wildlife has formed an important part of our trip, game viewing is a bit of a double-edged sword with kids – they aren’t that keen to spend hours in a vehicle searching for elusive game. My advice would be to strike a balance between really child friendly experiences (such as ziplining across the Batoka Gorge) and pure game viewing to avoid frustration!
Of course, most of Africa is not about wildlife but about people. Part of our motivation in doing this trip was to help our kids understand in a tangible way, how most of the rest of the world lives. They have loved the friendly approach of almost everyone we have met on our travels. Apart from the day-to-day interactions, we have participated in a charity ‘shoe drop’ in Zambia and our kids have attended a few days of home school with local kids in Malawi, for example.
Personally, I’d say the biggest challenge has been dealing with family relationships – we have all been together 24/7 now for almost two months – no daily breaks for work or school. The kids have not had many other kids to play with besides each other but sibling rivalry continues unabated! Although this does lead to moments of tension (and some spectacular rows), on the whole, we all agree that we are loving the journey we are on and don’t regret a minute of it.
