Laura's Safari Journal: Day 2...

The desert woke us gently, with a sunrise that painted the pans in soft gold. After a quick breakfast, we set off to visit the San Bushmen. They came out to greet us dressed in springbok hides, smiling and laughing, carrying themselves with a dignity rooted in deep knowledge. They were warm, curious, and eager to share. For an hour, they unfolded their world before us. We watched as they struck fire from dry sticks, cut roots that released water, and explained which plants could heal or sustain.

What struck me most wasn’t the novelty of what they did, but the ease with which they lived in harmony with their environment. I left with a strange mix of admiration and humility - reminded that our modern comforts often come at the expense of generational wisdom. They live in balance with the earth: taking only what they need, wasting nothing.

From there, the morning turned to play. Prince greeted us with quad bikes and taught us how to tie turbans around our heads, showing us how to protect our faces from the sun and sand. Then we were off, engines roaring across the vast emptiness of the salt pans.

The horizon stretched in every direction, where sky and earth dissolved into each other. The heat shimmered, but the land itself was utterly still. At one point, Prince stopped and told us to spread out, to sit alone in the vastness. “This,” he said, “is the Great Nothing.” And he was right. In every direction: nothing - and yet it felt full, as though the silence itself carried weight.

Then came his game. Blindfolded, we were told to walk toward a bag we had just seen. Roan, Suzanne, and I veered close but missed. Patrick somehow walked in a perfect circle, ending where he started, and we laughed until our sides hurt. Dad, steady and certain, walked directly to the bag as if guided by invisible ropes. He later explained he’d used the wind to guide him.

By the time we returned to camp, dust clung to our clothes and sweat streaked our faces. Patrick, Roan, and I couldn’t nap, so we plunged into the pool overlooking the pans. The water stripped away the grit, but after the morning’s adventures, I felt its value more sharply. In that moment, it was a luxury - but out here, it was life itself.

The afternoon brought us smaller but no less enchanting companions: meerkats. Habituated enough to ignore us, they busied themselves with their eternal hunt for insects. Tiny paws clawed at the soil, tails flicked, eyes scanned the sky. We were irrelevant in their world, and I found something deeply reassuring in that. They were not there to entertain. They were simply surviving, as they always had.

As the sun dropped, we returned to camp and shared dinner with fellow guests — Martha, Caroline, and Shaena. Conversation flowed easily, but Martha stole the show with her razor-sharp humor and fearless commentary. The desert had greeted us in silence, but it sent us to bed with laughter echoing under the night sky.

Laura xxx