Call of the wildermess
Some 16 years ago, I mooched around the length and breadth of South Africa for three months in a Land Rover Discovery II. A freelancer at the time, I had been given an assignment: I was to produce a small book called South Africa’s Top 50 4x4 Trails.
But time and technology move ahead, and here I was in a gleaming new Firenze Red Land Rover Discovery, on my way to the Cederberg Wilderness. Instead of sleeping in an old battered tent, as I had all those years ago, I now had a Bush Lapa Baobab... and not just any Bush Lapa, but a limited-edition Military Edition.
The Bush Lapa I was towing belongs to Jannie Oeschger, the owner and founder of Bush Lapa’s own Baobab off-road caravan, and was the prototype, already fully tested. There will be only 30 of these Military Edition caravans rolling off the factory floor in August 2018.
I wasn’t a stranger to the Bush Lapa off-road caravans. In 2015, I covered some four thousand or so kilometres in Namibia with a Miskruier, practically all on dirt roads. And to this day, I tell people, “Not a speck of dust in the van after 4 000 kilometres.”
This time, I was in for a more local trip to the Cederberg. I headed out to Bush Lapa’s new showroom on the Old Paarl Road between Klapmuts and Paarl to collect my home for the next week. As with all Bush Lapa clients, I was first given a top-to-toe demo of how every item on the Baobab works. I was itching to get on the road, but Jannie insisted that I first follow the whole routine myself, including setting up the patented Bush Wing