Zambezi
A 12-year-old’s guide to camping in the
Text Christina Hugo Photographs Chrisna Greeff
My name is Christina and I am 12 years old. This year my grandpa turned 70, but I'm going to start this story with him still being 69. Since 70 is a big number, my grandma wanted our whole family to go travelling for his birthday.
A
ll the adults started talking about where we could go, and someone suggested an island. I thought it was a great idea! I imagined sitting on the beach, swimming, diving. Staying in a great hotel with a jacuzzi and WiFi. Sadly, what I found out soon enough was that a fancy hotel and jacuzzi are not my grandma's idea of fun. So going to a tropical island was out of the question. Then someone suggested camping in the Zambezi. The word camping meant that my grandma was already in from the beginning. I thought it could be fun, but if I got malaria they owed me a hundred bucks. So the Zambezi idea stuck, and that was that. We all looked forward to it and apparently I could drink a pill for malaria so
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it was sounding even better. Our lives went on until the week before the trip. Then everything got hectic! The adults were apparently under a lot of pressure. Preparing to go camping can be a bit chaotic, but the time you put into preparing pays off. It works out even better if you have the right equipment. Anyway, all the kids missed a day of school which was a bonus. Finally we were all stuffed into the car with a packet of snacks each, ready to go. Soon enough we were on our way to our first campsite, about five hours out of Windhoek. My mum is going all healthy so our snacks included the following: apples, bananas, oatmeal cookies, biltong and droĂŤwors and only two tiny packets of sweets.
