Taking the leap and living your dream

Have you ever thought of selling your house, move to a small town to use as a base, place your earthly belongings into storage, take the kids out of school and head into Africa for a few seasons as a family? I like the word ‘seasons’ – it indicates a certain time frame without set dates…exactly the thing a family needs that’s planning to explore the African continent!


Well, this is exactly what we’re planning to do for the next few years! We decided to challenge our comfort zones, refocus on our dreams and show the kids the amazing places in this intriguing continent that has fascinated my wife and I since childhood. I’ve had the privilege to extensively travel across most of southern and east Africa as a tour guide and have worked with some of Africa’s most knowledgeable and respected tourism representatives and travel businesses.

Soon we will be traveling to a different destination every second month while based in a small town in the Eastern Cape. If you’re wondering what we will be doing while traveling around Africa, we’re in the fortunate position to own a business that already promotes African travel to a worldwide audience and have been planning safaris for travelers for the past 10 years. When we started to look at our dream of a family expedition, we decided to expand on The Safari Co.’s main functions, which is to assist travelers in planning the ideal African holiday. We now connect the traveler with the tourism businesses they want to travel with directly, to plan the perfect holiday together.

Telling the world about Africa
With this in mind, our main focus while traveling around Africa is to firstly promote the diverse destinations across this beautiful place, and secondly to meet the individuals, tourism businesses and organizations that make it their mission to show visitors their destinations. Together we promote Africa to the world!

Helping where we can to change lives in Africa
Thirdly, we have a passion to see less poverty in Africa. While traveling throughout Africa it is difficult to miss that there are many people who have it hard. Be it through ignorance, outside factors, natural disasters or just not been given the opportunities, we want to make a difference. We work with communities in various nations and try to make a difference in their lives by helping in specific areas such as clean water, effective farming, basic health training, small business, safer cooking methods and malaria prevention. We will try to assess the greatest need in a specific area and then implement possible solutions. Have a look at www.touchtheland.com for more info on how we intend to lend a hand.

We set up two blogs; one for the travelers to give feedback on the destinations we visit and to post amazing photographs taken by my talented wife, and another for the tourism industry (which will go live soon) to help our business partners with online marketing and doing business online. We also post our news on all the social media channels like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Linkedin. Please join us there if you use any of these. It makes it easy to spread the word and to keep everyone up to date with where we are and what we’re up to.

So how do you just up and go on a family adventure? It all starts with a dream…and a good dose of passion! Then years of planning, years of hard work and quite a bit of sacrifice gets you to a place where you’re ready to take the leap! And then you have to actually do it. More details on this in future posts.

Join us as we live our dreams and explore the Africa we love.

Tags: africa marketing, african expedition, comfort zones, family travel, self drive africa