The day began with an unbidden wake up call at 4.50am. The people that run the game drives into South Africa's Kruger National Park aren’t silly. If you want to get moving early then don’t rely on the organisational abilities of the guests.

We were sitting in the back of the game vehicle, ready to depart, when a drunken and garrulous British serviceman on leave decided to see if he could get a free ride and hopped in. Our guide – a sixty-something Afrikaner – was just about to head off with him, before we decided that seven hours with this guy was not going to add to the wonders of the southern part of the Kruger, so we left him behind.

With an evening trip the night before already under our belts, we continued in our search of the 'Big Five' - elephants, lions, rhinos, leopards and buffalo.

Jungle hierarchy

I was constantly reminded of the hierarchy of the jungle, of who kills what, and about the interdependence of nature’s vast array of creatures. And we were reminded about how tough nature’s way can be. Watching an old rhino bull; lonely, ostracised, with his only friends being dung beetles, who rejoice in turning rhino crap into neat little tennis balls. And we watched an old buffalo turfed out from the herd. No welfare, no superannuation.

We learned that it is better to be an elephant calf, fiercely protected by your mum – rather than a lion cub, where the chances of being eaten by your dad are fairly high. Penny, our 19 year-old daughter reflected on this and the fact that Anne, my wife, has told her she would kill, like the elephant, to protect her. I protested that I would too, but she laughingly suggested I’d be much more like the lion and gobble the kids up.

We witnessed the apparent injustice of being a male impala in your bachelor herd, jealously watching a fellow impala bloke with fifty partners. And how bad is it for the female impalas with such little choice of a mate?

Latent power

I was particularly struck by the grace and slow, sleek – feline even - movements of elephants, rhinos and hippos, which hide their raw weight, size and power to turn nasty, to kill. A power that humans possess – purposely or accidentally – and something that we would see later in the day.

My favourite was the broad-chested, powerful and statuesque Kudu. Spiralled horns, impressively striped, a meter and a half high and weighing in at 150 kgs – perhaps he was the alpha male I thought I once was.

Like so much in Southern Africa, the park – the largest in South Africa: covering around 19,000 km², roughly the same size as Wales – is in constant transition. Now that elephant numbers are growing and potentially destroying the fauna, the question of to cull or not to cull, looms large again. Named after Paul Kruger the Prime Minister of the day, the park is tipped to change soon to Mandela Park. Not surprising really, it’s amazing that such an important national landmark has lasted with its colonial moniker for so long.

Having shot at animals repeatedly – with cameras – we returned to the hotel impressed with the beauty, expanse and variety of the park. Vowing to come back again, we set off for the 140 km drive eastwards back to Maputo, capital of Mozambique, where we were staying for a week.

We drove past huge sugar cane, banana, papaya, and citrus plantations and stopped just before the border for a feed. My son Nick, 21 years old and a philosophy student was reading Homer’s Odyssey. He gave us a quick explanation of the ethics of virtue, which given my and Penny’s current reading material – John Le Carre and Dan Brown – was a fairly short discussion and we headed for the Mozambican border, which we had traversed comfortably two days before.

Border run

It was a Sunday afternoon and the customs hall in Ressano Garcia was literally steaming; full to the brim with clamouring, sweaty people in 100 per cent humid, 35°C heat. I couldn’t believe the immigration officials, pleasant, calm, almost sphinx-like but with a collar and tie. No dispensation for the hot rainy season. Bus load after bus load disgorged into the hall. We had made the mistake of not getting a multiple entry visa on our arrival in Mozambique several days before, so we had to line up again. Our passports, complete with sweat-drenched visa forms, disappeared into the back room for nearly an hour. We felt that quiet unease arising from the fact that, with no passport in your hands, you are officially stateless.

The passports came back, and with the formalities for our rented blue Toyota Corolla, we slid out of town and down towards Maputo.

After about 20 km we drove through a small bush fire burning on a front of about 100 m. Just as we had driven through the thick smoke, we noticed jagged, vertical spikes of lightning intermittently and unnervingly filling our horizon, wondering if somehow we’d be picked out.

Unnatural selection

And then the storm hit with gusting and driving rain so strong that we were forced to slow dramatically and creep along behind a small commuter van. We were contemplating stopping on the side of the road when we saw ahead of us a large InterCape bus pulled over to the side with another car in front of it.

And then we saw a man slouched over the highway guardrail, directly behind the bus. Not moving, no shirt on him. We stopped and ran back to find him blue, bleeding and broken limbed. I'm a medical doctor, so I checked his pulse. Dead. Nick and Penny seeing death like this for the first time.

The driver of the bus was unhurt but dazed. Fortunately his bus was empty, and he hesitatingly described how the wind had caught his bus and he’d hit an oncoming car. The hierarchy of the road, bus trumps car. The law of the bitumen.

Who do you call? The only number I knew in Maputo was our travel agent, a young Mozambican woman called Edna. She was no doubt a little surprised to be rung in church, by someone she hardly knew, asking if she could ring for the police and ambulance for an accident 40 km away.

Other people were now stopping to help, some really kind souls. Then Penny yelled out to say there were others in the car. We rushed across to find a woman – driven back through the flattened back of the front passenger seat – prostrate on the back seat.

"This is Africa"

She was conscious and calling for her husband, fearing for the worst. I had picked up the dead man’s wallet to identify him, so I knew he was a South African working in mining in Mozambique.

We stayed for about an hour and a half. The police arrived quickly, and then we saw the flashing lights of the ambulance. But it turned out to be the Trans African Concessions mob; the highway maintenance patrols with flags and witches hats to slow traffic and protect those on the side of the road from nutters who still persisted in racing past at upwards of 130 km per hour.

But there was no ambulance simply because currently there is no public ambulance that works the highways in Mozambique. When the surviving woman's friends from Maputo arrived, we felt we could leave, so we jumped back in the Toyota, only to find a flat battery as I'd forgotten to turn off the lights in our hurry. It's tough pushing an automatic car to get the battery working.

No jump leads were available, but one of the people who had stopped had the bright idea of asking the highway maintenance men to help. Within five minutes one of them had removed a spare battery from the back of his truck, cut two short pieces of coat hanger wire and complete with gloves, had kick started our battery.

Eyeing our obvious relief and wonder at the resourcefulness, he proclaimed with an irresistible grin, “this is Africa”.

We continued to creep back gently into the Maputo night, wary of stopping in case the car stalled. The intermittently functioning traffic lights all the way down the grand Maputo colonnade proved a challenge, but we made it home.

Cathartic release

Into a city of contrasts: giant billboards advertising mobile phones adorning the sides of equally immense but tired apartment blocks and along post-independence roads such as Mao Tse Tung, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, even Kim Il Sung street and Robert Mugabe place.

But the irony was not lost in finding the British Embassy on Avenue Lenin and even more intriguingly, the American Embassy on Avenue Friedrich Engels (who helped Karl Marx develop the theory of communism). Someone hadn’t done their homework!

At the end of the day I returned the hire car to the airport, and a kind cabby gave me a lift home. After he roared out of the airport I was so unnerved, and so unwilling to be unnaturally selected to perish, that I urged him, using international body language, to slow down.

I was concerned about Nick and Penny’s reactions to the accident and we talked about it the next morning. They seemed fine, much better than me. I remembered dreaming about it during the night and subsequently bursting into tears, cathartically it seemed, on at least three occasions.

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