PHOTOGRAPHS:DANA ALLEN
For my twelfth birthday my parents gave me a novel present: they packed me and nine school friends off into the wilderness. Their plan, apart from getting the boisterous pre-teens out their hair for a while, was to have us slickers of the urban sprawl of Johannesburg educated in the forgotten ways of the bush.
The place of choice was Lapalala, a 5000-hectare reserve of the most pristine wilderness deep in the Waterberg in the remote north-western part of South Africa. Here, isolated red-soiled valleys lined with spectacular layered sandstone cliffs echoed the flow of rivers cascading into rock pools where endless wooded and grassland landscapes harboured a diverse range of wildlife. If an African wilderness could be personified, this was it.