It takes an elephant to get my teenage son up early

Having just turned 13, my boy Ferdy doesn’t really do early mornings. Indeed, during the summer hols we rarely glimpsed him before noon and then only fleetingly whenever he chose to assemble himself a triple-decker jam and Nutella sandwich and flee back upstairs to his darkened room and repeats of Top Gear on his iPad.

I saw more of our neighbours’ kids than I did of our own. But there Ferdy was at 5.30 a.m., bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and raring to go. ‘Come on, daddy, for heaven’s sake shake a leg, everyone’s waiting!’ I hardly recognised the boy.

We were staying at Phinda Forest Lodge in KwaZulu-Natal, south-east of Johannesburg, for three days’ safari and some father-and-son bonding, and it was time for the first early-morning game drive.

Phinda Private Game Reserve encompasses an impressive 23,000 hectares of prime wilderness, and Forest Lodge — one of six on the reserve — is in the middle of nowhere.