Growing up in South Africa embeds a love and need of the outdoors from an early age. And a lot of the dissatisfaction South African expats feel with their adopted homes stems from an incomplete integration with the outdoor pursuits predicated by the climate they find themselves in. So, us South Africans just have to be slightly more committed to our outdoor pursuits.
I am fortunate enough to be a member of that great South African institution, the Dispersed Nuclear Family Unit or DNFU. I have a brother in Canada and a sister in Australia. My parents and extended family are still in SA and I am in the UK. We’ve adopted a follow-the-sun approach to keeping in touch, so at any point in time someone within the DNFU is awake.
The DNFU gives me a certain amount of insight into the outdoor traditions of the foreign offices of DNFU HQ: Canada, Australia and the UK. I’ll begin with Canada – a beautiful country, with enough wildness and open space to satisfy the most outdoorsy of outdoors people. You can hunt, fish, hike or camp to your hearts content, although you need to be careful of the bears. These bears are not looking for porridge or a picnic. Canada is also really far from the equator if you compare it to SA, with vast tracts of tundra and a sizeable chunk of the remaining boreal forest, so you need to move fast to get your summer jollies in. The summer only lasts, more or less three months, and that includes the spring! Despite this, there is a sizeable South African community in Canada and if you look around, you’ll be able to get hold of wors for your braai. The SA expat community in Canada has also embraced the Canadian style of outdoor living and very few complain with serious commitment about the long harsh winters, especially since this introduces a whole new angle to outdoor life with the arrival of snow! Always ones for adventure, South Africans are known to take to the snow lifestyle as readily as they do to the sea and surfboards!
Even Australia, typically seen as a climatic equivalent of South Africa, has its own, subtly different, outdoor culture. For instance, they play an incomprehensible amalgam of rugby and football, called ‘Aussie Rules’, yet on a cricket pitch!? South Africans in Australia have integrated as well as they have in Canada, despite valiantly and repeatedly correcting Australians when invited to a barbecue, “it’s actually called a braai you know!” It’s an easy country for a South African to live in, filled with lovers of rugby, cricket, sun and of course beer.
There are also plenty of Saffas in the UK and we all know about the ‘Great British Summer’. When it’s good it’s fantastic, when it’s bad (which can be annoyingly often) it’s… umm, wet. But South Africans do relish the long summer evenings with its lingering twilight, the sky still glowing at half-past ten. For active South Africans summer in England can feel like having an intravenous supply of Red Bull!
Apart from all of the relatively informal sports leagues that kick off in the summer, a plethora of music festivals and concerts, a veritable feast of culture and entertainment is laid on, particularly in London. Even on rainy miserable days, there’s absolutely no excuse for boredom and apathy.
All of this rambling is trying in a very round about way to get the following point across. Every country has an outdoors, every country has a particular outdoor tradition – some stronger than others. South Africans can live in any country in the world precisely because we have such an affinity with the outdoors. Wherever we go, we just need to work out what it is that the people in those places like to do when they’re outside of their houses, and then we go ahead and do the same… but with more flair and usually some boerewors as well!