That's what I call a nasty way to go

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These photos are so incredible, I really wish I could take credit ... but of course I can't. They were taken by a friendly South African named Ivan Emslie whom we met on one of our safaris and who kindly agreed to show me his many photographic treasures.

Sundown in the lowveld

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Could there be a more surreal spot to down a few cocktails than this Ngwenya Lodge balcony at sunset, overlooking a watering hole full of hippos and buffalo? This particular African night – and actually the entire sensory-overload holiday so far – is as one could only hope: wild, perfect and beautiful in the extreme.

Cool for cats

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We're told that to spot a leopard on your first trip to Kruger National Park is a bit like winning a cool million in the lottery ... so we must really be on a winning streak because this guy walked out in front of our car somewhere in our first few hours there. The lions, too, showed themselves, as did the rest of the so-called "Big 5": rhino, elephant and buffalo. Do I feel lucky? You bet.

Meryl Streep, eat your heart out

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Internet access is sparse, but I'll do my best!

The girls are having a ball, making scrapbooks of all the animals - eagles and African hornbills and wildebeest and impala – and I’ve gone all Meryl “I once had a farm in Africa” Streep on myself, sleeping in a tent perched on a wooden platform on stilts and loving every minute. God, this is heaven. Eagle-eyes Farquhar is proving to be the best spotter in the family; on a night safari in an open-aired Jeep, he peered through the scrub to pick out a blackbacked jackal and a spotted cat called a genet.

We have seen a pride of lions relaxing in the midday sun, African buffalo zigzagging in front of our car and the biggest “tusker” in the world: Duke, aged 57, who has his very own ranger to protect him from poachers. We’ve seen everything, in fact, but the cheetah, but of course we can wait. It’s damn near impossible to take this all in anyway.

Close encounters of the very best kind

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A world away from Australia and already we are light years away from our first night in South Africa, spent with wealthy white friends in Johannesburg just a few hundred metres from thousands of desperately poor blacks living in the squalor of the squatter camps. More than a decade after the end of apartheid, there is still clearly such disparity between have and have-not, between white and black, that it’s simply too much to take in straight away. We've escaped to the country; the cities can wait.

Out here in the magnificent Kruger National Park – a game reserve roughly the size and shape of Israel - there is room to breathe and I’m grateful to at last be in the Africa of my dreams. (The first film I ever saw at the cinema was Born Free - hence, I suppose, the wanderlust I’ve nursed for decades.)

It is our first day in Kruger and already we have seen everything we could possibly want and then some: a spectacular leopard looking for a snack, skittish zebras drinking from a waterhole, Nile crocodiles sunning themselves, white rhinos that leave piles of poop the size of small cars, hippos lollygagging in the mud, giraffes loping majestically across wide brown savanna.

I think we’ll have to stay forever.