The Marginal Safari

Justin Fox, the well-known travel journalist and deputy editor of Getaway magazine, journeys counter-clockwise around the edges of South Africa, starting in Cape Town. It is 2006 and his famous father Revel has been diagnosed with cancer. Worried and guilt-ridden, he takes to the road nevertheless, making full use of the advantages that distance and the sheer physicality of driving affords a troubled soul. For this trip becomes something of a soul journey: Restless, anxious about an uneventful slide into my late 30s, hungry for adventure - or colourful change at least - I've been craving the road for some time. As he stops at places frequented or famously erected by his architect father, his thoughts congeal around notions of fatherland and fatherhood. He tarries at outposts and colourful towns, skipping entire cities at times to favour the off-beat treasures of human souls fashioned less by convention than by their own sheer will pitted against nature or circumstance.
Fox travels like Theroux and reports like a novelist, with pithy dialogue and sharp observations, and strings together scenes, pictures, communities and characters to form a totality of what South Africa is today as seen from its margins: a poignant, exciting clash of histories and stories which Fox tells in a quietly charming and irresistible way.