I had played in SA once before, as a guest of the Sowetan Cricket Club. This was over two years ago, but my disastrous performance was still fresh in my mind. Hopefully this time the style in which I returned to the club house may be somewhat more ebullient than that inauspicious visit.

Before the dramas of the Inanda cricket club in the heart of Sandton, Johannesburg, I was granted some very special visits courtesy of some very new but now firm friends.

The Horizon ranch, 2 and half miles north of Johannesburg is a delightfully peaceful 'homestead' style guest farm that provides riding and other associated entertainment in the delicious surroundings of the Waterburg countryside. Before I begin to sound like a marketing/advertising exec describing this place, I must stress that it is very difficult tio describe anything about the ranch without drifting off into superlatives. As a non-horse rider (been off more times than on!) I was treated with a great deal of respect, by instructor and horse.

After a thoroughly enjoyable few days on the back of a fifteen hand high animal called Nelly, it was off to sample another part of the Triple B ranch, Ants Nest.

Owned and run by Triple B's son and daughter in law, namely Ant and Tessa Baber, Ant's Nest is a private game retreat that boast an idyllic guest house and rotundas surrounded by land occupied by impala, giraffe and two glorious rhinoceros.

After recharging my batteries, and also my coccyx, which had taken a battering from Nelly (the horse if you please), we headed away from the Triple B to the Kruger National park for some adventure. Well it was actually adventure times two from the minute we got off the plane. The Sabi Sabi lodge sits in this unfettered and non-bordered park. The wildlife here is free to roam from southern Africa all the way to the far excesses of Kenya, so what is seen here is certainly free and most decidedly wild.

We spent three days not in the fantastic opulence of the lodge, but in the somewhat downtrodden surroundings of a bush camp, right in the heart of lion territory. Our guide, Murray, understated everything in a manner that made me feel I was staying in the Holiday Inn, just under canvas. However, when night fell and we returned to camp after a long day looking through my Canon lens, I realsied that this time there was nothing more between the wildlife and my delicious flesh than one millimetere of canvas, and my partner's hefty snoring.

During those few days I experienced tracking a rhino on foot, running away from my breakfast courtesy of a hungry elephant, and finally calming my partner after she had been chased semi naked from the bucket-shower she was having by a slightly small and insignificant snake.

However the one incident I shall remember was coming face to face with a lion, a matter of one meter away, panting and licking his bloodstained lips having recently killed and eaten a Zebra.

The cricket at Inanda couldn't have been further removed from this scene. The club, a plethora of tennis, squash, polo and otherr such sporting facilities, is an oasis in a city of mixed blessings.

My host here was a gentleman, and I stress the word gentleman, called Jon Ford. I'd met Jon in ghana at the polo tournament he was competing in on behalf of an South African XI. Jon gladly invited us to come and stay at his charming Inanda home, strewn with memoribila of polo days gone by. The match was another charitable success as we managed to raise enough interest to donate to the Buschdrai Farm school a some of money that has helped them continue the valuable work of educating the local farmworkers children on the Triple B ranch. My thanks go to Satour, Jon Ford, the Triple B ranch, Charles Baber and family, Geena and all at the Horizon, Avis car hire for getting it right in the end, and finally to all at the Buschdrai Farm School.