Seventeen flights, fifty hotels, seven countries. Four months in to our year-long, round-the-world odyssey and we are seriously wondering whether we should stop for a breather. We need to take some time to mull over our shrinking list of possible living destinations.

We loved Namibia and it enjoyed a surprising, but brief, period at the top of our wish-to-live-there-list. Crime is minimal, land is cheap, its Germanic past has left it well organised. We finished there with a flourish, drifting over the soaring red dunes of Sosussvlei in an enormous hot-air balloon. The beauty of the place was still making us gasp even as we headed out east to Tanzania.

We spend our first week lounging on the beach on the lush, tropical coast below Dar es Salaam. It rains on our first night and we greet the downpour with delight. We realise how dry Namibia had been and make a decision; we can’t live in a desert. We are too English to live life without rain.

Refreshed, we are ready to tackle the rest of Tanzania, starting with Zanzibar. We hire a battered car to tour the island, visiting unspoilt, beaches where we collect armfuls of small shells, which we will display one day, “when we have a house”. This has become the family mantra and we have started to visualise this haven — with no fixed abode, we are free to fantasise. Mima dreams of the pet snakes she will have one day, Gregor wants polecats. Nick wants an outsized television, tuned solely to rugby, and Guinness on tap. I’d like somewhere I could slip away to, on my own, to read a book.

In northern Tanzania, we visit the nomadic Hadza Bushmen, and spend a morning trying to keep up with them as they hunt through the undergrowth around their temporary village. Walking comfortably at a pace that forces us to trot, they fire their powerful poisoned arrows at anything that crosses their path. This morning a large female baboon is the unlucky victim, along with a skinny bushbaby and a tree squirrel.

The bushmen, who are exhilarated by their hunt, ignore us completely, except to offer a tasty chunk of said baboon, after she has been roasted, hair and all, into a cindered shadow of her former self. Apart from their rather dubious taste in food (the uncooked squirrel’s feet are torn off and chewed up by the grandmother of the clan), there is so much to learn from meeting these people. The few remaining Hadza Bushmen have rejected all attempts to conventionalise their way of life.

Outwardly impoverished, materially bereft, they exude a powerful sense of pride and contentment. They are a close and efficient family unit, three generations, living together, perpetually moving, working as a team.

They would be astonished by our Western angst. They think we are irrelevant anyway. They have reminded us of the importance of simple pleasures, of family, of friends.

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