I’ve been in the Great Karoo for a week. Are you jealous? You should be – this is the heartland of our country and the people in the region I’m visiting have a thing or two to teach us all about tourism.

They’re that friendly (except of course when they serve chicken as a vegetarian dish. But then I did ask for a salad…).

So why don’t I just tell you where I am, name them and shame them – the friendly ones and the chicken-IS-a-vegetable ones - and get it over with?

Well, see, I’m actually here working on the first round of selections – the Regionals – for South Africa’s team for the greatest adventure race on earth: the Land Rover G4 Challenge.

South Africa’s selections process is three-phased: Regionals, Nationals and Internationals - and because of the number of eligible athletes, Land Rover South Africa decided to organise the Regionals in four rotations of 30 people each. And because the tasks they must face are the same for each rotation, we need to prevent sensitive information about location or strategy from getting out to those who have yet to go through the ordeal.

After they’ve all been, sweated and gone, of course, all will be revealed.

The way it works is that we’ll be taking the top man and top woman from each rotation – together with the top eight runners-up and four wild cards –to the Nationals in an Lesotho in October, where we’ll choose three men and three women to go the Internationals in England in February. And then one man and one woman will join competitors from about 20 countries in the 4-week-long Land Rover G4 Challenge.  in Mongolia in June and July next year.

South Africa’s Martin Dreyer is the current world title holder and from what I’ve seen of him and of the sixty athletes we’ve met so far, we’re spoilt for choice in this country: we’re blessed with some awesome young people - fit, wiry and mentally tough.

It’s a huge honour doing what I do, travelling with them and writing about them. But perhaps an even bigger honour – and an even bigger eye-opener – is the opportunity to really experience the Karoo.

I’ve always wanted to spend quality time in this lovely silent place. It’s a cliché, I know, but when it comes to dramatic or even gentle landscapes the Karoo really is big sky country.

At the start of each rotation, we meet the contestants at a village on the N1 and drive with them (each team of four has a Land Rover Discovery 3 of their own for the duration) along the back roads to our base at Camp Discovery (no hot and cold running water, no electricity and – gasp! – no cell phones. It’s the finest hotel you ever could find). And along those back roads the other day, I realised that we’d been driving for almost 90 minutes without ever once seeing even one little house.

The mountains here are beyond description, too. We’ve named one section group of them The Dinosaur’s Backs – and they look exactly like that and nothing else.

And the wildlife! Mark, our race director, saw an aardwolf, an aardvark and a honey badger on just one section of the road into the nature reserve where Camp Discovery is situated (the road IN, mind you – not on a road inside the fences of the reserve itself. The game there is a whole nother ball game). And as I’m writing, I can hear the songs of at least a half a dozen different birds outside my window (I have the luxury of an office in a self-catering cottage in town so that I can hook up to the net. I’ll tell you where it is next week).

And what all of this has done for me in my professional career as a tourism writer is remind me about the basics of what we’re doing in this industry in South Africa.

Sure we can offer our shopping malls and our gambling dens – but where in the world (the easily accessible world) can you hit a well-maintained dirt road and drive along for 90 minutes without seeing a single man-made building? And where in the world today can you see an aardwolf OUTSIDE a nature reserve?

This is what it’s all about. These are the experiences that set us apart as a country.

Thank you, Land Rover, and thank you South Africa for honouring me with this amazing experience.

If you’re interested in the Challenge, you’ll find my media releases in This Tourism Week’s Media Room - or you can join our supporters group on Facebook: “Land Rover G4 Selections South Africa.” And don’t use the excuse that you aren’t on Facebook. If you aren’t, you aren’t marketing your business very well, are you?

I’m proudly, proudly, PROUDLY Part of A Brilliant Event Management Team

The Land Rover G4 Challenge Selections – Regional and National – are being staged by event managers Magnetic South.

They’ve got two more events this year – both of which are open to anyone who’s fit enough (and for the Sabrina, you don’t need to be very fit at all):

The Robberg Express - now nicknamed ‘The Shark’ by most competitors because of the treacherous nature of the course - is a Multi-sport race involving a 35 km mountain bike ride, a 10 km mountain run and a 10 km ocean paddle. You can also enter the ‘Robberg Express Lite’ – or, more correctly, the Robberg Raggie – and there’s a junior version of the race for dads or moms wanting to compete alongside their kids (teams of two - one adult and one child under 16 - paddling in a double kayak).

The Sabrina Love Ocean Challenge - a 6 km open water swim - takes place on the 28th of December every year. It’s a highlight of Plettenberg Bay’s summer holiday season and the main fund-raiser for the Sabrina Love Foundation (founded in memory of Sabrina Lubner to raise funds for and provide assistance to people living with disabilities in Plettenberg Bay). It’s also all about supporting one another – so one of the great traditions of the event is the 3 km beach walk which happens while the swimmers are battling it out. And for those who like their sport but aren’t into long-distance swimming, there’s a 10 km run or a 20 km ocean paddle - and because The Sabrina tries to include everyone, there’s a 600 metre swim for children, too.