No beach, no pool, no kids’ club – not even a socket to recharge their Walkmans. What were we thinking of – taking our five-year-old twins to Namibia to spend a week with Bushmen in the remote Kalahari? Surely it was nothing short of family-holiday suicide? Well, no, not really.

From the moment we walked into Nhoma village, a cluster of grass huts on a wooded sand dune, some 200km from the nearest main road, all expectations of a traditional family holiday were swept aside and, for the most part, happily forgotten.

Our translator, /Ui Steve /kunta (the “/” representing one of four distinctive tongue-clicking sounds), led us first to the elder’s hut. Crouched outside, curing the skin of a small antelope with a stone scraper, G/aq’o Kaeqce clucked a greeting in the gentle, almost birdlike language of the Ju/’hoansi – the largest remaining and most traditional of the Bushman or San groups. Nearby, one of his daughters smashed mangeti nuts between fist-sized rocks. G/aq’o wore only a pair of western trousers. His hands and feet were black from soot and his face was elf-like.

I don’t think Joe or Ellie blinked once during that first 10 minutes with the Ju/’hoansi. As G/aq’o’s daughter shared out the mangeti nuts, the twins clung to Sally, my wife, momentarily stricken by shyness and culture shock. I felt relieved that we weren’t taking them completely out of their comfort zones. While we would be spending each day with the Bushmen, our nights would be spent at a simple tented camp a few hundred metres from the village.

Following a request from the Bushman community to attract tourists to the area, Nhoma Camp was set up in 1999 by Arno Oosthuysen – a Namibian who, six years earlier, had built a lodge at Tsumkwe, a tiny settlement 80km away.

“Do you think we’re mad bringing five-year-olds here?” I had asked Arno when we first arrived at the camp – three hours’ drive along a dirt track into the wilderness of Bushmanland. He had shrugged: “One thing’s for sure, though – you must come with the right attitude and expectations.” I had then made the mistake of asking him what our plan was for the next few days. “Don’t ask me, ask them,” Arno had replied, thrusting a stubble-covered chin towards the Bushman village. “It’s up to them to decide what happens each day.”

But there was no general consensus among the Ju/’hoansi either. The men wanted to collect mangeti nuts, but the women would have none of this: they wanted meat. And so, the following morning, we found ourselves preparing for a porcupine hunt.

“This is the only Bushman group that still has traditional hunting rights,” Arno told me, as four lithe hunters, Sao, !Amace, N!aici and N!ani, clad only in leather loincloths and armed with bows, arrows and spears, scrambled onto the roof of his 4WD.

We drove an hour through thick scrubland. When we flushed out a pair of warthogs, an arrow was instantly loosed by one of the hunters crouched on the roof rack. It missed. Just.

“Did they really try to kill that warthog?” said Ellie, looking slightly bemused. Killing things to eat was just another new concept that the twins were grappling with.

We parked in what seemed like a featureless tract of heat-stunned bushveld. But the Bushmen obviously knew the land intimately, and soon we were walking single file along an elephant track – the hunters in the lead, Arno with a .300 Holland & Holland Magnum rifle at the rear. Within minutes, N!ani spotted vultures circling far to the east, and, without hesitation, the four hunters led us “off track” to investigate a possible kill.

Whereas the elephant path had been relatively easy walking, trying to negotiate untrammelled bushveld was challenging. But Joe and Ellie never pleaded to be carried. N!ani and the others made the bushveld seem less threatening. I began to relax; let my attention drift from the children...

The puff adder was several feet long, thicker than my thigh, and when we saw it, it was almost too late. A warning hiss scattered the Bushmen hunters like grasshoppers on hot coals. Spears lowered, they formed a wary semicircle around the vexed viper, gently encouraging it to find an alternative resting place. “It might not kill you, but it’ll give you gangrene,” said Arno bluntly. “It’s a dangrous snake – lazy and easy to step on.”I saw the question form on Ellie’s lips. She’d barely got used to the idea that we might be killing porcupines – and now here was something that could turn the tables. Five minutes later, the hunters looked agitated again. They had reached the first of the burrows where porcupines might less palatable down there. ArnoNAMIBIA scanned tracks, then slipped the rifle from his shoulder, aimed it into the burrow and told us to keep walking.

“There were footprints from a leopard sliding in,” he told me later. “But none showing that it had climbed out.” We returned to the village empty-handed.

The next day, N!ani and the others were keen to demonstrate their hunting prowess and invited us to watch them making arrows from lightweight stalks of elephant grass, tipped with metal points fashioned from old fence wire. Smeared with poison, these lethal darts can bring down game as large as eland. Ellie, of course, wanted to know exactly how poison worked. Her new-found interest in death was becoming slightly worrying. However, any hope of changing the subject was dealt a final blow when the hunters performed a startlingly realistic mime of a bushbuck stumbling into one of their snares and being clubbed senseless – a charade that sent every child in the village into paroxysms of giggles.

Our second hunting expedition was altogether more sweet-natured. Again the women of the village had spoken, and this time they wanted honey. After another three-hour trek, we were sipping honey dripping from a stick inserted into a wild beehive.

By our final day, Joe and Ellie’s hands and feet were as soot-stained as those of G/aq’o. When we wandered over to the camp, they no longer clung to us, but ran off to play with the other children, communicating through drawings in the sand and a mutual love of football. I was glad that they’d seen this world before it was too late.

“It will be gone in 15 years,” Arno told me that night. “These guys are the last hunters. They have a ridiculously hard life. Everything is about survival – and the young people don’t like that. This is a culture in transition.”

I thought Ellie had been asleep on my lap, but suddenly she asked: “Are the Bushmen going to die?”

“No, don’t worry,” I replied. And left it at that.

William Gray was a guest of Expert Africa (020 8232 9777, www.expertafrica.com ), which has a 12-night fly-drive itinerary combining Bushmanland with a safari in Etosha from £1,660 per adult (£1,590 per child aged 3-12), based on a family of four, including flights from Gatwick to Windhoek, rental car and most meals

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