Waking up in your own bed, with your own pillow, is always
the best welcome home when you’ve been away. Waking up at 3AM because your body
thinks it is actually time for lunch is a different matter. We didn’t get our
5:30AM wake up call, nor the sweet voice saying “good morning!” accompanied by
a pot of steaming hot coffee, nor our breakfast by bonfire this morning.
However, I did get my Peet’s coffee today - which does make me very happy. No
more high tea at 3:30PM with some decadent dessert, no more sundowners at 6PM
with appetizers, which John is largely protesting, and no more large dinners with
homemade dinner rolls and dessert before bed. I am actually glad I don’t have
to eat 5 times a day now, because the food was always so delicious it was hard
to say no. My scale shows the results of those decisions, but oh well, it was
worth every morsel.
We are all still speaking to one another after 28 days of
spending time together practically 24/7! Winning! Just kidding, we are very
compatible travel partners. We learned a lot about each other on what I think
was approximately 30 separate game drives; like for instance we all liked the
thrill of tracking and finding the game. Our very first guide, Sam, taught us
about tracking animals and birds and how to ID the prints, along with how to
determine which direction the animal was going. He also taught us about
listening to the birds and the baboons for distress calls when a predator or
threat was in the area. I think because of Sam, we were hooked on game drives
for the rest of the trip where other people may have been “enough
already!” This actually turned out to be
a blessing since we were all in this together. We learned that Marc is a closet
birder. When Sam had introduced us to maybe the 5th bird in the
first hour of our first game drive, Marc decided to begin recording all the
birds and animals we saw. Over the next 3 weeks he became the resident bird
expert, sometimes even challenging the guides on what we were looking at, so he
kept them on their toes. I believe the list ended up at 133 birds and 40
animals that we saw. Beth and I learned that we were experts in creating the
perfect ladies loo kit for the bush, and that we should go into business
marketing them on Amazon. We created our own supply package after one of our
guides had absolutely nothing for us. Yes, he was a man.
We had more than one irritated elephant encounter complete
with a fake charge towards our vehicle, but our guides tell us the elephants
don’t want combat either, they fear getting hurt, but they are very very
protective of their young. The majority of our elephant encounters were peaceful and
absolutely remarkable. Maybe the most
humbling and profound experience was at Little Vumbura, when we stopped to view
an elephant herd coming out of the brush and they just kept on coming and
coming until probably 100 elephants in two streaming lines emerged and walked
past our car. Watching the matriarch at work was pretty impressive as she
instructed the entire herd to halt and look us over. We stayed perfectly still
as instructed and after several minutes of deliberation, and a mock challenge
by one of the teenagers, she instructed everyone to proceed and off they went. Observing the elephants swim across the river at Duma Tau - especially the baby elephants - was so fun to watch. I
had a hippo charge the boat I was in that was pretty terrifying as he took 2
giant leaps towards the boat before the guide shooed him away. They are
enormous!! Being next to the big cats who could overtake us and kill us all had
they wanted to was thrilling. Thankfully they don’t see humans as prey so could
not have cared less about our presence but it took a while to get comfortable being so vulnerable. The lion/aardvark story from last week
is another story that will be retold over and over again.
Although we were pretty spoiled in these luxury safari
camps, we felt like we also got to know the people who are the heart of the regions
we visited, like the staff who were mostly hired from the local villages, and
also the working people in the actual villages such as the principal of the
local school and the village chief. We learned about village life, what their families
were like, what challenges faced the communities, and the structure of their
society. Clearly the men and women employed at these camps were the fortunate
ones because they had good jobs and were employed by responsible companies that
supported the local economy and gave back to the communities. We spent a day visiting
in the community meeting local villagers and witnessed a glimpse of their daily
lives. A teacher’s salary at the local village where we stayed in Zimbabwe was
$150/mo., and that was a senior level teacher. The kids don’t have electricity
in their homes thus there is no way for them to do homework after dark, and
typically they have to help with chores when they get home during the daylight
hours. They may have walked up to 13km to and from school that day, and just
had porridge for lunch and nothing else. The school has no running water and no
flushing toilets, the kids just use a squat hole to eliminate. It also costs
the parents money to send their kids to school for tuition and uniforms - education
is not free. I think the school kids’ situation affected all of us the most.
We were very impressed with the sheer knowledge of all of
our guides. There are over 400 species of birds in Africa – not all of them
were located where we were visiting but the guides not only knew their names,
they knew their breeding habits, the sound of their call and what it meant, and
their nesting habits. Same with the animals, they knew the tracks, the dung,
the breeding and gestation details, and the behavior. They knew the latin names
of the plants. Apparently guiding school is quite a rigorous course and there
are several levels to guiding which can take years to achieve. Only the top
level guides are permitted to do walking safaris, and in Zimbabwe and Zambia
our guides, or the rangers that rode with us, always carried a loaded rifle. We
were equally impressed with how passionate the guides were about protecting the
wildlife and helping to minimize the human/animal conflict.
We observed Mother Nature at work with every species, animal
parents working to provide and protect their families. Every species had a
purpose, a reason for being in the ecosystem, they provided benefit by their
very existence and they also received benefit from another. There were no fences or game reservations where we went. We saw the animals in their unspoiled true habitat.
We fell in love with each and every one of them, from the ugliest of them all,
like the warthogs, to the most beautiful, like the cheetah (we all have our
opinions on the ugliest and prettiest). We could sit and watch the elephants
for hours and never get bored. We grew so fond of the hippos who made us laugh
as they talked to each other in snorts and grunts pretty much all the time day
and night. Hearing the lions roaring nearby while tucked safely in bed in the
middle of the night was pretty special, and the sunsets are second to none.
Put Africa on your short list friends and family, it will
change you in profound ways. Believe it or not, spending your money in these
countries through travel actually creates jobs, (which allows the employed to
better educate their children), supports the local economy and makes lives
better in those regions, provided you choose ecologically responsible safari
companies. We miss you already Beautiful Africa.
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