It’s taken a few weeks to pull my photos together. I considered whether it would be best to group them by place, by animal or in some other fashion, but I have concluded that the best way to present them is as a random montage. That’s how I remember the African safari experience, in any case.
These are not necessarily the “best “photos, nor are they all “finished“ (when is a photograph ever finished?), but I hope you enjoy the ride.
You will need to click on this YouTube link. The slide show lasts less than ten minutes. https://youtu.be/NCPyyYCwRnc
Africa, and particularly African safaris, are unbelievable. Full stop. There is really no way to explain the experience, if you have not had it. For people who live in a first world, city environment, the differences are so startling that one can’t really conceive of them without experiencing it. So, trite as it sounds, the best part of the experience is the experience itself.
The animals are amazing. But almost as important as the animals are the guides. We had incredible, hand picked guides almost everywhere we went. The extent of their knowledge, their ability to identify and talk about the animals, the landscape and the entire experience enriches everything immensely. In my case, they were also very important in easing the difficulty of travel with the mobility issues I’ve been having. The guides were very attentive to and concerned about my ability to navigate things and happily assisted with everything from getting in and out of jeeps (not always as easy as one might think), to pushing a wheelchair.
While the places we stayed were decidedly upscale for African safaris, the six nights we spent on a mobile tent safari in Botswana were challenging. There was no electricity, only bucket showers, a toilet that required putting ash into it after using it, rather than flushing it. But living in that way is also a distinct and valuable experience. On a mobile tent safari there is no Internet connections, none. A week without email and news every five minutes is a pleasure almost worth the cost of the trip itself.
In fact, it was going a week without being able to blog that raised in my mind the thought of not blogging for the rest of the trip. I decided that I did not need to add the not insignificant challenge of creating and posting a blog daily to the other challenges that I was already facing.
Speaking of “worth the trip“, the cost of an excursion like this is outlandish. There is no other way to describe it. On the other hand, this was for Max and, for him, it will definitely be an experience that he will never forget and, we hope, will change him in profound ways. So it’s impossible to put a price tag on that . Bottom line is that there is nothing we would be happier to spend an outlandish sum on than this trip. Friends of ours have described trips like this as “ski trips”, spend the kids inheritance.
I know that many of you enjoy the photographs that I typically include with posts. Had I followed my normal practice of posting daily, I would have described what we saw each day and included photographs of them. Instead, I plan to make several other posts, consisting entirely or almost entirely of photographs. This may take me a bit of time.
Truth is that, though seeing all of the many varieties of smaller animals, and hundreds of species of birds is quite wonderful, the biggest thrill is seeing the larger animals, elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos and particularly seeing the cats – leopards, cheetah, and lion, which are rare, but which we were fortunate to see. The biggest thrills involved death or risk – wild dogs devouring a warthog they had just killed, lions fighting with one another over their share of an antelope they had killed and a large mother elephant who felt we were getting a bit too close to her baby and trumpeted and attacked our vehicle. These experiences are surprisingly not gruesome, but reflective of nature and the cycle of life and death that propels it.
Other than these animal experiences, I’d pick out three people-experiences as among the things I’ll remember most about the trip. I’ve already mentioned them, but I’ll reiterate them and expand a bit upon them here.
First was Max playing the African drums with performers at Camp Okavango after only two drum lessons. It was such a kick to see this 11-year old kid sitting there confidently and rhythmically pounding away on the drums, while the group of adults was singing and dancing around him. The performers and audience were amazed at his aplomb.
Second relates to our dinner with Albie Sachs, who I have mentioned earlier in this blog. At 89 years of age, Albie is a hero of the anti-apartheid movement and a major figure in South African history. We tried to impress this on Max, but it’s a hard thing to convey to somebody at his age. I think our words probably rather rolled off of Max’s 11-year old back. Here is what finally got our point across.
After dinner with Albie, we took an Uber, dropped Albie off at his home and continued to our hotel. Albie lives on a steep hill and the Uber driver helped him down the hill to his home. When the Uber driver returned to the car from dropping Albie off after our dinner, something clicked in the driver’s mind and he asked us who that was he had dropped off.
When we told him that it was Albie Sachs, he went on and on about what an extraordinary person Albie was and what Albie had done for the country. So, while Carol and my description of Albie probably made little impression on Max, he is now indelibly impressed in Max’s mind because of the Uber driver, who, justifiably, had far more credibility than we did.
Albie has been celebrated around the world and holds more than a dozen honorary degrees. When I told Albie this story he wrote, “much as I crave honorary degrees, the unsolicited comments by uber drivers and baggage handlers mean more to me than all the honorary degrees put together.”
Third is just plain Max. This was his trip. And he loved it. His mother reported to us that she’d asked Max, on a scale of 1 to 10 how he would rate the trip. After thinking, Max had replied, “9.7”. I’ll take that. It was our privilege to be able to accompany him on this journey of discovery and to experience it through his eyes.
If, as we expect this is our last big adventure travel experience, it’s one helluva way to go out. I’ll close with this “sundowner” photo of us and our wonderful Zimbabwean guide, Lewis.
(I’ll include more photos in other, later posts.)
I wanted to put your mind at rest, because I know a lot of you are concerned about us since I have not blogged for more than two weeks. I know this because of our many followers, none have written to ask if we are OK. I attribute this to your concern that if you ask the question, the answer might be no, and you would learn of something terrible, having befallen on us, such as having been eaten by lions. No, relax, we are OK. And we are back in Chicago, with our wild animal. (Since drafting this paragraph, I have heard from half a dozen or more of you, so apologies to those who have written.) 
Rather than try to pick up the thread of where my blog ended and report on our daily activities, I want to give you an overview of our travel experience and the thoughts evoked by it. Some of you might not be interested in that and, if that is the case, I suggest that you cover your eyes as you read the remainder of this blog post.
The airport experience. We had a good, long trip of three weeks. Still, the trip was book-ended by getting there and getting back, a saga of some 30 or so hours of travel, each way. Notwithstanding the fact that there is no way to avoid that, the long trek there and back does not enhance the experience.
Simply navigating the airports has become a challenge. They all are laid out differently, directions are often quite poor and distances from entry to the gate are long. I have often thought that we are intentionally assigned the farthest gate, which seems to be roughly halfway to our “final destination” (An unfortunate way of describing the place to which we are going), wherever that might be.
Those of us who have been around for a while, may think back to travel when we were much younger. Going to the airport was itself an exciting experience. In fact, I even remember the days when it would be a neat (and cheap) date, to go with, a boyfriend or girlfriend to the airport to watch planes takeoff.
Of course, that has changed dramatically. First of all, going to the airport has become much more of an everyday experience. Second of all, the experience is significantly altered by all of the security requirements imposed after 9/11 The airports themselves have expanded greatly in size and now, in many places, resemble nothing so much as huge, upscale shopping malls.
Personally, traversing the distance from check-in to the gate has become enough of a challenge that I always request a wheelchair to and from the gate. This helps significantly. In addition to removing the physical effort, in many places, using airport personnel often allows you to skip long lines and get to your gate more quickly. On this trip, with as many different airports as we passed through, the assistance of airport personnel was invaluable.
Gliding through the airport on my wheelchair, I was able to observe other differences, (besides the shopping mall aspect). I was struck by the large number of people who, like me, were utilizing help in getting to the gates. Earlier, I do not recall seeing very many people in wheelchairs, this may have been due largely to the unavailability of wheelchairs to get people to the gates. I wondered what all of those people did in those days. Many of them probably simply did not fly. Others soldiered on and got to their gates, heartier than I am right now. (Or perhaps people in wheelchairs were simply invisible to me back then. I definitely feel an affinity for and sense of camaraderie now with my wheelchair brothers and sisters.) 
On the other end of the spectrum from those utilizing wheelchairs (typically older folks) were families who had four or more young children in tow as they traveled. Managing what we had to deal with, which involved no children, other than our almost 12 year old grandson, Max, I could not imagine how people with all of these little ones managed to get through the maze of the airport. I guess it was a good idea to make parents young.
Another observation was the diversity of people traveling. My recollection, which may be faulty, was that in the olden days airport travel was primarily white folks getting from one place to another. That was decidedly not the case on this trip, although undoubtedly the percentages were affected by the fact that we were traveling internationally and that Africa was our destination.
Travel certainly does not get easier as you age. In addition to the physical ordeal, I find the mental challenges of navigating the system increasingly difficult. I know that as one ages, one is supposed to mellow and meet obstacles more calmly. Somebody forgot to give me that message and so, I find the complexity of navigating airports to be mentally stressful.
So in many ways, this was a tough trip and most likely is our next last adventure travel. Arduous. We took fifteen different flights in three weeks and travelled many hours daily, often 8 hours a day in open jeeps on bumpy, dusty roads. No reason to feel sorry about this likely being our last, though, because we have had an incredible run of travel privileges.
In past trips, photography has been an important element for me. On this trip, I toyed with not taking a camera at all, other than my iPhone. I changed my mind at the last minute and am glad that I did that. I was surprised to find how important photography was to me, after all, and I was glad to have the camera, even if I was taking photos of animals and scenes that I had encountered on prior trips. The camera was something of a security blanket for me. I think I would have been less comfortable without it. .
It was fun to have Max along having his own and first photography experience. We had borrowed a camera from FreshLens Chicago, an organization that Innovation 80 supports, and so Max had exactly the same equipment that I did. In fact, I found that in quite a number of circumstances, though, my iPhone was as good as or better than my regular camera for photography. I particularly found that true in taking video.
We packed relatively lightly, but, even then, took more than we needed to. I was particularly fortunate to pack an extremely helpful spouse, without whom I could not have made it through the three weeks. I’m going to close this first reflection with a photo of one of the lions who did not eat us. There’ll be more photos in my next post.
Carol was up at six to go on another Safari walk. Max and I slept in a bit and then went out to breakfast and visited with some of the other guests over breakfast from the US at Switzerland.
Then Max and I came back to the room, where The drumming instructor Aldi met us and gave Max another lesson. Max was fabulous and his instructor was amazed at how good he is already. He also taught him to do some singing with his drumming, which at first Max was reluctant to do, but wound up picking up on it very well.
in the afternoon, Carol and Max rode in a maccoro, a canoe poled by one of the staff.
I took another boat ride with our guide, Tau,, and we encountered an elephant up close and personal.
A beautiful sunset in the reeds, and a sunset by the camp fire, with my wheel chair.
At dinner, Max Performed on the drum with a singing and dancing choir from the lodge to great annd deserved acclaim from the guests.
Wake up call for Carol and Max at 6 AM. They are going on a walk in Safari, and, since I would not be able to navigate that, I stayed back, I had breakfast served in the room and finished yesterday’s blog. hundreds of birds flying and singing near our private deck.
Maxi and Carol had a good walking safari. Max then got an African drumming lessons from a staff member yet at our lodge The staff member said that Max was “a master” and said he would give him another lesson tomorrow morning and then Max could perform at dinner. Obviously, Max was pleased.
We met up for lunch talking with guests from Barcelona and from other places in the US. Rested back at the room, then went out for boat ride. Pime sighting was a huge crocodile.
The scenery along the river on the boat ride was beautiful.
After the boat ride we relaxed, and Max played and lost to one of the staff members in a game of chess.
The three of and our guide were served a private, candlelight dinner out by the pool. Then back to the room to sleep.