The Smoke That Thunders

On December 8, 1840, a 27 year old missionary named David Livingstone departed his native England on an expedition funded by the London Missionary Society to bring Christianity to southern Africa. He wouldn't return home until December 9, 1856. In the sixteen years he was gone, he had established three missions (all destroyed); met with and befriended a number of native tribes and chiefs in a way no other white man had; converted almost nobody to Christianity; and walked across the entire continent from his landing point at Luanda, Angola to the end of his journey at Quilimane, Mozambique. Along the way, on November 16, 1855, he discovered a great waterfall, which he named Victoria Falls after England's reigning monarch at the time of his journey.

Of course, Livingstone's discovery is a matter of perspective. He was certainly not the first person to lay eyes on what he named Victoria Falls; people living around the the Zambezi River had known about and feared the Falls for generations and stone age tools as old as 50,000 years have been discovered near its location so it's not like folks didn't know it was there. Livingstone was merely the first European man to see the falls, which we white people naturally have a tendency to confuse with actual discovery, although I'm sure Livingstone would not think this way. It is very likely that he knew exactly when he was going to find it since the natives he had stayed with on his trek likely told him all about it, using the name they had given the place: Mosi-Oa-Tunya or "the smoke that thunders."

On August 20 of this year, a 47 year old architect (me) departed his adopted United States for Africa on a trip that promised to be a vacation of a lifetime (so far). And Mosi-Oa-Tunya was my first stop after arriving at my final destination. Like pretty much literally my first stop. A quick check in at the hotel for a clean shirt and we were off on the half mile trip (we drove...or more accurately rode) to the famous Falls. It didn't take a 15 year journey, although the 28 hour plus trip might have seemed that way to me at the time (and hence the clean shirt), and for darned sure I was in no way any sort of discoverer of anything other than myself on this trip. But two hours after arriving in Zimbabwe, I was on my way to a place that meant the start of an eye-opening journey for me.

When I think of amazing waterfalls, I think of Niagara Falls, probably because that was the only truly awe inspiring waterfall I'd visited in person prior to last month. And by Niagara, I mean a wide river flowing fast and deep over a massive drop into a large-ish body of water all of which is in plain view. Basically a cliff with a ton of water flowing over every second and minute. Pretty much your classic waterfall.

Victoria Falls is not Niagara. And by that I mean my preconceived notion of what this waterfall would look like was nothing like my ideal large waterfall based on my past experience. Instead of falling off a large drop into an open pool like the water at Niagara does, the water at Victoria Falls drops into a slice in the Earth and then zigzags down a tight fast canyon which snakes its way along the border between Zimbabwe to the south and Zambia to the north. I'll try my best to explain how this happens and how it's not as easy to appreciate as Niagara.

The land under the Zambezi River (which is the river that drops over the falls) is made up of alternating vertical layers of basalt and sandstone which form "stripes" perpendicular to the flow of the river. These "stripes" of course are not visible to the eye below the river but sure enough they are there. I'm not sure why it is this way but somehow, somewhere way back in time some sort of geological action must have formed this sort of phenomenon.

Basalt is hard. Sandstone is not. So over the millions of years that the Zambezi has been flowing over the riverbed, the action of the water is gradually eroding the sandstone layers. The result at the location of the Falls is that the softer sandstone has been washed away to form canyons which the river dives into while the basalt around the sandstone remains in place. This appears to the first time tourist as a gash in the land about 350 feet below the upper riverbed everywhere there used to be the softer stone.

Looking east at the Falls from just west of the Devil's Cataract.

The way Mosi-Oa-Tunya was formed makes it extremely difficult to understand for the first time visitor and I spent the majority of my time walking through the national park on the Zimbabwe side trying to wrap my head around how this part of the waterway was created. The park itself is one of the basalt layers that make up some of the riverbed and millions and millions of years ago, the Zambezi actually flowed over where you are walking. It doesn't now because time eventually caught up with the sandstone layer north of the park and created a new canyon for the Falls to drop into. Make sense? If not look at the picture above the one above. Hopefully that helps.

Victoria Falls is neither the highest nor the widest waterfall in the world yet it claims to be the largest. At its highest point of 360 feet it is more than twice as tall as Niagara which tops out at just less than 170 feet but it is nowhere near the largest drop of over 2,600 feet you can find at Angel Falls in Venezuela. And despite it being just over a mile wide (Niagara is about 25% narrower), it is significantly smaller than Iguazu Falls which separates Brazil from Argentina and is over 1.5 times as wide.

So why is it the largest? Well that's just not clear to me but I suppose it has something to do with the amount of water dropping at any one time which would be a combination of height, width and depth. Despite searching for hours on the internet, I was unable to find a satisfying answer. I can say having been there that Victoria Falls is so wide and the viewing angles are so few that it is really hard to comprehend just how big the Falls is. It would be a lot simpler if the drop was just like it is at Niagara. But the fact that the water dies into a canyon so suddenly makes it almost impossible to see the whole thing from one spot on foot. I was more impressed by Niagara.

The Main Falls. Pretty strong in winter. Imagine the flow in summer.

For those of you reading this post who have made a visit to Niagara Falls and hate it, please understand that I love Niagara. I could stare for hours at the enormous amount of water flowing over the Canadian side of those falls. And the geography there makes that viewing angle which is so awesome just so perfect. You don't get that same view of Victoria Falls and so it doesn't seem as powerful. Don't get me wrong here, Victoria Falls was gorgeous and there are so many different places to see the Falls from and it just keeps going and going as you walk through the park. And I've also never seen so many rainbows in my life. But it didn't impress me like Niagara always has. Maybe I need to go back to the U.S.-Canadian border to make sure I'm remembering things correctly.

I suppose at this point I may need to offer a disclaimer. One of the difficulties for us in visiting southern Africa to see Victoria Falls and also spend time on safari was that those two concepts are fundamentally opposed. To see the animals I grew up loving in zoos and books, you need to go in August to September when the water levels on the Zambezi and Chobe Rivers are low. The lack of water in the bush draws wildlife to the riverbanks  for ideal game viewing. To see Victoria Falls at its most powerful, you really need to visit in April when the rains have been falling for a few months and the Zambezi is at its highest water level.

We visited Zimbabwe after essentially three to four months of solid drought so it shouldn't have been any surprise to me that the Falls were less impressive than they could have been. I can imagine if we went at a different time of the year, I would have come away from the Falls a lot more enthusiastic. You can see where the water flows in wetter times by looking at the face of the drop; anywhere the rock is without plant life is a spot where there is water in the summer months (August is winter in the southern hemisphere). There were a lot of plant-less areas on the basalt face, especially on the Zambian side. I can imagine just how powerful the curtain of water is at full force. You apparently get soaking wet during this time, which I suppose is an advantage to when we visited.

The east side of the Falls, getting close to Zambia and no winter flow.

The town of Victoria Falls is all about "the smoke that thunders." It is clear from spending a day or two there that this is a unique spot on the African continent and the entire economy revolves around tourists coming to look at the Falls, or raft the lower Zambezi or bungee jump off the Victoria Falls Bridge (350 feet down? uh, no thank you). I suppose if the Falls weren't there, the local Zimbabweans would survive off the game that is all around the river and sometimes found wandering around town. I still think it's odd to find baboons and warthogs roaming the streets. I can imagine it would be a little freaky seeing an elephant or hippo on the sidewalk on the way home from a bar. We stuck to the hotel at night.

Our choice (or maybe better said as what was chosen for us) of hotel in Victoria Falls was the Ilala Lodge, which is located about a half a mile from the Falls. The balcony in our room looked toward the Falls and from the moment that you opened the balcony doors in the morning to the time you closed them at night, you can hear the rush of water from Mosi-Oa-Tunya. Coming from the United States it's easy to mistake it for the roar of traffic, only there isn't any traffic to make such a noise. The spray from the drop apparently can rise a half a kilometer or more into the air and I completely believe that. We got up before sunrise the second day we were in town to look for wildlife on the hotel lawn before daybreak. We were disappointed in the animals (just more warthogs…sigh!) but the spray was always visible, shifting like smoke in the air against the emerging light.

Early morning view of "the smoke that thunders."

In addition to the natural wonder of the Falls, there's something else to see in the national park adjacent the waterfall: a statue of David Livingstone. I think it's worth spending a few moments considering Livingstone's presence in Africa. 

Before I started researching this trip, I always thought of Livingstone as an explorer who "discovered" Victoria Falls and crossed Africa for the glory of Britain. I honestly had no idea that he was a missionary. Call me ignorant. Last September I visited the outside of the Royal Geographical Society in London which features a statue of Livingstone prominently in a niche on the outside of their headquarters which reinforced my impression.

In the late nineteenth century, David Livingstone acquired almost mythological status in Great Britain. While he was away, the public was fed stories about his complete isolation for years in a foreign world; accounts of the distances he traveled and things he saw; and too good to be true tales like him surviving a lion attack (true, by the way). For a population that rarely had any opportunity to leave their hometown let alone the small island they lived on, I can imagine how their imaginations were captured by Livingstone.

Statue of David Livingstone at Mosi-Oa-Tunya.

Livingstone was a missionary AND an explorer. His initial visits to the dark continent were funded by the London Missionary Society; later on, when he could no longer secure cash from his first sponsor, the Royal Geographical Society picked up the tab. From reading stories about Livingstone before leaving home for Africa last month, I believe he genuinely believed in the good of Christianity and went to Africa with the intent to convert as many people to the faith as he possibly could. I'm not convinced he ever really wanted to explore and find things for the glory of queen and country, however.

But his real reason for spending so much time away from home was that he firmly believed opening the continent to trading in goods unique to that land would be able to halt the east African slave trade. And this really became his life's work. Indeed his first trek across Africa was to find an overland route for passage of goods which could bring the tribal chiefs who were selling their own people into slavery the riches that they so desperately sought.

Livingstone made three major trips to Africa. The first one may have started out as a missionary trip but there's no doubt the end of that journey and the entirety of the last two were to find any way to halt the movement of humans from the African mainland to the slave market at Zanzibar off the coast of present day Tanzania. Over the course of his life, he tried to find new paths for trade, gave speeches that fell mostly on deaf ears on his return trips home and eventually found a way to try to embarrass the crown into taking action by feeding accounts of the government's inaction to the New York Herald via Henry Morton Stanley, who found Livingstone when everyone thought he was dead with the now famous greeting "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" 

Eventually his efforts paid off, but he wouldn't be around to see it. He died on May 1, 1873 from malaria and dysentery in present day Zambia. In 1874, the British government, mostly through threats of force, brokered a treaty with Zanzibar to close the slave market on the island and end the trade in that portion of the world. Four years later, all human trade had been essentially squashed. Livingstone was an integral part of that effort and I'm sure he would be prouder of the progress he made toward that goal than anything else he accomplished in his lifetime. His statue at Victoria Falls has a series of words around the base, including "Explorer" and "Missionary." The most signifiant is "Liberator."

Victoria Falls was a great way to start our Africa trip but it's sometimes difficult to have it all. Since I returned to the U.S. I've looked for aerial shots of the Falls online and they truly are spectacular. Maybe one day I'll get to go back at a different time of the year and see the full force of the Falls. Or if I ever make it back in winter, I'll have to take a helicopter ride above the Zambezi to get the view of the whole thing that you can't get from the ground. It's only $162 for a 12-13 minute ride. A bargain, right?

Nine Days, 15 Passport Stamps

Giraffe at sunset in the Chobe National Park.

Last month I spent six nights in southern Africa. When I told people this before setting out on this trip, the most frequent question I got was something to the effect of "you are going all that way for just six nights?" Yes, I am. Or did. Six. That's right. Just six. It was not a decision I entered into lightly but I think it worked well for us as a first trip to the real dark continent (Morocco last year doesn't count!). We got out of it what we intended to get and we got a whole series of great stories from and insight into all of the places we visited.

Despite the short duration, we managed to pass through immigration in five different countries, in addition to stopping in a sixth to re-fuel. Six nights, six countries? Well sort of. Sounds like a lot, right? It really wasn't. The point of this post is to discuss our thought process in selecting this vacation; how we did it; how in many ways what we did is exactly what other folks from the rest of the world are doing; and to pass along some of the insight we gained about taking this sort of a trip and visiting the places we visited. Oh…and why it worked out pretty much perfectly.

I have to tell you this holiday had the potential of being a real sort of freak me out vacation. I've spent a lot of time over the past 25 years or so traveling the United States and Europe and I am very comfortable piecing together a week or more in a sort of a la carte fashion: booking all my hotels, flights and transportation separately to customize the trip to my tastes and how much I want to spend exactly. I'm really comfortable doing this, even with last year's trip to Morocco. But deep in the heart of Africa? Not so much. I needed a different solution.

Now being a big brand guy, I turned to an airline, specifically South African Airways Vacations, to solve my problem. With no travel agents who specialized in Africa in my knowledge base, I figured why not go with a recognizable brand name. Plus SAA Vacations seemed to have a ton of different packaged options for us to choose from in all sorts of different lengths and all kinds of different price points, although none was especially cheap. But if cheap vacations are your thing, maybe safari in Africa is not up your alley unless you really know what you are doing.

Four countries meeting at a single point.

So with the "who" out of the way, now it was time to determine the "where" and that took some doing. Our original strategy was to maximize the number of nights on the continent at the cheapest possible price while getting some safari experience in. We looked at a nine or so night package to South Africa that would allow us to see animals in a private reserve or National Park (both fenced as we learned on this trip in that country) in addition to seeing penguins off the south tip of Africa; touring some historical sights; and spend time South African wine tasting for a day. We also checked out a rhino focused vacation in Namibia (as I recall) and some other options.

Ultimately, we decided this trip was not about wine or history or penguins. It was about safari; seeing elephants and lions and giraffes and all sorts of other creatures that filled my imagination as a kid. So instead of two days out of nine on safari, we decided to maximize our wildlife viewing potential while also allowing a day or so at the famous Victoria Falls. We picked the Chobe and the Falls package, which seemed to get us what we wanted the most. While we didn't know it at the time, these packages are totally customizable. We ended up not doing that but SAA Vacations will allow you to do whatever you want.

Six days, four on safari. The vacation we chose would require us to spend time in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Botswana again while passing through South Africa both coming and going and detouring into Zambia if we felt like it (we did). That sounded like a lot of travel but we'd sure get a lot of passport stamps, which is always attractive to me. But the lot of travel? Turned out to be not so much. Despite all the visits to various exotic countries, the three places we stayed at were about an hour and a half drive to get to all three. If I told you I was visiting Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado in six days, you wouldn't think twice. Same story here. Just like those four states come together at the four corners, the part of the world we visited last month joins four countries at one point.

And as we found out from other folks we met over there, moving around after a couple or three nights is not unusual. The experiences can vary drastically from one place to the next, just like it did for us. And the distance we traveled compared to some of the people we met seemed very very small.

Warthogs digging for food on the banks of the Chobe River.

So at this point we have someone to arrange things for us, we know what we want to see, now we just needed the "when". Now if we were just going to see animals in their natural environment, the best time to go would be simple: when there was as little water as possible, which would bring every creature in the bush down to the river to drink every day, including those creatures that wanted to eat other thirsty animals (it's the circle of life, folks…).

But the dry season, which runs from May to September, isn't such a good time to see the Falls in all their majesty. And when I say "dry", I mean DRY. Like no rain at all for those five months. The river rises six feet or more during rainy season (summer) over the dry season (winter). So we tried to strike a balance, visiting sort of halfway through the winter and hoping that the Falls would be busy enough to allow us to get a full picture of what they might be like in summer. It almost worked because I have a good imagination. But that's a story for another post.

We booked this trip last October and waited ten months before we could get what we paid for. So we went to bed the night of August 19 knowing the next day would be one of the roughest travel days of our lives. Here's how the whole thing went down, with some of what I found remarkable and some pictures thrown in for good measure. Plus where we got all our passport stamps from.

Marabou storks standing in a tree.

Days 1 and 2

Out of the United States (zero stamps); into and out of South Africa (one stamp); into Zimbabwe (one stamp)

At 4:15 a.m. on Thursday, August 20, we hopped into a taxi at the Westin Hotel outside my condo building in Arlington, Virginia. One cab ride, 28 hours and three flights later, we arrived in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, having passed through New York's Kennedy airport and Johannesburg, South Africa. It's by far the longest I have traveled in terms of distance and time to get to any one place in my life. And the Victoria Falls airport is the smallest I have ever been to. Or at least it was for the next week or so.

Before stepping off the plane at Vic Falls airport and walking myself into immigration, my impression of the town of Victoria Falls from looking at Google Maps was that it was probably a smaller sort of Key West. I have no idea why I thought this other than I imagined it was a resort sort of town with a series of restaurants and bars arrayed around a few hotels.

I must have been absolutely bonkers. My impression of course couldn't have been more unfounded in reality. First of all, Zimbabwe is absolutely nothing like southern Florida and it likely never will be. Sure there are chickens roaming the streets of Key West and there are warthogs, elephants, baboons and all sorts of other creatures roaming the streets of Vic Falls but the similarities stop just about there. Other than the fact that there are some quite luxurious hotels in Victoria Falls to serve the tourists who flock to see the famous waterfall, the town is developing, impoverished in many places and surrounded by the African bush, which in mid-August makes it resemble more of a desert than anything thriving.

Baboons running across the lawn at the Victoria Falls Hotel.

Despite what might seem like complaining in the previous paragraph, Victoria Falls was the perfect place to start our trip. It got us a good look at the famous Falls and allowed us a preview of some of the animals we would see later in the week. In a sense it got us really excited about wildlife viewing by almost bumping into warthogs, baboons and hornbills in the streets and trees around our hotel. If we had seen this little wildlife at the end of our trip, we might have just yawned. The preview was perfect.

We tend to be super prepared before we visit other countries in the world. So we were very ready to have people following us around asking us to buy whatever they had in their hands to sell, whether it be carved animals, wooden dishes or a few trillion Zimbabwean dollars (one American dollar is now worth 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars; that's a 35 with fifteen zeroes after it and yes, I did have to google that). But what we weren't prepared for was how consumer goods starved the people in Zimbabwe are. It's like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, or so I imagine.

When we declined most offers to exchange our American dollars (now the official currency of Zimbabwe) for whatever the people following us really wanted us to have, the requests changed from money to t-shirts, shorts, shoes, socks or even shampoo. I wish we had known all this for a couple of reasons. First, we could have taken some things over that we no longer needed and just given it away. We managed to scrounge all the shampoo from the hotel (sorry, Ilala Lodge), a couple of old t-shirts and socks we had with us along with some trail mix we had brought to snack on and hand it over to someone waiting outside our hotel.

Secondly, our goods are actual currency over there. We traded in a bandana for a couple of pieces of jewelry and two shirts for a wooden giraffe. The quality of shirts we can get in the United States is just far superior to what you can get in sub-Saharan Africa, even if most of our stuff is made in sweatshops in southeast Asia. We bought some souvenirs from one shopkeeper over there who was wearing the absolute worst NBA jersey knockoff I have ever seen (Toronto Raptors, in case you were wondering). The NBA logo wasn't even close to resembling the actual NBA logo. I could have hooked that guy up with a Wizards jersey from my closet; he'd instantly look more credible and more stylish at the same time. Missed opportunity. I wish Lonely Planet had that in their Southern Africa guidebook.

Crocodiles. The Nile crocodile is one of the most gorgeous creatures we saw in Africa.

Day 3

Out of Zimbabwe (one stamp); into and out of Zambia (two stamps); into Zimbabwe (one stamp)

Considering how juiced we were about getting as many passport stamps as possible, we couldn't be a river gorge away from Zambia and not visit. We had prepared for this at the Victoria Falls airport by purchasing a double entry visa (allowing you to enter Zimbabwe, leave and re-enter) for $50 rather than the single entry visa for $10 less.

Zambia was almost a total waste of time. Almost. And it was all our fault. But more on that later. I feel a Zambian post coming on. At least we got four more passport stamps out of it.

For those of you looking to get a good look at Victoria Falls from the Zambian side of the border in mid to late August, don't bother. It won't work. There's barely any water. Stick to the Zimbabwean side. Walk over the bridge maybe but be prepared to be pursued the whole distance.

My first baobab tree!!!!

Days 4 and 5

Out of Zimbabwe (one stamp); into and out of Botswana (two stamps); into Namibia (two stamps)

I almost feel guilty coloring in Namibia on my countries visited map on the "The Maps" page of this blog. I spent maybe 20 minutes on the actual soil of that country: about ten minutes to get into the country through immigration and about ten more minutes to get out. The rest of the time we were in country was on a houseboat. However, all the time we were on the boat we were technically in the country of Namibia. So there! Plus…five passport stamps in one day. How cool is that?

Staying on the Ichobezi Safariboats was amazing. You book one of four cabins on the main boat (we got the front cabin and only one with a private-ish balcony) and are then provided with your own personal tender boat plus pilot for game viewing excursions. The kind of personal attention we received on board was incredible. Everything we needed, including getting all too close to some very dangerous looking pods of hippos under the watch of our pilot, David, was provided for us. Of all the places I stayed in Africa, I liked the houseboat the best, even if you did have to shower in filtered (but still green-brown) Chobe River water.

The Ichobezi Safariboat: the main houseboat...

…and the tender boat. We stuck to the one on the left.

Two other stories are worth telling about our time in Namibia. We were picked up at the Botswana border by David and his tender boat and immediately taken to immigration on Impalila Island in Namibia. David needed to stay with the boat and our luggage so he gave us directions to the immigration office: walk up the beach and turn left at the baobab tree. Seriously??? A baobab tree??? How awesome is that. I've wanted to see one of these upside down trees since I first read Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and to a much much much lesser extent first purchased "Pink Floyd"'s Delicate Sound of Thunder album which features a picture of baobabs on the rear cover.

Seeing one of these trees with their super thick trunks topped with their teeny tiny root like branches was a signature African moment for me. There are nine species of baobabs in the world and they only grow naturally in Africa and Australia, although I didn't realize the Australian connection until I got back from my holiday. Seeing a baobab was so totally off my radar that finding one as a marker to turn left to immigration was a real treat. Now I feel a little closer to Le Petit Prince. Oh and "Pink Floyd" is in quotes because Floyd without Roger Waters isn't really Pink Floyd.

The second story worth noting about our trip into Namibia is how well oiled the tourism machine in Africa is and, quite frankly, why I would still be reluctant to engage in travel arrangements myself. When we got ready to depart our hotel in Victoria Falls, the only thing we knew was that we had to be at the front desk at 11:15 a.m., which of course being most always on time, we were. We boarded the minivan that showed up in front of our lodge and then went to pick up some other folks at some other hotels. From there we drove (or rode, I guess) about an hour or so to the Zimbabwe border where we were taken through immigration by our driver and then walked to the fence separating that country from Botswana.

Not everyone from our minivan was headed to the same place so naturally there were a number of different Botswanans waiting for our party on the other side of the chain link fence that divided the two countries. Some of us were handed off to one driver; others to a second but in all cases our names were on the manifest of sorts that these guys had in their hands and our Zimbabwe driver wouldn't leave until everyone was handed off correctly. So we hopped in another minivan and kept going through our new country. We let a group off at a lodge in country and then headed to immigration out of Botswana at Kasane, which ended up being little more than a small building near a beach. Once again there was someone waiting for us and we were handed off securely.

Booking a package tour had really allowed me to not think about the logistics of traveling out of one country, through a second and into a third in the span of less than an hour. But if I had to think about it and worry, I didn't have to. As it turned out, we knew far less than the people that were responsible for getting us safely from point A to point B. And I guess that's the whole point of it, right? It all worked so beautifully that I didn't really have to think about it at all.

Cape buffalo. Male in the foreground, the remainder of the breeding herd behind.

Days 6 and 7

Out of Namibia (one stamp); into Botswana (one stamp)

Namibia was a perfect second stop on our six day trip. After the wildlife preview we got in Victoria Falls, there was seemingly every variety of animal everywhere on the banks of the Chobe National Park and we drank it all in greedily either from the deck of our houseboat or from the water level view of our tender boat while avoiding hippos on the Chobe River. We couldn't have imagined it getting any better.

But it did. The only thing on this trip that topped watching game from the water was watching everything we already saw and much much more from on land. If we had started with a land stop, we would have been disappointed with the rest of the trip, especially Victoria Falls. The sequence provided to us by South African Airways just built the excitement every day. We made a list of new creatures we had seen every day. We added at least three new species to our list every day except the last half day. The result in reverse would have been a lot of stuff up front and nothing new on the back end.

Tent number 14 at the Elephant Valley Lodge. Home sweet home for two days.

I already mentioned my favorite place to stay on this trip was the Ichobezi Safariboats; I just don't think you can beat the attention and care we received while staying there. There's not a whole lot more personal you can get than a place with four cabins and an equal number or more of people there looking after you. It even overcomes a river water shower. But a close second was the Elephant Valley Lodge, our base for our last two nights on the continent.

Elephant Valley Lodge sits right on the Botswana - Zimbabwe border and is made up of 20 tents where us tourists sleep and a central lodge facility that houses reception and is there to feed us three meals a day. I know this sounds sad but this is the first time I have ever slept in a tent that I can remember. And by tent, I don't really mean tent like something temporary set up for the night. I really mean a 12 foot high or so fabric and wood structure that looks like a tent but actually has a full plumbed bathroom complete with shower.

The best part of the whole experience was that most of the property was laid out to focus on a watering hole just outside the fence designed to keep elephants out of our camp. The dining area and tents 13 through 20 face the watering hole which is frequented by all manner of wild animals. We watched a herd or two of elephants slurping water, jockeying for dominant positions and sometimes getting a little upset with one another every night at dinner. We also got up and looked out the front door of our tent every opportunity we got, whether that was first thing in the morning to see the sunrise, in the middle of the day to watch a single elephant about 30 feet from our porch or in the middle of the night on a bathroom run. Hey, you never know when you are going to see a giraffe or hyena or something else out there.

Impala by the water.

We thought we knew what to expect before we got to Elephant Valley Lodge. But our expectations were shaken up a bit by talking with another couple earlier in the week who stayed in a non-fenced camp where all the tents were on stilts and you required an escort to move anywhere within the lodge so you wouldn't get stomped or attacked by something really dangerous. We hadn't counted on this sort of experience. And it threw me a bit.

So we were relieved when we arrived at the Lodge to be told that the camp was surrounded by an electric fence to ensure the elephants that were all around us didn't wander among our tents and possibly trample us in the middle of the night. But the statement about the fence keeping the elephants out was quite a precise one. The fence did keep elephants out but there was a section of fence where the bottom five feet or so was just wide open and we watched a bushbuck (a deer type thing) walk out of the camp shortly after we got there.

Now if a bushbuck can walk in and out of the camp, can't a hyena? Or a leopard? Or a whole pride of lions? The answer as it turned out was yes, but they won't. But just in case, there's a flashlight in the room and a whistle if there's ever any trouble. OK, so nothing happened but if there's a whistle in case of trouble, doesn't that mean trouble might exist? A bit unnerving at first but the folks in the Lodge made sure we were safe. Or maybe nothing tried to get in while we were there.

As great as the Lodge was, we didn't spend a whole lot of time there. Most of our time was spent being away looking at animals on land or in the water. That's the point after all, right? And that's a story for another time.

Lions playing in the bush. It's amazing how well they blend in with the grass.

Days 8 and 9

Out of Botswana (one stamp); into and out of South Africa (one stamp); into the United States (zero stamps)

Time to go home and get our last passport stamps.

I like to think I don't complain about much in life (it's the English person in me I guess; stiff upper lip and all that). But the flight from Johannesburg back to Dulles Airport is a killer. We started day eight with an early morning game drive followed by breakfast and then a ride to the Kasane airport down a dirt road that actually took us around the airfield. I now think Kasane is the smallest airport I've ever been to. They seem to have all of one gate, which is really just a door leading to the tarmac.

From Kasane, we flew back to Johannesburg where we caught a 6:30 flight to Dulles via Senegal. An 18 hour scheduled flight with one stop, from 6:30 p.m. South Africa time to 6:25 a.m. Washington (or Virginia) time. What kills is the stop in Senegal for refueling and to pick up and drop off some passengers. The stop is about 2 a.m. but they can't land a dark plane full of sleeping people. Instead, you all have to wake up, the lights have to be on in the cabin and all window shutters have to be up. So it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I'm dead tired in a fully lit airplane going through cleaning, security checks and boarding. Brutal. I'm not sure I've ever felt more tired in my life. Never want to do that again, even if it is the only way to get back from South Africa to home on a single plane.

On the other hand, arriving at Dulles at 6 a.m. and passing through immigration was one of the most surprisingly pleasant experiences of my life. I never thought I'd write "immigration" and "pleasant" in the same sentence but there was literally no line. Unfortunately, there were also no passport stamps for coming back home. Stupid fast pass immigration...

So that's it. There are many ways to get to southern Africa. We chose South African Airways Vacations and it worked out just fantastic for us. I'm sure there are other ways which are just as good. If you go, I think the package we picked was well worth the price. We learned so much in the short time we were over there. This trip really changed my perspective on a number of things about our world. I hope the thought process we went through helps and use it or discard it as you see fit. But take something American to trade if you ever go to Victoria Falls. It will benefit everyone. And if you see a guy named Eric with a red bandana, say hi for me.

Elephant at Elephant Valley Lodge. Taken from the front porch of Tent number 14.

Beware The Hippos!

One week ago today, I traveled out of Zimbabwe, through Botswana for about 30 minutes and into Namibia, where I would be spending the next two nights on one of the Ichobezi Safariboats on the Chobe River in southern Africa. After a few hours cruising upriver on the big houseboat and a couple of hours in a three-person tender boat (each cabin on the boat got exclusive use of a smaller or tender boat for wildlife viewing) getting a closer look at some of the animals I had come to the dark continent to see, it was time to relax a bit before dinner. And right at that time, I could think of no better place to sit, watch and listen than on the Chobe, which separates Namibia to the north from Botswana to the south.

Our boat and hotel in one was anchored to a small sand and grass island in the middle of the river, technically on Namibian soil, and we were feeling very much alone in the middle of nowhere, probably because that's exactly what we were. The four crew members who were taking care of us were conspicuously out of sight preparing dinner for us and the other three cabins on the boat were empty for the first night of our stay. It was just what I could have wished for on this vacation. Utter isolation. It wouldn't feel quite like this any other night of our trip.

At about 7:15 p.m., just 45 minutes or so after sunset, there was no trace whatsoever of sunlight which added to the feeling of remoteness. It was an amazing scene. There were more stars visible that night than I can recall seeing in a long time, highlighted by the Southern Cross, which is a sight I had never witnessed in my life. Despite the darkness, the brightly lit half moon allowed us to see shapes and masses in the night. Or at least I think it did. The darkness played tricks on our eyes but we believe we could make out dark things moving and bobbing in the river. And the dark things we think we saw were very large.

If our eyes weren't much good to us that night, our ears took in way more. Over an inconsistent background noise of a few unknown bird calls every now and then, there were other sounds in the night that had our imaginations running wild. Most frequent among these noises were minor to fairly serious splashes and the sound of breathing out so heavy that it kicked up water from the surface of the river, not unlike a whale surfacing and exhaling before diving again. But the more sinister sounds were what had our minds racing: low growls reminiscent of a bear and loud grunts that can only be described as a tenor pig (heavy on the bass) with an ape's intonation (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh). The noises were coming from hippos in the water, which happened to be the same very large dark things we think we could make out in the night.

Of all the animals I hoped I would see in the wild in Africa, I was most looking forward to getting a closer look at some hippos. I'm fascinated by the large African mammals in general but the hippopotamus, which is so ungainly looking on land and so deceptively fast in the water, is my favorite. After dinner that first night on the boat, we retreated again to the rear deck of the houseboat to continue staring almost uselessly into the dark while listening to these beasts, hoping they might come ashore so we could see them better in the light emanating from our anchored ship. At about 9 p.m. we believe one did get out of the water and onto our island followed by a second but it appeared to us that the first chased the second right back into the river and things got quieter from there on. We went to bed, hoping that in the morning we'd get up and see four or five hippos grazing before us in the early morning light. We were disappointed. But not for long.

Hippo heads on the Zambezi River.

I came to Africa knowing that the most dangerous animal on the continent for humans is the hippo. These things kill more people each year than any other creature. More than lions, leopards, cheetahs and some of the other predators that you find on the continent by far. Some of this is based on human ignorance. Big cats are quick; have big teeth and claws; and are scary; hippos look happy, fat and slow; eat grass; and can be rationalized as decidedly unscary. But the hippopotamus in the water is a very dangerous animal and it's here where they do their damage. They are very territorial and will chase and attack boats, sometimes biting with their tusk like canines and sometimes capsizing the vessels. And if you don't expect that, I imagine it would be very easy to get killed by one of these things.

With that knowledge, the idea of cruising about a river in a tiny tiny boat with some hippos at large was a bit unnerving. My imaginings had us and a pilot swerving about on a very narrow waterway avoiding the piles and piles of hippos that were popping up all around our extremely fragile vessel. My only solace was that people do this all the time and you don't hear a lot of stories about hippos killing tourists. Maybe our guides would know what they were doing. The river, as it turned out, was a lot bigger than I expected. That helped a lot.

Maybe I scared myself to death before even getting on the water, but my first couple of encounters with hippos in the wild were very different than my preconceived notion that these things were menaces. On our last night in Zimbabwe, we had seen our first pods of hippos from the deck of a 35 foot long, 12 section hull boat on the Zambezi River. While we were told at the beginning of our cruise that the hull design would allow us to survive a hippo attack without sinking, it almost seemed like that warning was a joke. All the hippos we saw that evening stayed far from the boat and didn't show the slightest interest in having anything to do with us.

Our second hippo encounter was similarly uneventful. We had spotted a lone animal grazing on the north bank of the Chobe from our houseboat while motoring upriver and made a beeline for the thing when we launched on our first tender boat ride. Instead of seeming threatening, the hippo simply slid gently into the water, submerged and was gone before we could get close enough for a good picture. No aggression. No attack. No nothing. Maybe these things weren't that frightening and fierce after all.

Hippos near the shore of the Chobe River; the big one looking at you is NOT a good sign.

But by the end of that first tender boat ride the night we were alone on deck, I could very firmly believe that I would never want to get super close to an adult male hippo on the water in a very small boat. Because I had. And it didn't feel good.

First, they made our pilot visibly nervous. Don't get me wrong here, I believe we were never in real danger with David driving our boat, but he didn't like hippos at all. Our boat rides with David allowed us to get super close to elephants, Cape buffalo, crocodiles and all sorts of other creatures and to maximize the experience with these animals we cut the engine when near the shore I guess to allow us to hear the creatures and make them feel more secure. We were checking out a crocodile from about three feet away that first day when we heard a grunt from the water behind us. Before I could turn around and ask David "was that a hippo?" he had already started the engine and was backing up to move on. We never cut the engine around hippos. Never.

Second, we got charged by one as we were heading back to the big boat that night which made the sounds we would hear later so much more threatening. Most of the hippo groups we encountered behaved exactly the same way. During the day, they generally stick close to the shore in a family group: one adult male, a couple of females and maybe a younger calf or two. The male keeps the territory safe and the females keep the babies safe. So if you are cruising by in a boat, you get watched by a very concerned male hippo.

While he's watching you, he may grunt, snort and show you how big he is by raising his body and head out of the water. If that's not enough to scare you away, (and let's face it, we were there to see these things, not run from them) they will charge. And when they charge, they dive so you can't see them for a couple of seconds and they are fast. Like really fast. If you ever want to experience the full force of nature, sit in a small boat with a 3,000 pound plus male hippo rushing at you. I guarantee you won't want to stick around and see what happens. These things are powerful and scary and we fled. Later that week, I'd sit in an open vehicle about ten feet from a lion in the wild and wouldn't be as concerned as seeing a hippo chasing after our boat. Not even close. And that's still super weird to me.

Despite that harrowing experience, we were out the next morning in the small boat again and again we couldn't keep our distance from these things. So that meant more chasing, one similar to the night before where a single male shooed us away with a threat of violence and another where the group of five hippos spread out across the river and kept coming even as we tried to run and stop to look at other animals. I don't think it's paranoia when I suggest that those hippos were determined to chase us until we got far enough away to be tolerable to them. Eventually we did and we got a look at some other things.

A crash of hippos abandoning the shore for the safer waters.

As if all that hippos charging wasn't enough to make me never want to get in a small boat around these things ever again, our last tender boat ride sealed the deal for me in what I now refer to as the first of three "scare the tourists" moments that we had in Africa. Although in reality all of these occurrences were absolutely real and could have been really really scary.

It was early morning after our last night on the houseboat and we were determined to get another small boat ride in to get one last look at things from the river. Our focus that morning was on the shore, looking for leopards (that we never saw) and other creatures that were out just after sunrise. Things were especially slow that morning so not finding anything upriver we decided to pass by the houseboat and check out what was out early in the morning downriver. We had just passed the boat when we stopped dead in the water.

After five trips with David, we generally understood this type of abrupt stop to mean there was something close by worth looking at. But this stop was in the middle of the river where there was never anything interesting to see. We looked back and watched as David struggled to re-start the engine, fiddling with the levers (yes, that's a technical term) and tapping the gas can in a way that it looked like he was trying to coax fuel to magically appear and take us onward. And then we heard the hippo grunt. And while it was not visible to us, it sounded awfully close.

The next 15 seconds or however long it was seemed like a pretty long time as we watched David trying to get our engine re-started and we imagined a hippo in full on rush destroying our boat and then coming after us. And while that seems farfetched, it's really not. If we had been in its protected territory and it would have been close enough, there would have been a distinct possibility of that happening.

Eventually (and I'm sure it was not more than 15 seconds), the engine kicked in and we got moving again. But rather than heading upriver back to the boat and a hot breakfast, we moved downriver. And saw a hippo head in the middle of the river. So we moved to go around it. And found another one ahead of the boat's new path. And then another when we re-directed again. There were five or so of these creatures arrayed across the river watching us and cutting off any angle we took. So we decided caution was the better part of valor and slalomed between a couple of the heads and fled back home. This was way too close and I'm sure our speed saved us. But God forbid if that engine stopped. I never want to do that again really. Seriously.

I went to Africa to see the animals I looked at in zoos as a kid in their natural environments and learn and appreciate everything I could about them. And I did. I learned more about elephants, marabou storks, lions, hippos and a number of other species by watching and especially listening to them in unfenced and wide open nature in a few hours in Africa than I ever did in my whole life. I guess hippos are still my favorites, but I know for sure if I'm never in a small boat with these things in the water nearby, I'll be a happy man. It was totally scary. And totally worth it. I'll never forget the Chobe hippos. But I'll beware of them forever.

Hippo heads in the African sunset.

What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up

For the last 22 and a half years of my life, I've been employed full time as an architect at one of two architecture firms in upstate New York and the Washington, D.C. area. Mostly, I've loved almost every minute, day, week, month and year of it. Sure there have been some frustrating times. Some days I've wanted to cry and there have been some people who I have really wanted to strangle on the worst days; it's work after all. But it is a real privilege to be able to see something that you have designed on a sheet of paper or drawn as a two or three dimensional image in a computer program to be built piece by piece until you can eventually stand in what was once just something you imagined in your head.

I think I got really lucky when I picked this profession in a couple of ways. First, I've received a wonderful, well-rounded education which didn't end when I graduated from Syracuse University in 1993; it went on and on and even drove my travel all over this country and Europe for 15 years and more after I finished school. It's given me an identity and a purpose to a good portion of my life. I love that. I think this profession has made me a better person.

But secondly and more importantly for the purposes of this blog post, I got to do for real the last job I imagined having as a kid. I don't think there are many people who can necessarily say that. I decided I wanted to become an architect in study hall, of all places. And it stuck. I can still remember telling my friend Rich Borbely, who sat with me at our two person study hall table in the cafeteria of Gideon Welles Junior High School, that I had decided that's what I was going to do with my life. And I did. I'm sure most people don't end up doing the job they imagine themselves having in middle school. I got really lucky.

But just like most kids before I ended up what has gotten me a paycheck for most of my adult life, once upon a time I wanted to do something much different that has nothing to do with what I do now. I don't think this is unusual. I'm convinced depending on how you asked her that right now my niece would say she wanted to be a princess and would believe it's an achievable goal. Similarly, I'm sure kids (and by kids, I mean boys) that I grew up with in England wanted to be an astronaut or an actor or a super hero (one kid I knew claimed his middle names were "Steve" and "Austin" and he was actually related to the actual six million dollar man) or a policeman or a firefighter.

I didn't want any of those jobs. No astronaut, no actor, no super hero, no policeman, no firefighter, no soccer (or football in those days) player, no teacher, no writer, no aeronautical engineer (like my dad). None of it. What I really wanted to be when I was a kid was a zookeeper.

Stopped laughing yet? Good. I'm totally serious. From the time I can remember conceiving of having a job until I decided I wanted to be an architect, the only job I wanted was zookeeper. As a result, much of my childhood in England was spent visiting zoos with my parents and sister. Based on my me-as-a-kid's recollection, it seemed like we visited Twycross Zoo about 10 or 12 times a year, although I'm sure my memory's probably off here. The picture of the gibbon at the top of this post is from one of my many visits to that zoo; the gibbons were my favorites because if I made some ape noises, they would join in with me and eventually drown out my kid monkey noises. I think I did this every time I went but again I'm sure my memory's off here. If the howler monkeys nearby got in on one of those deals...look out.

Twycross was less than a ten mile drive from the town where we lived in Leicestershire but my parents were good enough to take me not just there but further afield also. My parents seemed to be all in on this life ambition, for which (among other things) I love them very much. I remember a couple of visits to Whipsnade Zoo north of London and at least one visit to the London Zoo in Regent's Park. I know the picture of the giraffes and zebras above (with the very English "subject, location and comments" stamp on the back) is from the London Zoo because the Decimus Burton designed Giraffe House is still there today. I'm glad I used to take pictures with my camera. Most of them have faded significantly over the years but they bring back some good memories.

Eventually I gave up on my dream to become a zookeeper, mostly because I figured out I really didn't like to get that close to most animals, and chose a more practical profession. The luster of zoos also wore off slowly over time. When we moved to the United States, we found no zoos close to our home in central Connecticut. By the time I figured out where the zoos were in this country and started making it a point to go more often, the pens that these animals that should be free and wild were confined to were mostly just depressing. I get the role that zoos play and have played in conservation efforts. I just don't want to go to most of them nowadays.

Despite my waning interest in the animal kingdom, I am still fascinated today by the largest mammals and the largest carnivores on Earth: elephants, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, bison, lions, leopards, tigers, bears and probably a few more I can't think of right now. Most of these creatures of course are native to Africa and still roam free in parts of that continent that has been mostly untouched by man. And so in honor of my former self and to quench a desire that I've had for most of my life, I've decided to take a trip later this month down to southern Africa to see these animals that I once loved so much for myself. I hope that it is as inspiring to me as the zoos I used to visit as a kid were. And I sincerely hope I get some better pictures that can supplement, but not replace, these ones shown here that I took when I dreamed of spending every day at a zoo. I'm sure I'll have some stories to tell.