When I tell people that I am going to Africa the response is often either excitement or the question, “why?” The most memorable instance of this occurring was when I was in the chemists shop (pharmacy) on campus, picking up my prescription stomach illness packet that my doctor had prescribed just in case. When I presented my prescriptions, the pharmacist had to explain, loudly the purpose of each drug. “This one is for bloody diarrhea!” and so forth. That would have been fine except a woman I know was also in the store. When the pharmacist went to get my medicine, the woman slid over and asked softly, “are you ok?” That is when I explained that I was going to Africa and when she asked in surprise, “why?”. The response that I gave to her and to everyone else who asked the same was, “why not?”
I have been to the other continents other than Antarctica (it’s on the list) and so it was definitely time to turn my attention to Africa. The idea for this trip began several months ago when my friend, Brian emailed me his travel itinerary for 2009. Brian and I were volunteer teachers in China as part of the WorldTeach program in 2000. Of our group, Brian was probably the most keen to have a true China experience. He really tried to learn the language and he rarely turned down an invitation to go bowling or to go out singing karaoke. After not seeing each other for years, Brian and I met up again by chance when I returned to Yantai in October, 2008 after attending a conference in Shanghai. Brian and I did not plan it, but he was in Yantai at the same time as I was and it was really fun wandering around the city with him and reminiscing about our experiences and how the city used to look. Brian has the enviable position of having a unique deal with his employer. Brian only works a few months a year to earn enough money to travel and the rest of the year, he travels. When I saw that his travel plan for 2009 included southern Africa, I wrote that I would be eager to join him. As the plans grew to include more people, the group divided into two groups of two for ease of travel. I am now travelling with Sue, my constant travel companion and we arrive about a week earlier than Brian and his companion.
The travel plan includes Botswana and Namibia. These two countries are two of the most stable countries in Africa and I have long wanted to visit Namibia. All of us going on this trip booked our flights without too much research beyond which cities we would fly into and out of as we travelled. After all, we have travelled in developing countries before and we were counting on the excitement and affordability that developing countries offer. However, once we began our serious planning, we all were in for a tremendous sticker shock.
Botswana, it turns out is the playground of the rich who want to go on safari. At the start of the travel planning, we had each budgeted various amounts per day, but typically under US $100 per day. We researched various options for seeing animals by visiting the lodges in the parks and we sent off requests to various companies and agents for quotes. The responses we received were shocking. Many of the lodges charged in excess of US $1000 per person per night. The least expensive lodges were around US $500 per night. The lodges charge so much in part because they offer luxury accommodation in the middle of the bush. Alternatively, there are campsites available in some of the parks, but these must be reserved, sometimes months in advance and also require the use of a 4x4 vehicle which were also expensive. In fact, according to the guide books, organizing your own safari can be as expensive as one of the lower cost guided safaris and without the safety net of having a guide. We consulted the Lonely Planet Botswana and Namibia, the book that budget travelers count on to find low cost accommodation and travel options. However, the guide lists the expensive lodges and offers little in the way of budget options. We were on our own to try to wade through all of the options to find the diamond in the rough that we could afford.
We wound up spending a lot of time planning. And by a lot, I mean hours every day for weeks on end spent contacting agents and reviewing impossible quotes before we ran out of options. What was really frustrating was that we often contacted a safari operator and responded favorably to a quote only to have them never return our emails asking how we could pay. Never in the history of my travel have I spent so much time planning. And even as I sit here, writing while on the plane to Sydney, we still don’t have all of the pieces in place. We supposedly have bookings in Namibia, but we don’t have confirmation of this or vouchers to present. Nor do we have transport in Namibia quite yet.
Our flights into Africa will take us to Gaborone, Botswana via Johannesburg. We realized early on that if we wanted to go on safari, we would need to fly on from Gaborone to Kasane or Maun and that required making bookings on Air Botswana. Kasane but especially Maun are launching off points for many of the safaris. We had a lot of trouble booking our flights, but I discovered a website in the UK which allowed online bookings and Brian discovered a 800 number to make bookings from the US. Taking busses would have been far cheaper, but at the expense of time and some of the bus routes listed in the Lonely Planet were found not to exist.
There are a number of options for seeing the critters and there are a large number of places to see them. According to the LP, Botswana has long pursued a far-sighted policy of sustainable tourism that is aimed at preserving the country’s natural environment. In total, about 17% of Botswana is designated as a national park or reserve while another 20% is defined as wildlife management areas which together is an astoundingly large percentage of land for a country where cattle is herded and to have a large herd of tens of thousands of cattle is the dream. According to the US Department of State, prior to independence in 1966, cattle raising dominated Botswana's social and economic life. More recently, even the former president of Botswana is said to have commented during a meeting in a lodge that overlooked the wildlife below that it was all very nice, but it would be better if they were cows, much to the dismay of those who support the parks.
In addition to the parks there are also private concessions. These privately owned areas offer accommodation and activities for visitors. The private concessions can be more expensive than the national parks, but with the advantage that there are not restrictions about park hours which then opens the possibility for night safaris.
So there are lots of places to visit, but there really aren’t a lot of budget ways of seeing the critters. You could hire a 4x4 but this requires decking it out with extra fuel cans, food, tires and equipment you will need to get it out of mud or sand. However, the self-safari does not include a guide to help you find the critters and can be more expensive than the cheaper safari options which include a guide. It has been stressed to me in the past by members of the Christchurch Photographic Society that a really good guide is an essential part of taking really good photographs of animals. The main goal of our time in Botswana is to see and to photograph critters, so the guide was really important to us.
The least expensive guided options were mobile safaris in a large group in large trucks or a caravan of SUVs. Depending on the number of people in the group, there could be 3 people per row in the car meaning that not everyone gets a window. There could also be a lot of people per each guide. Some of these safaris included support staff and others required that the customers set up their own tents and cook their own meals. Some included drinks and others required the customers to bring their own drinking water.
Another option was to stay in lodges. Typically, the lodge customers are flown in small aircraft to the lodges where they are pampered. Alcohol may or may not be included in the cost of the lodge. In the morning, the guests are taken on a safari drive and then are back at lunch. In the late afternoon another game drive occurs and the guests are back by dinner. We were told that the schedule of the morning drive and in by lunch and then out again at 4PM is very common and most guides at the lodges and the mobile safaris have agreed to this code. The cost of the lodges begins around US $600 per person per night during the high season. Not a cheap option.
Since the cost of the safaris is so expensive, there are also day trips and short safaris on offer. These might include a mokoro trip in the Okavango Delta and spending a night in a camp. A mokoro is a shallow, dugout canoe traditionally hewn from an ebony or a sausage-tree log. There are also lodges which offer a night out in the salt pans at the cost of several hundreds of dollars per person per night. But these would just be expensive teasers rather than a true safari experience.
During our travels we found out that there is also another way to see the critters which involves an illegal safari of which we saw several. In order to offer safaris, a company must pay a lot of money to the government of Botswana for licensing fees and the like. Guides must also pay P1500 to keep their licenses current. To enter a park, the safari company must pay the park fees for the guests. In the past, the support staff including the guide paid a lower fee for the park, but this is now changing. A fee for the campsite must also be paid and people from the parks will go around during the day to check to make certain that campers had paid the fee.
Illegal safaris are operated by an individual, not a company and so therefore the safari company fees which must be paid to the government are avoided. The guide of the illegal safari will typically lead a caravan of cars into the park on the basis that they are individuals travelling together, not a safari. This also therefore avoids the licensing fees for the guides. The customers, however aren’t really reaping the benefits since they apparently still pay a lot of money for the safari. According to one guide we met, he found people illegally camping on the border between two parks. Apparently, there is a web site which lists the GPS coordinates of several such sites which it advertises as free places to park. The guide we spoke to confronted the illegal campers and told them that he was reporting them. When he returned, the illegal campers had disappeared to a new site, probably one deeper in the bush.
After so many hours of searching and so many emails, Sue and I finally found a local safari company in Maun called Ulinda which was mentioned in the Lonely Planet. Ulinda is run by a woman named Jane who made a name for herself both as a hunter and as a photographer. We contacted one of her former customers who is a doctor in California and he raved about his time with Jane. He told us that he has been to Botswana three times and has done the lodge option. He told us that if you want pampering in the woods, that is a good option, but if you want to see wildlife, what Jane is offering is a superior option.
Jane disappeared a few times during our negotiations, but we finally were able to make a booking. She will be picking us up at the airport in Maun at 8AM and then taking us out into the bush for six nights / seven days. We really hope that she will be there since as part of the booking, we had to wire the full cost of the safari to her in Botswana. At the time of writing, we are her only customers for those six days and so we basically have a private guide which is exciting. She will drive us to various locations and at night her crew sets up our tent and prepares our food. Since we will be out in the wild, there is danger from the wildlife such as lions, but it seems that as long as we are in our tent after dark, we will be fine.
From Maun we fly on Air Botswana to Kasane where we have booked in at a relatively inexpensive lodge which offers drives and boat trips along the Chobe Riverfront. The LP describes the Chobe Riverfront as a place that rarely disappoints and where we are almost guaranteed an up-close encounter with some of the largest elephant herds on the continent.
From Kasane, we will travel overland across the border with Zimbabwe to stay in Victoria Falls to see the world famous falls which have been called one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The choice to go to Zimbabwe made me a bit uneasy since I don’t want to support the Mugabe government. Plus the New Zealand government has a travel advisory against going to Zimbabwe and advises against all tourist and other non-essential travel due to a high risk to travelers’ security. The high risk advisory was stressed to me when I purchased my travel insurance since they would not cover travel to Zimbabwe. However, I explained that we would only be in Victoria Falls for less than two days which changed everything and I was told by the insurance agent to have a good time and that I would be fully covered. Friends from my church in Boston were recently in Zimbabwe and they went to Victoria Falls as well. They told me that they thought it was reasonably safe, but was devoid of tourists. They were the only ones staying at their hotel.
From Victoria Falls, we will fly to Johannesburg and then to Windhoek, Namibia. Compared to Botswana, Namibia has been really easy to plan. Older friends from Christchurch have told me that they had no problem driving around in a 2 WD car since the roads are very good so we could be mobile rather than to depend on a tour operator. The hard part for Sue and I was deciding where to go since we only have a few days in a large country. Fortunately, we had the help of an agent at Expert Africa which has a fantastic website which describes the various places and lodges in detail. Our agent there was a Kiwi who was happy to help and was able to get us exactly what we decided to do in the end.
We decided to concentrate on the Namib Desert which was highly recommended both by my friend Karen who lived in Namibia during her time with the Peace Corps and by my photography friends in Christchurch. The lodges we chose for early morning access to the park were expensive, but nowhere near the insane level of those in Botswana. We decided to splurge for one night by staying at a recommended lodge called the Kulala Desert Lodge which has its own gate to allow its guided tours to get into the park before the sunrise, something essential for photographers. The other nights we will be staying at another lodge in the park from which we will drive ourselves into the park. I have seen such spectacular photographs coming out of the Namib Desert and so I am really excited to go.
So, after months of painful planning on all of our parts, lots of jabs including Polio since it is a real problem in Africa and lots of emails flying around the globe, the trip has finally arrived. Unfortunately, it is on the heals of another trip, this one to the US. I spent three weeks in the US, two of which were to visit my family in the Boston area. My girlfriend, Joanna flew up a few days after I did to join me and then we both flew to Ottawa for a conference which was the main purpose of the trip since my tickets were booked by the university. The trip and the conference were both really good. On Saturday, 29 August, we flew across the US and then down to New Zealand where we arrived on 31 August. I had a day to quickly scurry around to unpack, pack and to get my affairs in order before boarding a flight to Sydney on 1 September. I was originally supposed to fly on the morning of the 2nd, but Air New Zealand canceled my flight. Air New Zealand agreed to put me on a flight on the 1st, but they insisted that I had to fly out at 7AM to Sydney and sit there for a day before connecting to my flight to Africa. My agent told me that they had tried to persuade Air New Zealand that this was a bad idea, but without fruit. After a lot of stress, I contacted Air New Zealand directly and they quickly agreed with me that it was ridiculous to require me to fly at 7AM rather than later in the day given my situation and so that problem was solved and I spent the night in Sydney. I am now writing during the 14 hour Qantas flight from Sydney to Johannesburg. We will be flying down the coast of Australia and then dip down towards Antarctica before heading north to South Africa. If all goes well, I will be meeting Sue at the gate after I run to make my connecting flight. Then to Gaborone where we will have a few hours of sleep before catching our next flight. Will I make the connection? Will we be awake on our first day of safari? Will be we eaten by cats? Stayed tuned.
Read more about Botwana in a very old, but therefore interesting Time Magazine article here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912669,00.html
US State Department summary of Botswana:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1830.htm
I have been to the other continents other than Antarctica (it’s on the list) and so it was definitely time to turn my attention to Africa. The idea for this trip began several months ago when my friend, Brian emailed me his travel itinerary for 2009. Brian and I were volunteer teachers in China as part of the WorldTeach program in 2000. Of our group, Brian was probably the most keen to have a true China experience. He really tried to learn the language and he rarely turned down an invitation to go bowling or to go out singing karaoke. After not seeing each other for years, Brian and I met up again by chance when I returned to Yantai in October, 2008 after attending a conference in Shanghai. Brian and I did not plan it, but he was in Yantai at the same time as I was and it was really fun wandering around the city with him and reminiscing about our experiences and how the city used to look. Brian has the enviable position of having a unique deal with his employer. Brian only works a few months a year to earn enough money to travel and the rest of the year, he travels. When I saw that his travel plan for 2009 included southern Africa, I wrote that I would be eager to join him. As the plans grew to include more people, the group divided into two groups of two for ease of travel. I am now travelling with Sue, my constant travel companion and we arrive about a week earlier than Brian and his companion.
The travel plan includes Botswana and Namibia. These two countries are two of the most stable countries in Africa and I have long wanted to visit Namibia. All of us going on this trip booked our flights without too much research beyond which cities we would fly into and out of as we travelled. After all, we have travelled in developing countries before and we were counting on the excitement and affordability that developing countries offer. However, once we began our serious planning, we all were in for a tremendous sticker shock.
Botswana, it turns out is the playground of the rich who want to go on safari. At the start of the travel planning, we had each budgeted various amounts per day, but typically under US $100 per day. We researched various options for seeing animals by visiting the lodges in the parks and we sent off requests to various companies and agents for quotes. The responses we received were shocking. Many of the lodges charged in excess of US $1000 per person per night. The least expensive lodges were around US $500 per night. The lodges charge so much in part because they offer luxury accommodation in the middle of the bush. Alternatively, there are campsites available in some of the parks, but these must be reserved, sometimes months in advance and also require the use of a 4x4 vehicle which were also expensive. In fact, according to the guide books, organizing your own safari can be as expensive as one of the lower cost guided safaris and without the safety net of having a guide. We consulted the Lonely Planet Botswana and Namibia, the book that budget travelers count on to find low cost accommodation and travel options. However, the guide lists the expensive lodges and offers little in the way of budget options. We were on our own to try to wade through all of the options to find the diamond in the rough that we could afford.
We wound up spending a lot of time planning. And by a lot, I mean hours every day for weeks on end spent contacting agents and reviewing impossible quotes before we ran out of options. What was really frustrating was that we often contacted a safari operator and responded favorably to a quote only to have them never return our emails asking how we could pay. Never in the history of my travel have I spent so much time planning. And even as I sit here, writing while on the plane to Sydney, we still don’t have all of the pieces in place. We supposedly have bookings in Namibia, but we don’t have confirmation of this or vouchers to present. Nor do we have transport in Namibia quite yet.
Our flights into Africa will take us to Gaborone, Botswana via Johannesburg. We realized early on that if we wanted to go on safari, we would need to fly on from Gaborone to Kasane or Maun and that required making bookings on Air Botswana. Kasane but especially Maun are launching off points for many of the safaris. We had a lot of trouble booking our flights, but I discovered a website in the UK which allowed online bookings and Brian discovered a 800 number to make bookings from the US. Taking busses would have been far cheaper, but at the expense of time and some of the bus routes listed in the Lonely Planet were found not to exist.
There are a number of options for seeing the critters and there are a large number of places to see them. According to the LP, Botswana has long pursued a far-sighted policy of sustainable tourism that is aimed at preserving the country’s natural environment. In total, about 17% of Botswana is designated as a national park or reserve while another 20% is defined as wildlife management areas which together is an astoundingly large percentage of land for a country where cattle is herded and to have a large herd of tens of thousands of cattle is the dream. According to the US Department of State, prior to independence in 1966, cattle raising dominated Botswana's social and economic life. More recently, even the former president of Botswana is said to have commented during a meeting in a lodge that overlooked the wildlife below that it was all very nice, but it would be better if they were cows, much to the dismay of those who support the parks.
In addition to the parks there are also private concessions. These privately owned areas offer accommodation and activities for visitors. The private concessions can be more expensive than the national parks, but with the advantage that there are not restrictions about park hours which then opens the possibility for night safaris.
So there are lots of places to visit, but there really aren’t a lot of budget ways of seeing the critters. You could hire a 4x4 but this requires decking it out with extra fuel cans, food, tires and equipment you will need to get it out of mud or sand. However, the self-safari does not include a guide to help you find the critters and can be more expensive than the cheaper safari options which include a guide. It has been stressed to me in the past by members of the Christchurch Photographic Society that a really good guide is an essential part of taking really good photographs of animals. The main goal of our time in Botswana is to see and to photograph critters, so the guide was really important to us.
The least expensive guided options were mobile safaris in a large group in large trucks or a caravan of SUVs. Depending on the number of people in the group, there could be 3 people per row in the car meaning that not everyone gets a window. There could also be a lot of people per each guide. Some of these safaris included support staff and others required that the customers set up their own tents and cook their own meals. Some included drinks and others required the customers to bring their own drinking water.
Another option was to stay in lodges. Typically, the lodge customers are flown in small aircraft to the lodges where they are pampered. Alcohol may or may not be included in the cost of the lodge. In the morning, the guests are taken on a safari drive and then are back at lunch. In the late afternoon another game drive occurs and the guests are back by dinner. We were told that the schedule of the morning drive and in by lunch and then out again at 4PM is very common and most guides at the lodges and the mobile safaris have agreed to this code. The cost of the lodges begins around US $600 per person per night during the high season. Not a cheap option.
Since the cost of the safaris is so expensive, there are also day trips and short safaris on offer. These might include a mokoro trip in the Okavango Delta and spending a night in a camp. A mokoro is a shallow, dugout canoe traditionally hewn from an ebony or a sausage-tree log. There are also lodges which offer a night out in the salt pans at the cost of several hundreds of dollars per person per night. But these would just be expensive teasers rather than a true safari experience.
During our travels we found out that there is also another way to see the critters which involves an illegal safari of which we saw several. In order to offer safaris, a company must pay a lot of money to the government of Botswana for licensing fees and the like. Guides must also pay P1500 to keep their licenses current. To enter a park, the safari company must pay the park fees for the guests. In the past, the support staff including the guide paid a lower fee for the park, but this is now changing. A fee for the campsite must also be paid and people from the parks will go around during the day to check to make certain that campers had paid the fee.
Illegal safaris are operated by an individual, not a company and so therefore the safari company fees which must be paid to the government are avoided. The guide of the illegal safari will typically lead a caravan of cars into the park on the basis that they are individuals travelling together, not a safari. This also therefore avoids the licensing fees for the guides. The customers, however aren’t really reaping the benefits since they apparently still pay a lot of money for the safari. According to one guide we met, he found people illegally camping on the border between two parks. Apparently, there is a web site which lists the GPS coordinates of several such sites which it advertises as free places to park. The guide we spoke to confronted the illegal campers and told them that he was reporting them. When he returned, the illegal campers had disappeared to a new site, probably one deeper in the bush.
After so many hours of searching and so many emails, Sue and I finally found a local safari company in Maun called Ulinda which was mentioned in the Lonely Planet. Ulinda is run by a woman named Jane who made a name for herself both as a hunter and as a photographer. We contacted one of her former customers who is a doctor in California and he raved about his time with Jane. He told us that he has been to Botswana three times and has done the lodge option. He told us that if you want pampering in the woods, that is a good option, but if you want to see wildlife, what Jane is offering is a superior option.
Jane disappeared a few times during our negotiations, but we finally were able to make a booking. She will be picking us up at the airport in Maun at 8AM and then taking us out into the bush for six nights / seven days. We really hope that she will be there since as part of the booking, we had to wire the full cost of the safari to her in Botswana. At the time of writing, we are her only customers for those six days and so we basically have a private guide which is exciting. She will drive us to various locations and at night her crew sets up our tent and prepares our food. Since we will be out in the wild, there is danger from the wildlife such as lions, but it seems that as long as we are in our tent after dark, we will be fine.
From Maun we fly on Air Botswana to Kasane where we have booked in at a relatively inexpensive lodge which offers drives and boat trips along the Chobe Riverfront. The LP describes the Chobe Riverfront as a place that rarely disappoints and where we are almost guaranteed an up-close encounter with some of the largest elephant herds on the continent.
From Kasane, we will travel overland across the border with Zimbabwe to stay in Victoria Falls to see the world famous falls which have been called one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The choice to go to Zimbabwe made me a bit uneasy since I don’t want to support the Mugabe government. Plus the New Zealand government has a travel advisory against going to Zimbabwe and advises against all tourist and other non-essential travel due to a high risk to travelers’ security. The high risk advisory was stressed to me when I purchased my travel insurance since they would not cover travel to Zimbabwe. However, I explained that we would only be in Victoria Falls for less than two days which changed everything and I was told by the insurance agent to have a good time and that I would be fully covered. Friends from my church in Boston were recently in Zimbabwe and they went to Victoria Falls as well. They told me that they thought it was reasonably safe, but was devoid of tourists. They were the only ones staying at their hotel.
From Victoria Falls, we will fly to Johannesburg and then to Windhoek, Namibia. Compared to Botswana, Namibia has been really easy to plan. Older friends from Christchurch have told me that they had no problem driving around in a 2 WD car since the roads are very good so we could be mobile rather than to depend on a tour operator. The hard part for Sue and I was deciding where to go since we only have a few days in a large country. Fortunately, we had the help of an agent at Expert Africa which has a fantastic website which describes the various places and lodges in detail. Our agent there was a Kiwi who was happy to help and was able to get us exactly what we decided to do in the end.
We decided to concentrate on the Namib Desert which was highly recommended both by my friend Karen who lived in Namibia during her time with the Peace Corps and by my photography friends in Christchurch. The lodges we chose for early morning access to the park were expensive, but nowhere near the insane level of those in Botswana. We decided to splurge for one night by staying at a recommended lodge called the Kulala Desert Lodge which has its own gate to allow its guided tours to get into the park before the sunrise, something essential for photographers. The other nights we will be staying at another lodge in the park from which we will drive ourselves into the park. I have seen such spectacular photographs coming out of the Namib Desert and so I am really excited to go.
So, after months of painful planning on all of our parts, lots of jabs including Polio since it is a real problem in Africa and lots of emails flying around the globe, the trip has finally arrived. Unfortunately, it is on the heals of another trip, this one to the US. I spent three weeks in the US, two of which were to visit my family in the Boston area. My girlfriend, Joanna flew up a few days after I did to join me and then we both flew to Ottawa for a conference which was the main purpose of the trip since my tickets were booked by the university. The trip and the conference were both really good. On Saturday, 29 August, we flew across the US and then down to New Zealand where we arrived on 31 August. I had a day to quickly scurry around to unpack, pack and to get my affairs in order before boarding a flight to Sydney on 1 September. I was originally supposed to fly on the morning of the 2nd, but Air New Zealand canceled my flight. Air New Zealand agreed to put me on a flight on the 1st, but they insisted that I had to fly out at 7AM to Sydney and sit there for a day before connecting to my flight to Africa. My agent told me that they had tried to persuade Air New Zealand that this was a bad idea, but without fruit. After a lot of stress, I contacted Air New Zealand directly and they quickly agreed with me that it was ridiculous to require me to fly at 7AM rather than later in the day given my situation and so that problem was solved and I spent the night in Sydney. I am now writing during the 14 hour Qantas flight from Sydney to Johannesburg. We will be flying down the coast of Australia and then dip down towards Antarctica before heading north to South Africa. If all goes well, I will be meeting Sue at the gate after I run to make my connecting flight. Then to Gaborone where we will have a few hours of sleep before catching our next flight. Will I make the connection? Will we be awake on our first day of safari? Will be we eaten by cats? Stayed tuned.
Read more about Botwana in a very old, but therefore interesting Time Magazine article here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912669,00.html
US State Department summary of Botswana:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1830.htm
