Back Story: Of all the trips I've been on, my very favorite was a trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe. And, Africa is the only place that I've wanted to get back to (as soon as I can find the time and money)! When you go to London or Paris or Sydney, you know you'll see Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and the Opera House. When you go on safari, you never know what you'll see!
When I went to Africa in 2008 with some friends, we flew to Kruger National Park and stayed at the Djuma Private Game Reserve. The staff, cooks and guides were the best! We did two game drives a day - - one at sunrise and one at sunset (complete with a stop for "sundowners"). We saw buffalo, giraffe, zebra, elephants, a leopard, a cheetah feeding on a kudu it had killed about an hour earlier, rhinos, "Friendly" (a hippo that our guide had his own special language with) and, on the last day, lions!
After that, we flew to Victoria Falls, on the Zimbabwe side. It was beautiful, but sad. The inflation was out of control (I got $100 billion of Zimbabwean currency for $1 USD) and no one was exporting food or goods to Zimbabwe, so the meal options were very limited. We went on an elephant ride and white water rafted down the Zambezi River...I was sore for days after the climb in/out of the gorge!
From Victoria Falls, we flew to Mana Pools National Park for a canoe safari. We were in a teeny tiny plane that flew into a dirt runway - definitely no airplane terminal). We had to abort our first landing because there were warthogs on the runway! On the first night, we stayed at a quasi-permanent camp site. The next two days, we canoed our way through TONS of hippos and went on several bush walks where we got pretty close to some elephants and also saw a couple of lion prides and hyenas. Back in the canoe, we narrowly avoided a hippo that had been lounging on the land until we interrupted him and he decided to splash into the water right in front of us (we had to back paddle and our guide went for his gun)! The other two nights, we stayed in tents, but were fortunate that the staff put up the camp for us while we were canoeing, so we didn't have to do anything except holler when we were ready for them to fill up the water bucket for our shower!
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| Hippos...yes, we canoed around them! |
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| The Shower |
Our last stop was Cape Town. It was a beautiful city, but it was just that - a city. No animals. While we were there, we made the most of it by going to Robben Island and Table Mountain. I remember how fabulous it was to see the very last of the sun set into the ocean at what seemed like the tip of the earth!
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So, what's your answer? What is your dream vacation?
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