How to begin! We have been packed for a week now, no small feat as this trip is more like a safari. Rick Steves would definitely not approve. We have all of our camping fear except the stove and coolers. Each day, however, we find something else to add, re-weigh the duffels and shift things around to make the weight and volume limits. We started taking malaria pills two weeks prior to departure and were somewhat disappointed to find we experienced no side effects, no vivid Technicolor dreams.
Friends introduced us to Vanessa, the executive director of the DeWildt Cheetah Centre near Pretoria, South Africa, last year when she was in the US on a fundraising mission. When we retired last June we inquired about volunteer opporutinities and this trip is the result.
Finally, farewell calls made, the house cleaned, the big day arrived. Today is the beginning of an epic four month trip to southern Africa. Africa is enormous, even just South Africa is large. So we should have anticipated a long journey, right? First was a direct flight, Denver to Frankfurt, on Lufthansa, nearly nine hours and 5,000 miles or so. Too keyed up to sleep, I read most of the night. We had a six hour layover in Frankfurt before flying to Munich so we took a train into town and wandered around along the Main River and had lunch. The flight to Munich was uneventful and we wiled away the four hour layover with dinner. Finally, we’re headed for new territory, eleven hours to Johannesburg, South Africa.
