Until Friday we’re at MalaMala Game Reserve in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. We arrived yesterday afternoon on a twelve-seater airplane that picked us up at Phinda, the reserve where we spent the previous three nights. Mpumalanga Province is in the eastern part of the country. According to the brochure, MalaMala “is part of a conservation gene pool that covers 5.5 million acres of land in the heart of the South African Lowveld.” It’s certainly huge, I can’t argue with that! Since our first day at Phinda I’ve been noticing how different So [View Full Entry]

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I'm writing from another airplane. We're flying on air Botswana from Maun, Botswana, to Joberg, where we'll spend a night before we head back to the bush. We'll go to South Africa next. I'm sad to be leaving Baines' Camp. It's a beautiful camp in a beautiful place and we had a wonderful time. I wish we could have stayed a little longer. Things were just beginning to get not-awkward with Martin, our guide. We were telling jokes and making real conversation at our last few meals, instead of sinking into five minute silences between comments about the superb quality of [View Full Entry]

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You have not truly lived until you have been charged by an elephant. I say that because I now believe that in order to know how alive you actually are, you must (at some point) feel very close to death. An encounter with the matriarch of a breeding herd of elephants is a great way to do this; I really recommend it. It's extra efffective if she charges you three times. More on this later. I'm writing from our hotel in Johannesburg. We're overnighting here--we came from Botswana this evening. We stayed at Baines' Camp in the Okavango Delta. It was [View Full Entry]

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I stopped writing yesterday at tea time, thinking I'd have time to continue later. I should have known better. We seem to have no down time here. I'm sitting in the outdoor living room of the main lodge. We've just finished lunch and we have a few hours until we go out on our evening game drive, so I thought I'd try to get a little closer to caught up on my writing. I can hear the hippos, just so you know. They're right below me in the river/swamp. *** When we arrived at the airstrip, a man named On picked [View Full Entry]

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Where to begin? We're at Baines' Camp in Botswana's Okavango Delta. The camp itself is amazing--it has a maximum capacity of ten guests and sits in the middle of the swamp on stilts. The main building is open-air and includes a living room, a campfire pit with a porch around it, an outdoor dining patio and an indoor dining room. The rooms all have a bedroom and bathroom, and a porch that looks out onto the delta (which is beautiful--it's not a gross, smelly swamp--for the record). At night, you can roll your bed out onto the porch and sleep under [View Full Entry]

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I am writing from the sky. We are flying from the Kasane Airport in Botswana to the Baines' Camp landing strip in the bush. Appropriately, we're flying on a bush plane. The plane seats twelve passengers, a pilot, and a co-pilot; right now there are nine people on board including our solo pilot. We're stopping twice before we arrive at Baines' to pick up and drop off other passengers. We spent the last two nights at the Stanley & Livingstone hotel at Victoria Falls, in Zimbabwe. The hotel was beautiful. It's a few miles outside the small town that's populated mostly [View Full Entry]

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This afternoon around 12:30pm we arrived at the Zimbabwe Airport. When we left Johannesburg this morning we were advised to hurry off the plane upon arrival, because Zimbabwe Immigration writes all tourist visas by hand. We did hurry, and we were third in line. Thank God. It took twenty minutes to process the six of us. I can't imagine how long it took for those passengers who didn't get the memo and took their time getting from the plane to Immigration. We flew from Seattle to New York to Dakar to Joberg--a 24 hour trip that left me completely exhausted and [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone, I'm at JFK Airport waiting to board a 18 hour flight to South Africa. Over the next two weeks I'll be in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana with my mother, stepfather, sister, and grandparents. We are going to be on safaris in the middle of nowhere, so posts aren't guaranteed until after the trip is over (when I'll have internet access again). However, I'll be writing the old-fashioned way the whole time (with a pen!), so I'll have some thoughts and stories to share whenever I do eventually find the internet. I was a little worried about angry/hungry animals, [View Full Entry]

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Buenas noches a tod@s, Remember me? I used to have a blog. Wait, no--that's not quite right. I still have a blog. What I used to have was time to write in it. What do I have now, instead of time? A family, four classes, and an internship where I work 20 hours a week. A free hour is harder to come by lately. A lot has happened since I last wrote, 79 days ago. Here are some quick updates: School My semester will end on April 30, two and a half weeks from now. I'm taking the following classes: Social [View Full Entry]

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Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’ve been here for three whole weeks. Other times it’s hard to believe I haven’t been here longer. The last twenty-two days have been full of the excitement, frustration, discovery, and homesickness that I’ve decided are typical of the initial stages of most grand adventures. School is almost in full swing, I’m about to begin an exciting internship, and I’m starting to develop a routine that should soon help me feel more permanent than temporary here. The three-week mark is difficult, though. The initial exhilaratio [View Full Entry]

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