No matter where you go — African safari, Mediterranean cruise, Great Wall of China, or family reunion in Wichita —  travel is often tough. Here are some things I’ve learned:

Take your rattiest underwear and toss it out as you go, every day. You’ll buy new when you get home.

If you’re prone to motion- or sea-sickness take gingersnaps along. They don’t make you sleepy like Dramamine does, plus they’re good with a restorative cup of tea.

Take packets of hand cleaner. Besides hands, they can be used to clean iffy toilet seats, get the sticky off a restaurant table, or bugs off the windshield.

Carry neatly folded lengths of toilet paper in plastic baggies. How awful is it to conduct your business in an enclosed stall and then realize there’s no t.p?  This goes double in some countries where they hang the loo paper on the outside of the door. If you forget to take some before you go inside, well…! I’m just sayin’, BYOTP.

Blue Buff bandana.

Bandanas made of seamless loops of stretchy polyester microfiber — Sahalie Buffs® — are indispensable. They come in riotous designs as colorful as a giant box of crayons. They contort to keep your head and neck warm when the weather turns cold, sop your sweated brow when the temperature soars, and become a hat or headband if you have a bad hair day. What more can I say? Oh! no, I do not own shares in the company.

Wear your most vertsatile earrings and leave all the rest at home. Limit other jewelry to one necklace, one bracelet, one ring, one watch. Less is less.

Don’t take a garment you’ll only wear once. Plan a color scheme and stick to it. A few neutrals, a pop of color, and you don’t have to worry about what goes with what.  Everything goes!

If you have limited time and you stop to take photos of everything, that means you aren’t seeing anything.  Buy. The. Postcard. If you must have a picture of you with Big Ben, put yourself into the frame quickly, then look at the sight you’ve paid thousands of dollars to see.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxSunrise, Bryce Canyon, Utah. There was no postcard.

Our shadows, ourselves.

Do I buy the postcards? Yes, but…when you’re lucky enough to be in a beautiful place that you know you’ll never see again, it’s hard not to snap a picture or two, especially with the instant gratification a digital camera provides. I do have a way to take “selfies” that aren’t so “in your face” though. Watch:

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[Click on “Contents,” above, to revisit earlier posts in my African Safari series.]

African Safari – Part 13

Before our trip to Botswana my idea of seasonal perfection was fall and winter in the Northern Hemisphere.  There’s nothing like a brisk autumnn morning when you can smell the crisp in the air and see vibrant oranges and reds against a brilliant blue October sky. Better yet, for me anyway, is the magic of a fresh snowfall that outlines familiar landmarks with poufs of white.  At least that was always my view until we went to the Southern Hemisphere in August, the end of their winter.

Even now, nine years later, I can smell the velvety desert sage and feel the African air, soft as new flannel pajamas, against my skin.  True, we weren’t there in the searing, humid heat of their summer, but their winter was as appealing as the snowy ones I love.

Even now hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of that trip — the one I so determinedly did not want to take — while conjuring some tiny detail to savor: the absence of outside influence, the simple life style, the welcoming joyousness of the people, particularly the children. Unforgettable, the way: elephants just materialize out of the bush; ferocious, tusked warthogs run daintily, tails held straight up like the antenna on a car; hippos’ broadcast their nightly, nasally wanh wanh wanh; lions seemed so small and looked so bored. I’ll always remember the enviable eyelashes of the giraffes; the zebras’ hysterical dog-like yaps; the skulking hyena; the rumbling thunderclouds that were Cape buffalo herds.

From the very first day Peter and I said we’d return the next year.  But we didn’t, and now we won’t. Even though my husband’s mind is fading, he does remember that magical trip, and the memories are etched as indelibly on my brain as if acid on metal. I’ve only to think Botswana and I’m back there again.

xRussell, Judy and Peter, backs to camera

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.”

― Alexander McCall Smith, The Double Comfort Safari Club

[You can read earlier posts in this series, by clicking on “Contents” at the top.]

African Safari – Part Twelve

Tubu was the last camp in our two-week Botswana safari.  Tubu means “place of dust” and, indeed, the Kalahari desert’s powdery gray/brown sand sifted into everything. We felt gritty and even though we wore hiking boots and socks, our feet were gray. No matter how often I washed my dufflebag for the next several years, tiny piles of dust dribbled from its crevices.

If I could, I’d go back tomorrow, pardon my dust!

xxxxxxxxxOld Tom.

Tubu had a resident elephant, an old male who ambled around like a pet dog. He didn’t have a name like the three at Jacana did, but I thought of him as “Tom.” No matter how frail he seemed, we were warned to be wary. He was a wild animal after all.

The first night, after lanterns out, we noticed how windy it was. The sides of the tent billowed in and out as if we were in the belly of a huge animal. Lions roared in the distance. Every now and then there was an extra-strong gust followed by something — it sounded like hail! — hitting the roof. Nothing bothered husband Peter who fell asleep quickly.

Next morning, I described what I’d heard to guide Russell and his sidekick Kate. They thought it was probably “Tom” who hankered after palm nuts. That afternoon I sat on our little porch to spy on the old guy who was a few yards away. I watched as he drew an elephantine breath, exhaled mightly, then head-butted a palm tree. Nuts rained. So that was the “hail” I’d heard. “Tom” must have been right beside our tent the night before.  Would we have slept so well if we’d known? Peter would have, for sure.

Palm nuts look a bit like our black walnuts in their green hulls. Ellies slurp them around in their mouths like kids with jawbreakers and suck off the gingerbread-flavored green part. They swallow the nuts whole, and in a day or two, more palm trees are planted. Russell stripped several nuts of their hulls and gave us strips to taste.  With a little whipped cream…yu-um!

xxxxxxxxxI didn’t do it!

I don’t know if everyone in our group was so lucky, but our tent had an outdoor shower built around a tree about twelve feet up. How luxurious to shampoo my hair, warm water streaming from two showerheads, while in the distance, wild animals went about their business. Well, luxurious untiI I stepped in something squishy. Baboon poop! I should’ve remembered they hang around wherever there’s the chance of finding shampoo and soap.

The plastic snakes that were wrapped around railings and posts in all the camps theoretically keep baboons away. They’re almost as terrified of snakes as I am.  If there’d been a fake snake in our shower, there would’ve been no baboon, and no me!

xxxxxPeter handles fake snake.

Ol’ Tom must’ve had his fill of palm nuts because the second night all I heard were lions. Native wisdom says, if your collarbones don’t reverberate when when you hear lions roar, then they’re no closer than five miles. No worries.

I went to sleep with visions of gingerbread men dancing around a campfire.

* * *

Some months later I read Marian Keyes’ Anybody out there? in which she described a shower similar to my own. Keye’s protagonist, Anna, described her sister’s experience more graphically:

… I told him the story of how Claire had been having an outdoor shower in a safari camp in Botswana and had caught a baboon watching her and having a good old wank for himself.”

[Anna’s husband replied,] “She’s making it up…a baboon wouldn’t react that way to a human woman. …It would only happen if he was watching a lady baboon.”

Anna said, “A lady baboon wouldn’t take a shower.”

Mind your business.

African Safari – Part Eleven

[If you’d like to read earlier posts in this series, please click on “Contents” at the top.]

Although we left Linyati with misted eyes, as much from the sadness of departing, as from the dense dust storm that blanketed us as we drove to the airstrip, once we were above the swirling blackness we were birds migrating to an oasis.

From above, the terrain looked as if we’d detoured from desert to tropics. Towering palm trees, clumped fan palms and other vegetation covered islands set into water that reflected the bright sky like shards of broken mirrors. We seven — Arleen, Arden, Marilyn, Peter, Bruce, my Peter and I — had all read the pre-trip information but none of us were prepared for what was waiting. We gasped collectively at the view as we landed on another tiny airstrip pasted across the mosaic of greens and blues.

A motorboat waited to whisk us through papyrus-lined channels to our next camp, Jacana. Named after one of the most common birds in the Okavango Delta, Jacanas are also called Jesus birds or lily trotters because their very long toes make them look as if they walk on water. Peter decided he should call me Lily since the Jacana and I have similar physical traits. He thought he was so funny.

Web-grab 

The six-thousand square mile Okavango Delta, third largest inland delta in the world, looks like a giant bird’s foot spread across Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. In January, summer rains fill Angola’s Kubango River which flows a thousand miles southward. By July and August, Botswana’s winter, the delta is water-filled and lush. Since there is no outlet, the water remains, the birds return, fish that burrowed into the mud the previous year revive, and migrating herds of large animals come back.

Our mid-September visit was the last by boat for the year. The water was evaporating rapidly. (There are two weeks between safaris when the water isn’t deep enough for boat travel and the ground is too water-logged for wheeled vehicles.) We toured in fiberglass replicas of native mokoros — canoes hollowed out of tree trunks — instead of in Range Rovers.

Resident elephants on the little island were named Jack, little Jackson, and Spike. We never saw them but we heard them rustling in the bush like large, ghostly watchdogs. Odd that, because once males leave the matriarchal herd they live alone, yet these three palled around together, peacefully so far as anyone knew.

Peter and I were assigned to Cisco’s mokoro. He poled us effortlessly, or so it seemed. When he spotted a rare Pell owl swooping above us, he zipped us across the expanse of water as if we had wings too, and he maneuvered us close enough to see the bird perched in a tree. Minutes later he spotted two tsonga, extremely fast shy antelopes, as they dashed in front of us like hummingbirds with jets.

Massive Baobab trees dominate the area. They top out at one hundred feet and can store up to twelve hundred gallons of water that natives tap during a drought. In “Lion King,” Disney dubbed them “trees of life” because of their many uses — water storage, healthful fruits, rope made from the bark, oil for cosmetics.There are homes in some, and in one instance, a jail.

xxxxxxNatives think God was mad and jammed the trees into the earth upside down.

Cisco made me a necklace out of lily pad stems before we cast off the next morning. “Now, Mma,” he said with a grin, “we are betrothed.” Another guide made himself a sun hat with a lilypad leaf shaped into a cone. The flower and stem held it together, probably with a little spit and a dash of magic added.

We were gliding along the waterways when Russell abruptly signaled a stop and pointed to the island on our left. We could hear brush being trampled. Soon, a large female elephant poked her head out, flapped her ears, and trumpeted.

We floated, quiet, on the still water.

Another few minutes and she popped her head out again. I thought of ball toss games in amusement parks: “Step right up, ladies and gents, boys and girls! Hit the elephant and git yer toy.”

Our cameras were ready.

Then she blared another warning. Russell put his finger to his lips and whispered that we’d move further along, then stop and watch. It wasn’t long before she burst out of the trees as if from behind a theater curtain and splashed to the opposite side with a youngster on her tail.

The scene was so perfect, the action so well played, that we could almost believe that Russell had staged it just for us!

Applause! Applause!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWal Walt Disney couldn’t have done better.

African Safari – Part Ten

“A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?” ― In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, Alexander McCall Smith.

This tall blond shed no tears.

“Dumela, Mma, dumela, Rra,” Cook Pauline said when Peter and I arrived for breakfast.

“Dumela, Pauline,” we replied.

It was the morning after a very memorable night before, and we seven — Marilyn and Peter B, Charleen and Arden, Bruce, Peter and me, plus Guide Russell and side-kick Kate — again had our tea, porridge, and toast on the edge of the river.  A tiny campfire warmed and cheered us on this, our final morning in Linyati Camp.  That we’d had uninvited dinner guests the previous night was evident.  The marshy area just beyond the dining tent was trampled into a gloppy green stew by the elephants.

xWe’d had ringside seats at a water circus.

As we prepared to leave camp, Pauline enveloped we three women in warm hugs, while her helper stood back smiling.  Camp director Max and aide Jinx nodded goodbye solemnly.  I hoped that the gratuties each of us left would help Max buy another cow for his fiance’s dowery, so they could marry and live happily ever after at Linyati.

We were teary-eyed as we waved goodbye.  Next stop, Jacana Camp, Okavango Delta. Would Magic follow us there? 

A menacing sandstorm barreled across the runway as we sheltered under scrubby trees waiting for the little airplane. Zebras milled nervously, but scattered at the plane’s approach. The pilot couldn’t see through the dust, but he buzzed by and circled several times to scare any elephants out of his way.

When we took off from that BandAid-sized airstrip I knew that whatever else our safari held, I would never forget those three days.

As Precious Ramwotse mused in Alexander McCall Smith’s Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, “We don’t forget…. Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.”

There’ll be more stories from Botswana, but for now, tsamaya sentle.

Photos courtesy of, P. Blitz