The Last Hurrah: East Africa and Madagascar
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010It’s a tough life.
As soon as I got back to Geneva from the Balkans via Italy last week, we had to start preparing for our next voyage, which is the going to be the eighth and, as it turns out, last, major trip of three months or more that we’ll have taken together since 2003.
So, before we return to Geneva to begin a settled life in October, we are embarking on one final journey – three months in sub-Saharan Africa, beginning only five days from now as I type this. To sketch a rough outline of our plan, we fly to Nairobi (with a brief stop en route in London to see my brother Tim) on Monday, and we’re planning to do what more-or-less amounts to a two-month, clockwise circle through Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and back to Nairobi, from where we fly to Madagascar for the third month.
Having to do all our preparation for this trip in less than two weeks was a bit daunting at first, but since we once planned an entire wedding in 12 days, we knew we could do it. By now, we’ve had the shots we needed (just typhoid fever as it turned out), got the malaria tablets we needed (which cost literally one-third of the price a bus ride away across the border in France than they do here in Geneva), got one visa (Kenya) with another (Madagascar) on the way, and booked a (probably dodgy) hotel in Nairobi. Now we just need to pack up our stuff this weekend and we’ll be ready to leave on Monday.
Now, you may recall that the only other time we were in sub-Saharan Africa, we didn’t think too much of it. But that was mainly due to 81-hour bus rides like this one, and 7-day boat trips like this one (the disastrous nature of which I deliberately understated at the time so my parents wouldn’t worry). And also: that West Africa is the poorest and least developed region in the world and lacks the animals that make East Africa so famous.
Indeed, almost all the things we’re looking forward to the most are animal related – we’ve already booked our silver-backed gorilla tracking trip for early August, are about to book a safari (for next week!) in Kenya’s Masai Mara NP during the annual wildebeest migration, and we can’t wait to get to Madagascar to see lemurs, chameleons, and everything else it has to offer. (A funny thing that’s recently occurred to me: there are pretty much two places on earth with unique flora and fauna by virtue of them being islands and having been separated from the mainland millions of years ago. If you’re Australian like me – and as such you think of kangaroos and koalas as being common and not extraordinary – then Madagascar is to you what Australia is to everyone else.)
Of course, there should be plenty of other highlights as well – people, landscapes, old Arab coastal trading towns, and probably many other things that I don’t even know about yet. As always, you never know what Africa will throw at you…
Nick