Reviewing Two Months on Safari

Reviewing Two Months on Safari

TRevTitleI’ve just returned from two months in Africa, my 40th year of guiding there. I took consumers into five different countries in sub-Saharan Africa, toured three of its big cities and 14 of its most famous big game areas.

We stayed in hotels, lodges and tented camps from mid-market to super luxurious. Sometimes we used our own vehicles driving from place to place, and at other times we flew from place to place and used the property’s vehicles.

Tomorrow I’ll compare it all for you.

But before I do I want to explain why I think this is so important. We travel professionals are being marginalized by the internet, and consumers should know better.

Internet travel reviews like those found in TripAdvisor are often if not usually grossly inaccurate. This is because single event analyses are rarely fair. You wouldn’t want a real estate agent brokering your purchase of a home, or a doctor operating on your gall bladder for their very first time.

2oldersYet this is exactly what most travel reviews are: first-time consumer impressions. Strong reviews – good or bad – might be reflections of random events like unusual weather or public events or machinery breakdowns, or unusual personal interactions with an unrepresentative employee. None of these things might be recognized by the consumer as being unusual.

Moreover, most consumer reviews contain no measuring sticks of experience. They don’t know what it’s like next door or down the street, or at a different season. It’s a one-off experience that’s highly unlikely to be representative of the normal consumer experience.

And because many consumer reviews are from people who used consumer reviews before they planned their own vacation, mistake compounds mistake. Expectations might be way too high or way too low to begin with.

anniversaryBut of all the many reasons that consumer travel reviews are generally so wrong the single most obvious is consumers’ overwhelming demand for a low price. Especially among Americans price is the single-most driving factor in travel purchase.

Price should be an important consideration, but so many travelers believe they are due more than what they paid for. When price becomes this important it tends to erode performance and quality for a presumed gained “value.” This is the reason we’ve gone through such a horrible era of airline inconveniences.

RiverWalkPut all these things together and the typical consumer travel reviewer is not the type of person I would want to recommend a trip.

What I want is a person sufficiently experienced in the area of travel I’m considering. Indeed there are consumers just as good as travel professionals. When I find one of those it’s a bonanza, because that person isn’t saddled with the constraints of making a living out of her reviews and recommendations. But either way, a professional agent or a sufficiently experienced traveler is what will render a meaningful recommendation.

What constitutes sufficient experience? In my opinion there are four critical prerequisites for rendering a meaningful travel review:

capegoodhope✓ Multiple visits to the same place or property: More than two or three, the more the better, enough visits that both an array of seasonal weather and economic cycles are experienced, and enough visits that an anomalous situation can be recognized.

✓ Competitive selection. By this I mean experiencing a range of hotels, or beaches, or yachts, or trains in the same area so that the judgment rendered is contextual. You can’t apply the same standards to an Amazon jungle lodge that you would apply to the Peninsula in Hong Kong, or a kids’ family vacation to Disneyland to a week at the opera in Milan.

kathyk✓ Consistent purchasing. The “Honeymoon Weekend” purchased on LastMinute.Com won’t give you the same quality of rooms or package that buying it directly from the Niagra Falls Hotel will. It gets even more complicated: the same hotel room purchased directly from the Niagra Falls Hotel could render different qualities, frills and service depending upon how and when you made the purchase and what you actually paid for it.

✓ Minimize expectations. This is the hardest thing for a consumer to do, and understandably so. You don’t buy a vacation without expecting certain things from it. But the more this is the case, the less likely you will be able to render a meaningful review.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t heed the good advice of trusted friends and family. They’re like you: They know probably better than a random professional what you might enjoy best.

But at the same time you better give that travel professional equal if not greater weight for all the reasons I’ve explained above.

Tomorrow I’ll try to do that for safaris in sub-Saharan Africa at this time of the year. Please come back!

GrandpaDriving

OnSafari: Elephant Explosion

OnSafari: Elephant Explosion

eleTitleTwenty-five elephants exploded out of the forest about 400 meters away from us and cantered quickly directly at us. We were in open Landcruisers. No sides and a simple canvas top.

They stopped about half way. Not having had the time to look at the area with our binocs none of us at first realized it was a watering hole. My heart slowed down a bit. They weren’t coming at us; they were headed anxiously to water.
eleBAR
After light and late rains constrained by El Nino Savute has enjoyed some heavy rainfall recently. We were in an open meadow, but the grass was high and green and camouflaged the pond.

We watched them for a number of minutes as they sucked up huge amounts of water with their trunks then squirted it into their mouths, jostling for position. It was likely 3 or 4 families.

During our entire time in Botswana we hadn’t seen many elephants. At Savute we’d seen a group of about 20 scattered across a field, but they were all male! Before us now were real mixed families, although I noticed there were only a few juveniles and no babies at all in the group.

Then again out of the forest to the right exploded another group! This group had two youngsters under one year old. As they all gathered and jostled at this little watering hole I counted 67 elephant, with a couple huge bulls hanging slightly behind.

They didn’t linger drinking for very long. In fact I imagine many didn’t drink at all. As anxious as they seemed to get to the water, they now were equally anxious to leave.

Past us.

Our excellent driver/guide, Metal, had briefed everyone to keep quiet. The wind was in our favor. Most elephant can’t see very well or at all after they’ve reached their teenage years, but their sense of hearing and smell are acute. Our being quiet and the fortunate direction of a strong breeze meant they probably didn’t know we were there at first, or at least that we were anything too unusual.

There were two cars from our group about 70 meters apart on the road, pretty equidistant from the watering hole.

The assembled group began moving … quickly towards us. One family immediately pulled away to the right, but the big majority of them headed straight for the space between our two cars. The group to the right then circled back behind our car, and within moments, we were encircled.

When they realized that we weren’t trees or mountains or abandoned vehicles, there was some hesitation and confusion. We could hear a loud of rumbling. Humans can hear only 10% of elephants’ normal vocalization: the remainder is below our decibel level of hearing.

The big mamas pushed the babies forward anxiously with their trunks, and younger males flapped their ears at us. One very large matriarch stopped in the road and faced us as the great line of pachyderms moved quickly passed us.

Then, with a slight step or two towards us that made all our hearts stop and a flip of her ears, away she went, too.

There was no trumpeting and no real panic … on either side! It was an absolutely splendid event for our last game drive in Botswana!

Readers of my blog know that I believe there are too many elephants in Africa, today. This is particularly true in East Africa, but even here in Botswana the evidence is mounting.

Normal elephant behavior does not include large males congregating as we saw. Those males looked like residents, animals who had settled in to their environment and made peace with what normally would be a stressful living condition.

This happened during the years of heavy poaching in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Then the big tuskers took refuge in the caldera which was a safe haven from poaching. They learned to live together and never left, even when the poaching ended.

I don’t think this group in Savute has congregated for safety from poaching. It may have something to do with climate change and the radical weather all of Africa is experiencing… or something else. But it isn’t normal elephant behavior, and whatever the explanation I think a root cause is … too many elephants for whatever unusual situations exist today.

The beautiful group that passed between our two vehicles were not residents. They were traveling as elephants have been doing for millennia. When they travel it is normal for families that would normally stay well apart from one another to congregate as we saw.

The mystery remains why of so many elephants there were only 2 babies and no juveniles. The next youngest elephant I found in the group was in his teens.

Wild Africa is a never-ending source of drama and beauty. How lucky we’ve been!

OnSafari: Ending with a Bang!

OnSafari: Ending with a Bang!

DoginSavuteThe great prize on safari today is to see wild dogs. We saw them twice, once in Moremi and once in Savute.

We watched them hunt – and miss a reedbuck – in Moremi. In Savute we came upon them about a half hour after they had killed a young kudu. They were in a pond flooding their already distended bellies with water.

At first we thought they must have killed an impala, because the alpha female had serious puncture wounds in her face. But we learned from a film crew that was following them that the impala kill had been several days ago.

The story of today’s hunt was fascinating; the film crew lucked out and got it all:

The dogs spotted a kudu family about 400 yards from them and raced through the cover of tall grass. But another predator had also spotted the kudu: a leopard.

When the dog sensed the leopard, a few of them began popping up above the grass until the leopard recognized them and gave way, finally running up a distant tree. Even the largest leopard is no match for a pack of wild dogs.

The kudu, of course, had also seen the dog jumping, but some of the pack had been dispatched to surround the suddenly alert kudu.

All of this happened very quickly. The actual attack started only moments after the leopard fled. It was a large family of kudu and the dog quickly out ran and surrounded the youngest. Although almost every wild animal mother will try to defend her youngster, this doesn’t apply when wild dog are the attackers. Dog are the most gruesome and successful of the hunters.

There’s no hope for the animal once surrounded by dog.

The 9 dogs then tore the kudu apart eating it while it was still alive. According to the filmers in twelve minutes the roughly 220-pound kudu was gone.

Almost literally. When the dog tear apart their victim they will often run away with parts, so the remains of the kudu were scattered far and wide.

While we watched the dogs watering the sky began to fill with vultures. In a remarkably short time there were about 300 vultures circling above trying to focus on the kill site, but because the dogs scatter their kill, the vultures were at first confused.

Then a black kite dove into the grass and before a few moments passed vultures were landing all over the field: whitebacks, hooded, white-headed and lappet-faced.

The hunt, the take-down, the consumption and clean-up with a wild dog event is the quickest of any predation in Africa.

What an end on our final day on safari!

The Botswana trip has been fabulous. We sampled all its unique ecosystems: the Kalahari, the Delta and Moremi, and Savute.

Savute is the southern end of the massive Chobe National Park, a huge trapezoid that begins at the Zambezi River and extends more than 150 miles south towards the Delta. The vast majority of this area is incredibly arid, although heavily wooded, so there aren’t usually a lot of animals in its interior.

But along the Zambezi and where we were, on the opposite end in Savute, there is always some water and excellent grasslands. Many of these grasslands have been formed relatively recently, in the last half century for example, by the increasing numbers of elephant that destroy forests.

We saw quite a few elephants, but they were all male! Elephant behavior is changing as their densities increase and human/elephant conflict grows. It’s likely that most of these are traveling, north to south or vice versa, and Savute is a nice way station on these longer, stressful journeys between the fecund north of the country and the Delta.

Overall our game viewing these last 8 days has been fabulous. We saw nine lion and some of the group a few more. We saw a cheetah and glimpses of leopard. On our last day in the Delta, some of the group saw the rare sitatunga!

That’s a peculiar water-based antelope with webbed feet that makes a nest of reeds in the Delta.

Most of the group got gorgeous views of large families of lechwe and kudu, and of course, impala. We also saw reedbuck, steinbok and uncountable numbers of hippo often accompanied by crocs.

The group was fantastic. I don’t think anyone skipped a single game drive!

Most of the group now continues to Victoria Falls. Along with a few others, I’ll be returning home and my two months in Africa has been truly astounding. I’m so grateful to all my many clients!

See my next set of blogs where I summarize and compare the vast and many different parts of sub–Saharan Africa I’ve been so fortunate to experience again on this extended 40th guiding anniversary safari!sundowners1

OnSafari: Not Just a Little Botswana

OnSafari: Not Just a Little Botswana

Pigeon & LechweI can’t understand traveling to Botswana without visiting the Kalahari. The Kalahari is literally the heart of Botswana, the ancient home of the San People, the foundation for the Okavango Delta.

Traveling to Botswana and not visiting the Kalahari is like taking a vacation to New York City but not visiting Manhattan.

Rare Lesser Jacana
Rare Lesser Jacana

We began our Botswana safari with two fabulous days at Tau Pan in the Kalahari. The summer rains and hot temperatures were moderating. We had no rain and temperatures never got higher than the upper 80s.

The Kalahari is an enormous scrubland not really a desert. There are a variety of large bushes which provide birds, animals and the San with all sorts of food and medicines, as we learned on our “Bushman Walk.”

Around its “pans” are found the largest concentration of animals, because this is where the heavy summer rains pool. Admittedly this is not a Serengeti, but during our game drives around the 20 sq. km. Tau Pan we saw hundreds of springbok, many dozens of gemsbok, dozens of red hartebeest and wildebeest, a couple giraffe, lots of bat-eared foxes and jackals, a couple eland, some waterbuck and a few steinbok.

Oh, and 9 lion of which we watched 5 magnificent males come off their successful hunt, and a cheetah coming off its successful hunt.

The birdlife was terrific and the Kalahari (northern black) Korhaan provided the most fun. It’s a spectacular bird that was breeding, which means screeching itself to death whether or not a female is around! There were also kori bustards, the second heaviest bird in the world, and numerous other colorful weavers, seed-eaters, chats and others.

One of the great highlights in coming to the Kalahari is learning about the San People. That means learning about their current political battles with the Botswana parliament for greater control of the reserve, of their successful protests of some overly patronizing lodges that want them to pretend to still live as they did before.

But also learning how they lived in the old days, because the traditional San’s manipulation of the Kalahari ecosystem is actually mind blowing. There is not a bug, root, leaf or piece of dust that traditional San did not use for some practical purpose.

What all this meant was that probably three-quarters of the things we saw and learned at Tau Pan were not available anywhere else in Botswana.

Equally unique and much more famous and popular, of course, is the Okavango Delta. We spent a half day boating deep into the Delta. In a nutshell the Delta is the Kalahari in flood! Ridiculous amounts of water gushing out of the mountains of Angola spill onto the Kalahari ecosystem which is essentially almost all of northern Botswana, and then spread out creating channels and islands.

The ground and substrata is the same as around Tau Pan, but of course with so much water a new ecosystem is formed.

We saw water antelope like the red lechwe, river otters, learned of the many grasses, reeds and papyrus that define this ever changing swampland, and saw some incredible things like the painted frog and infinitesimally small reed frog. (You can place 5 or 6 side-by-side on your thumbnail.)

Birdlife is fabulous, and we were fortunate enough to find the rare lesser jacana as well as the headliners like the malachite kingfisher and fish eagle.

In the adjacent Moremi Game Reserve we were introduced to “Big Game” and what an introduction our first morning when we encountered wild dog hunting reedbuck! What a thrill!

Moremi was where the birdlife was most spectacular, with varieties of colorful storks, bee-eaters, starlings, larks – you name it! Have you ever seen a green-capped eremomela or out-of-this-world green pigeon? We did!

Our five days here in Botswana have been breath-taking, and we’ve seen its three great ecosystems: the Kalahari, the Delta and the big game woodlands of Moremi. We’re going to cap it off with some more big game in southern Chobe starting tomorrow.

Stay tuned!OnTheDelta

OnSafari: The Cape

OnSafari: The Cape

CapeStellOur final days in The Cape included wonderful touring of the Cape of Good Hope and the wine country.

Although it was overcast for most of the day at The Cape, that doesn’t reduce too much the fantastic scenery. Starting at Cape Town’s popular Camp’s Bay, the group spread out wide getting pictures of this wide and beautiful white-sand beach.

Although I know that most Cape Townians think of Camp’s Bay as their principal swimming beach, I can also tell that the vast majority of people on it are foreigners and snowbirds from Europe. There are hundreds if not thousands of time-shares and luxury rental condos here, and tons of coffee shops and cafes.

This was a particularly vibrant weekend as it’s the week before Easter when many of the long-distance visitors first arrive.

We then began the spectacular Chapman’s Peak Drive. This cliff-hanging tourist route to the Cape of Good Hope passes over Hout Bay, and as usual, the black “shark” flag was waving, so the massive white-sand beach was mostly empty. The scenery here is breath-taking.

But there were remnants of last year’s fires, and while I’ve been coached by people that this is a normal cycle, I think it’s fair to say last year’s was extreme. It canceled the Cape Mountain Bike Marathon – the first time ever, and later we would here from some wineries how they were devastated.

But today it was drizzling! The drought is broken, although there is still a moisture deficit as El Nino slowly fades.

We rode the “Flying Dutchman” to the overlook of the two great oceans, and I recounted to everyone the “Age of Discovery” and fascinating history of the 1400-1500s culminating in Bartolemeu Dias’ rounding of these turbulent seas.

Everyone gazed into the vast ocean that continues to Antarctica, a distance nearly ten times that from where Antarctic ocean voyages leave Ushuaia in Argentina!

We then went to the penguins at Boulders and that’s always so much fun! They were out in full force, if you can say that of a dismal looking and slow-moving penguin! The place was packed, nearly shoulder to shoulder with tourists, but there were hundreds of penguins on display, completely oblivious to their admirers.

Today we visited Eagle Encounters, one of my favorite stops in The Cape. This remarkable raptor rehabilitation center has literally saved the endangered Cape Vulture. Our special private tour by falconer Donald is such fun!

Starting with the Jackal Buzzard, Donald flew Cape Vultures, a barn owl, a gymnogene, a rock kestrel and finally the not-native American vulture that was confiscated from a collector in Cape Town.

As he himself said, the birds all “love him” and that’s why he can show them off – how they fly, how they look and how obediently they stand on our heads!

We had two wine tastings, one at the Cape’s second oldest vineyard and a full cellar tour at the lovely Lanzerac where we’re staying. The group also had several hours in the lovely Afrikaans town of Stellenbosch, so they could visit restored homes from the 17th Century and enjoy some real Afrikaans food for lunch!

Tomorrow we finally get into the bush of Botswana. Stay tuned!

OnSafari: Apartheid

OnSafari: Apartheid

apatheidApartheid is in the spotlight of most sightseeing for visitors to South Africa. It’s not a pleasant tale, but visits of the sort my group took to the Apartheid & Hector Pieterson Museums in Johannesburg and the District Six Museum in Cape Town are uplifting.

Because today’s story of apartheid is how it was ended, and how it must be understood and remembered to prevent it from happening again … anywhere.

Those in my group who visited District Six in Cape Town were led through those dark years in the “Mother City” by resident Joe Schaffers who recounted his personal story.

District Six was one of the oldest and most integrated communities in Cape Town. Residents were often fifth or sixth generation residents and from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

They were professionals and blue collar workers. They were commuters and local tradespeople. They embodied an enormous variety of religious groups, from Muslim to Jewish to Christian to Sikh and others.

Borne of the earliest days of Cape Town, many District Six residents carried at least a bit of the legacy of the 18th Century Malay slaves imported to The Cape by the Dutch colonists, although before the 1960s slavery was a topic residents were more prone to hear in discussions of early American than early South African history.

But apartheid changed all that.

“Digging Deeper” is the permanent exhibition theme of District Six as it tirelessly reminds South Africans and visitors alike of the barbaric attempted destruction of this community of 60,000 residents – a tenth of the city’s population in 1966.

The district became an official political municipality of Cape Town in 1867, nearly a century after its earliest residents settled there. Then, almost exactly 100 years later in 1966 the South Africa apartheid government advised the 1900 families living there that they were being “removed” – by designated race – to ghettos outside the city.

They were to be separated and removed so that whites controlling the apartheid government could develop this prime real estate in the city for themselves.

To me personally one of the most stinging parts of this story is that there was hardly any protest by District Six residents. There were frantic attempts by many to be excluded from the removal, or to be granted new race designations to assure removal to better ghettos, or to preclude the action by the government by moving elsewhere themselves, first.

But there were no protests – violent or otherwise – as characterized the opposition to apartheid in Johannesburg (Soweto).

Those of us who visited the Apartheid and Hector Pietersen Museums learned of these heroic oppositions. All of them began non-violently, but when police shot and killed 600 secondary school students in June, 1976, for protesting a change of language instruction from English to Afrikaans, the bloody imprint to revolution was intractably laid.

The individual stories in the actual places where this history took place is a moving experience for anyone. Personally I think it’s uniquely important today.

The immigration problems effecting Europe, much less South Africa itself (see this earlier blog of mine), and the immigration issue central to the American political campaign are all analogous to the issues that birthed apartheid.

“Apartheid” is an Afrikaans construction meaning “apartness,” a belief that society best develops when its people are separated by race. Apartheid was brutal, effective, and “legal.”

Apartheid was condoned not just by the majority of white South Africans, but by many Americans like Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan. It was opposed by many, if not more Americans, too, like Richard Lugar and Ron Dellums.

But apartheid has absolutely zero place in modern societies. Perhaps when the Neanderthals were fleeing the Denosovians it might have been useful. But the world today is both actually and conceptually far too congested to think we can live and develop apart from one another.

I’m extremely proud of my fellow travelers, today. Most vacationers don’t schedule much if any of their precious R&R to enter the darknesses of the past, but that’s what’s necessary for any traveler who visits South Africa and wants to understand it.

OnSafari: The Blue Train

OnSafari: The Blue Train

worcester vineyardsFor the last two days we’ve been traveling on the Blue Train, one of the world’s premiere luxury trains.

We boarded the 10-car exclusive train in Pretoria and headed south through the heavy industrial areas of the Transvaal. I think people are impressed by the extent of South African industry, but what was a surprise to all of us was the massive Vereeniging Steel Works which went on and on as the train rushed past.

Michelle, Carole and Deborach Sullivan; Jan Lavacek and Marc Whitehead
Michelle, Carole and Deborach Sullivan; Jan Lavacek and Marc Whitehead
But it was mostly vacant and eerily quiet. The plant closed last September, terminating 400 jobs. Reason? Steel’s cheaper if bought from China.

Soon, though, we were entering the great southern end of the country’s massive bread basket. The first part was almost as depressing as seeing the closed steel plant, because the area has been suffering a severe drought. For the first time in most people’s memory, South Africa will be importing corn this year.

But as if to turn around our sinking moods, we entered a fierce thunderstorm with lightning and hail. It lasted most of the afternoon, and as the train left the heavy overcast the beautiful sunset introduced us to the beginning of the Great Karoo.

The train has been operating since the 1920s in one form or another. There is now another luxury train, Rovos Rail, but I prefer this less pretentious and more business-oriented service.

Prices are similar and with today’s extremely depressed Rand, the train was so full that people were waiting outside hoping that we didn’t arrive!

After your private butler takes you into your elegant suite and shows you all the bells and whistles, the train begins and I for one, ordered a big pot of tea with cold milk!

It came in elegant, heavy silver and was among the best tea I’ve ever had in South Africa!

The group would meet from time to time in the Club Lounge car. All drinks, even premium champagne and spirits are included, and when I entered the car one table was piled high with sweets and pastries.

Lunch is as big as dinner (unfortunately) but it gave us all the opportunity to try a variety of premium South African wines. The food was absolutely exquisite.

Wifi depended upon which area the train was speeding through, but if the area had wifi, we did, too.

I returned from dinner with my bed beautifully made and three large chocolates on the pillow!

I woke myself so that I could see sunrise over the Karoo. The Karoo is South Africa’s Mojave desert. I watched a number of raptors over the massive landscapes plus saw gemsbok, steinbok and springbok … and, of course, thousands of angora sheep.

What was most amazing were these sheep farms. A windmill provided water and solar panels provided electricity and they were all built near the train tracks and spaced, oh, maybe 25 miles apart!

It is outstandingly beautiful in a very lonely way, and I just couldn’t help but try to imagine the lives of these remote farmers. I was able to follow the route nearly mile by mile on my computer using wifi, and almost all of the handful of Karoo towns were settled in the mid 1800s by Boer trekkers.

After our final lunch we left the Karoo, climbed the jutting Swartberg Mountains, went through several tunnels (one 8 miles long) and entered a completely new world: the wine country, starting around Worcester.

It’s a landscape hard to beat anywhere in the world: lush, green vineyards under the cutting and ancient bare granite of the mountains.

We pulled into the “Mother City” about 35 hours after we left. What a wonderful, happy, relaxing and palate-extraordinary journey!

OnSafari: Joburg & Soweto

OnSafari: Joburg & Soweto

sakhumzi dancersWe spent the entire day touring Johannesburg and Soweto as I began my annual Cape/Bot safari.

We drove a lot, though the super luxurious areas and into the slums. We visited outstanding museums, including the Apartheid Museum and Hector Pietersen Museum. It’s an eye-opener for most first-time visitors.

I don’t think there’s any place in Africa that suffers from as many misconceptions and stigmas as Joburg. The city is immense, chaotic, congested and the smog got to me, today.

But parts of it like the suburb of Sandton where we’re staying are more luxurious than many of the finest suburbs of big cities in America. There are more private swimming pools per residence in Joburg than in Dallas. You’ll see more Benz’ and Porches than in San Francisco.

But we also saw the decaying side of the city that authorities are trying so hard to rehabilitate. The end of apartheid resulted in situations few negotiating its end anticipated.

The brilliance of the new constitution meant that refugees were welcome, and boy did they come literally by the hundreds of thousands! Downtown Joburg today is where these Nigerians, Somalians, Chadians, Zimbabweans and so many others eke out a difficult existence.

Technically, they’re all illegal, but also technically under the new constitution, they have the right to remain and enjoy public services if they weren’t detained when first entering.

So the city decayed rapidly. Crime escalated. South Africa doesn’t have the resources that say, Germany or Sweden has to provide for these immigrants and so they developed ghettos of extreme poverty and depravity.

I think it’s turning around, and some major banks and corporations like Anglo-American are relocating into the city center.

There are equally reversed misconceptions of Soweto. Most of Soweto is composed of lovely residential districts of what local residents fondly refer to as “matchbox houses.” They are all tidy, colorful, maintained and the dozen or so of separate districts all seem to display some unique style.

Commerce is booming in Soweto, from manufacturing industries to mom-and-pop corner stores. We lunched at a traditional restaurant called Sakhumzi while being entertained by some exceptional singers and dancers. “Sakhumzi” means “to build” or “builder” and is the perfect way to characterize Soweto, today.

But it was the power of the museums of the area that everyone will remember. Of course they all focused on the oppression of apartheid, so it was a rather heavy tour.

In addition to the Apartheid Museum, we visited Nelson Mandela’s first home in Soweto, the Catholic Church in Soweto which was essentially the gathering place for everything political, and the Hector Pietersen Museum.

This museum is named after the youngest child (he was 13) of 600 students shot by police in the June, 1976 Soweto uprising.

I’ve been to all these place before, but it was also a very special day for me. This is the day my state, Illinois, votes in the presidential primary. The parallels of my country today with pre-apartheid South Africa are chilling.

Jan Smuts and J.M.B. Hertzog were both conservative Afrikaners (like say, Bush and Romney) who were ousted from power by a tricky mad dog, D.F. Malan, who like Trump rose to power on an angry and confused constituency. Malan once in power quickly crafted what became one of the most onerous, oppressive societies in history.

I really think it is a remarkable comparison. The realization sent chills down my spine.

Tomorrow we board the Blue Train, one of the most magnificent, luxurious trains on earth, for our 2-day journey to the Mother City, Cape Town! Stay tuned!

The Business of Safaris

The Business of Safaris

Business of SafarisMy 30-day safari convinced me that Kenya’s tourism has been reborn and that Tanzania better look out, but that they both might be in trouble.

For a month I guided nonstop 17 enthusiastic travelers – almost all veterans – through my favorite wildernesses in Kenya and Tanzania. All my objectives including finding the great migration and showing off the new dynamic Nairobi were met.

My clients have all vowed to return yet again!

But such enthusiasm needs stoking, and the East African tourism industry is sorely failing in this regard.

Today think of Kenya as a splendid adventure with extraordinary comfort, and think of Tanzania as wilder but more difficult. The distinction is just what an investor needs to create imaginative programs for a wide market.

But both Kenya and Tanzania are not doing so, in fact, they may be doing just the opposite: destroying their own precious industry.

Kenya’s ability to maintain its wonderful wildernesses is extraordinary, given the contemporary pressures of its unbelievably rapid development. That development will leave Tanzania in a deep wake, but it will be meaningless if Kenya can’t get under control a number of destructive political pressures.

These include nearly laughable mismanagement of the Mara (separated from the Kenyan Wildlife Service-KWS) and the unfettered development projects like the new railway through Tsavo or the planned labyrinth of national highways built with little concern for the wilderness.

Tanzania on the other hand needn’t worry for the time being that its great northern wildernesses are jeopardized by development: Global success stopping the Serengeti highway three years ago more or less proved this.

Tanzania’s disadvantage vis-a-vis Kenya lies mostly with its very dysfunctional and corrupt management of its wildernesses. TANAPA and TAWIRA look like expelled primary school dropouts compared to Kenya’s fabulous KWS.

Both countries suffer from corruption and both country’s executives and legislatures are implementing admirable policies to stem it. But I think Tanzania’s considerably worse off in this regards:

Poor implementation of the national park Smart Card program, seriously deteriorating park road maintenance, summary ending of long-time research efforts (particularly with lions) in the Serengeti, and seemingly random allocation of land leases in wilderness territory are just a few of Tanzania’s most serious problems, all rooted in corruption.

Tanzania’s greatest asset is it wildness. Kenya’s most popular parks, Amboseli and The Mara, are over developed, a legacy of years of corrupt allocation of land leases and a dysfunctional multi-tier system of wilderness management. The animals that have survived this congested development have become extremely habituated to tourists, and that’s not all that bad.

But it means that as Kenya’s tourism increases, so will the number of cars. It’s taking increasingly imaginative itineraries to avoid the crowds even now during a tourism decline. The payback to the tolerant tourist is that at the end of the day accommodations at every market level are considerably better than in Tanzania.

Kenya’s accommodations, food, customer service and reliability are much better than Tanzania’s.

Still, the tourist who like myself is more interested in the wilderness, can hardly discard Tanzania for these shortcomings. The much less crowded parks (Ngorongoro being a singular and notable exception) means that the animals are wilder, the landscapes less scarred and – from my point of view – results in a much more exciting trip.

Both countries, though, have what could be an insurmountable obstacle to healthy tourism growth: escalating prices.

Global resellers of East Africa are either conceding market share to Asia and South America, or they are so shaving their itineraries (like OATS or Road Scholar) that all that’s left is but a skeleton of the landscape, people and animal contrasts that distinguishes a classic safari.

Wilderness travel in particular is booming in places like the Amazon jungle and Alaska where prices have actually fallen over the last decade. African safaris now vie with Antarctica as the most expensive destination in the world.

Both the Tanzanian and Kenyan governments take some of the blame for slapping high taxes and escalating entry fees on tourists, relative to other wilderness destinations. But the bulk of the blame rests with poorly schooled investors who have never bet on the medium or long term.

Short term investing requires a high return, and believe me, they’re getting it in East Africa. It also leads to knee-jerk increases in price when demand falls. I can’t think of another place in the tourism world where this is the case. No one is prepared in East Africa to “weather the storm” or “restructure” or “look to the future” when the ‘future’ is hardly more than tomorrow.

The Serengeti remains my favorite place in the world, and the myriad of almost just as exciting places in both Kenya and Tanzania can still provide the traveler with the most unique and exciting vacation on earth.

But that will not depend upon the market, but upon the East Africans who can exploit it if they want to. It’s up to the politicians to stem corruption and infuse real professionalism onto the industry; Up to the business people to begin treating the place as a home they plan on building for future generations, rather than a foreign lark easily disinvested.

I think you know what I’m hoping for.
– Johannesburg

OnSafari: 4 Days in the Serengeti

OnSafari: 4 Days in the Serengeti

LotsofLionsOur last two days of game viewing in the central Serengeti were fabulous! Lion hunts, five leopards, rare birds and some of the most magnificent scenery on earth!

We left Ndutu and headed for the Moru Kopjes. This is the prettiest place in the Serengeti, with lovely small bush forests and meadows nestling giant granite kopjes that sculpt all sorts of shapes and sizes into the landscape.

My principal object in going is to visit two sacred Maasai sites: the cave paintings where newly initiated warriors are instructed by the outgoing warriors of their tasks and responsibilities, and Ngong Singing Rock, the legendary place that Bernard Gzimak convinced Maasai residents to leave much of what is now the Serengeti in 1972.

We did that, and it’s both heart-breaking and hopeful to hear the tales that grew the Serengeti at the expense of Maasailand.

But we also saw a rhino in the Moru! Now that’s something, because truly wild black rhino are about as rare a wilderness event outside of the Ngorongoro Crater that anyone can have, today.

And in the Moru we saw ten lions in two trees! It was actually quite hilarious and was right on the main Sopa road off the main Seronera road just after entering the Moru. The family had obviously finished off a pretty significant kill, because every one of their bellies was big.

After a lion kills and feasts (often increasing body weight by a quarter to a third) it has to flood itself with water. I can only imagine how painful that must be. Then the lion starts to hyperventilate. Besides running down a zebra at break-neck speeds, digesting hunks of unchewed meat is the hardest thing a lion body has to do!

Then, it tries to sleep. In this case, ten of them were flung about two trees on opposite sides of the road, all looking terribly uncomfortable. It was hard to position the belly so that it didn’t pull them off the branch, and once positioned, the rapid breathing made the branches move up and down as if the tree were alive!

In our last two days in the Serengeti we also saw five leopard. I hesitate to say this, because I guide many safaris to many of the same places where we never see a single leopard!

We also watched a lion hunt from start to finish and racked up more than 30 lions in three days of game viewing. For all you prospective first-timers to Africa, beware: that’s very unusual.

I think you can figure out by now that this was an extraordinarily successful safari, and I’m pressing myself to figure out why.

There’s no question that luck has a lot to do with it. But I know for certain from this group that client attitudes might be just as important.

We averaged 10-12 hours of game viewing each day. When I say that, I get myself tired, but we didn’t feel tired at the time. Everyone was so enthusiastic and the wilderness and its magnificent animals so beckoning. This is my favorite time of the year, when the rains that began at the beginning of the year get properly organized.

So the veld is so incredibly beautiful. The skies, especially at sunset, are so heart-thumpinginly magnificent. And the dramatic, loud and powerful storms disrupt hardly a couple hours of the day, a break normally at lunch time that we really need.

There are baby animals everywhere. We found one group of female wildebeest and it seemed like virtually every one had a calve! We saw baby giraffe that looked at us with as much curiosity as we had looking at them, and cheetah cubs hardly a couple weeks old that walked up to our vehicle almost meowing!

The Serengeti is my favorite place in the world and it lived up to every hope and demanding expectation I had for this marvelous group of people traveling with me.

Our last camp fire: Bill Vogt, Caroline Barrett, Connie & Harvey Fox, Cindy & Jim Pease, Steve Farrand, Judy & Bill Melville, Kathy & Dave Littlejohn, Lynn Vogt, Brian Barrett & Judith Fasani.  As usual, I’m holding the Tusker.
Our last camp fire: Bill Vogt, Caroline Barrett, Connie & Harvey Fox, Cindy & Jim Pease, Steve Farrand, Judy & Bill Melville, Kathy & Dave Littlejohn, Lynn Vogt, Brian Barrett & Judith Fasani. As usual, I’m holding the Tusker.

OnSafari: Serengeti Day 1

OnSafari: Serengeti Day 1

WildeLionKillDay 1 of 4 in the Serengeti: a lion kill, a cheetah kill, and most exciting of all, a reasonable hunk of the great migration!

The reason we found the migration was because the people I’m with are so incredibly enthusiastic. It’s that simple!

I expect that most of the migration is in the center of the park where we go, tomorrow. We’re currently in the far southwest. The information we garnered from the many other drivers here at Ndutu Lodge, as well as from rangers and what we could pick out of the radio traffic, suggested no large herds in this area.

So we headed out at dawn ready for anything … but the great herds.

We saw five cheetah and ten lion including a lion kill and a cheetah kill plus an unsuccessful cheetah hunting a baby wildebeest. That event failed when the mother wildebeest intervened at the last possible moment.

We had a fabulous breakfast on the plains packaged for us in Ndutu’s famous picnic baskets and we’d been out for five hours. We were an hour from camp so I was ready to call it a morning and return for lunch, but…

…Justin, one of my outstanding long-serving driver/guides, heard over the radio that 3 days previously wild dog had been seen another 90 minutes out from the lodge. Was anyone interested? That was in a pretty remote place.

The chances seemed extremely thin. It could mean at least an 8-hour game drive and no lunch!

Soon the entire group, all three vehicles was on board with the idea, and off we went – in the opposite direction of lunch!

Hardly a half hour later I began to see a very large number of wildebeest.

Most of the wildebeest we had seen until now were in wildly dispersed migratory files heading to the center of the park, where we expect to be tomorrow.

Twice, lost baby wildebeest had attached themselves to us, once on the Lemuta plains and once this morning at breakfast.

On the plains the poor 2-week old ran itself close to death trying to keep up with our speedy Landcruiser. We finally led it to a water hole with hyaena looking on.

This morning we were packing up breakfast when another two-week old showed up blarting. It pranced back and forth hardly 20 feet away from us. There were no other animals near us, much less its mother.

There are all sorts of reasons baby wildebeest get separated from their mothers, but one important one is that the migratory files are moving so quickly; and they were all moving in the same direction. I was pretty convinced that the big herds were all in the center off the park.

But before long on our extended trek to find wild dog we were among very large herds, not just of wildebeest, but zebra, gazelle and all sorts of other animals. We probably passed 500 eland.

Everything was located in and around the Kerio Valley, west southwest of Ngorongoro not really too far from the village of Endulen. Nobody suggested this area to us. None of the radio traffic or driver/guides or rangers even thought that part of the migration would be here.

The main reason no one knew about this is precisely because no one travels to this place! It’s deemed far too far from established tracks or lodges. The only reason we found it, is because my group is so tirelessly enthusiastic!

Five people have been with me for 30 days, yet they were among those lobbying for staying out!

So no, we didn’t see the wild dog. My predictions on that count were right: the chances of finding some family of animals in a place they were three days previously is ridiculously slim.

But it was just the excuse these wonderful adventurers needed to stay out, go further, do more. And what a reward we got!

OnSafari: Crater Drama

OnSafari: Crater Drama

elechargengorongoroForty very large elephant running six miles from one northern end to the southern end of the crater intersected the road endangering our early morning game drive.

We stopped to watch, and their trumpeting exploded all around us. The matriarchs of each of the four families turned to us, opened their ears and two charged!

Youngsters, one hardly a week old, didn’t know where to turn as the mothers confronted us. We held our ground; they were mock charges, and I knew that we couldn’t run from them if it were anything else.

We stayed quiet as they ran far past us, their trumpeting continuing and diminishing, the beautiful song of the red-naped lark finally penetrating their screeching.

The stillness of the early morning crater was forever unsettled. What had happened to them? I don’t know. It was only just after sunrise. No one else was on the floor but us. What had set them off?

It would be easy to say someone had tried to poach them, but that’s unlikely. Poachers don’t dare try to take down an elephant in such a large and wild group. We’ll never know. Perhaps they were from some distant place and had never seen the vast plains of the crater, moving their lives from one forest to another.

I just don’t know. But it was super powerful and heart-thumping. I just hope in the forests beyond the crater rim they’ll find some peace…

The rest of the morning in the crater was beautiful, perfect and normal. That’s quite abnormal!

About 25,000 animals were scattered marvelously among the mostly green plains and lush and verdant crater rim sides. There was a baby wildebeest for every two adults, 25 fat and sassy lions some licking deep hunting wounds, a giant rhino, hundreds of buffalo, black-backed and golden jackals, eland and hartebeest, hippo and elegant birds like the Hildebrandt’s starling and purple grenadier.

There are too many elephant in East Africa, and there are too many tourists in Ngorongoro Crater but it just can’t be missed. The crater is magical and often unbelievable, dense mixtures of animals and predators that would never be seen so close together elsewhere on the veld.

Nowhere else are the chances of seeing black rhino as we did so great. Nowhere do multiple lion families live so close together. Nowhere are zebra so approachable that you really could stick your hand out of the car and touch them.

Is this wild Africa? No, but it’s been this way for nearly a hundred years, ever since hunters have been restricted from the crater floor.

Many potential travelers on safari complain that they hear there are just too many tourists, that it’s too crowded. As tomorrow on this safari will show, there are many days – if not most days on safari that my convoy of vehicles is the only one on hundreds of square miles of veld.

But it’s true of the crater, because there is nothing else like it on earth, and it simply cannot be missed.
LunchTableNgorongoro

OnSafari: Tse-Tsed Tarangire

OnSafari: Tse-Tsed Tarangire

PeaseWatchingTarEleTarangire is the last place on earth for really big and wild elephants. We had amazing encounters.

We stayed in the southern part of the park where there are accommodations for only a few tourists. The vast majority stay to the north of Tarangire Hill.

Bill Vogt & Jim Pease photograph safari ants.
Bill Vogt & Jim Pease photograph safari ants.
There are plenty of elephant in the north, but most of them are residents there. They’ve come to know tourists. We saw several hundred there on our first afternoon driving south towards our camp. They’re just as large and beautiful as the ones in the south, but not as wild.

So most of our time was spent in the south among hundreds if not thousands of the last great giants of the earth. Some were friendly enough that we could approach fairly closely. One wonderful family seemed almost oblivious to us: The matriarch was engrossed scratching herself on a tree.

Her little one-year old even managed to get on the other side of the tree and mimic her!

But most of our encounters in the south aren’t quite as peaceful. We had many trumpeting us, several charges and many times had to keep our distance to avoid disturbing them.

Part of the reason for their anxiety is that there’s just too many of them. The elephant density is so great today in northern Tanzania that normal elephant behaviors are breaking down. Families have no choice but to spend some time near one another, something they didn’t do when there weren’t so many.