On Safari!

On Safari!

I’m off to Africa! The next 6 weeks I’ll be posting from Cape Town, Johannesburg, the Okavango Delta and the Serengeti, among many other wonderful places in the east and southern parts of the continent.

The next four Mondays will be honored by blogs from the African expert and Wilson scholar, Connor Godfrey. But the remaining three days of postings each week will be from me on safari.

It’s remarkable how fast communications have changed, and how the opportunity for me actually posting material to you from the most remote parts of the Serengeti is now possible. (Fingers crossed!) But the advent of wireless communication literally hopscotched the slothful progress of land line communication throughout the continent.

Today there are more cell phones per capita in Kenya than in the United States. And in Kenya and much of Africa cell phones are used for much more than just talking: data transfer, wire payments and even malaria tracking!

So my ability to keep posting to my blog has been revolutionized in just a few years.

I’ll be guiding several safaris, researching a few new venues and consulting. I’ll be posting first from Cape Town next week, absolutely one of my favorite cities in the world.

It’s been a wonderful stint home during a winter of great amounts of snow and intense cold, and my African friends find it odd that I enjoy that kind of climate. Perhaps it’s the extreme, because in just a few weeks in Botswana the heat and humidity are likely to be pretty intense.

And there’s no question that the extremes distinguishing winter in Chicago are no greater than the extremes of thunderstorming and temperatures in the Okavango. And while I think such experiences are fun and valuable for the moment, they are mounting misery upon those who live there year-round.

How global warming is effecting the veld is something I’ll certainly be reporting on.

Stay tuned! The next blog will be from Cape Town!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.