A year of adventures

 I have friends who live in Zurich, Switzerland and though I haven’t gotten to see much of them in over a decade, they assured me they were happy for me to come stay as much or as little as I liked. How lovely! When planning my trip I decided to head to Zurich from Senegal, to stay perhaps 4 nights. After that I thought I might go to Italy, and I started my trip without a solid plan for my return - I just knew I’d be home before American Thanksgiving in late November   After over 3 weeks in Africa, I was looking forward to the more familiar-feeling world of Europe. I didn’t know anything really about Zurich and had no solid plans for my stay - I figured with a home base amongst friends, I could wing it a bit. Unfortunately a few days before my arrival, my hosts came down with Covid! BUT amazingly my friend’s friends agreed to host me - a total stranger! - at that short notice. I wasn’t really sure what it would be like, but I sure didn’t want to pay for a hotel in notoriously ...

 For my final night/weekend in Senegal, my friends and I took a trip out of town. They don’t have their car yet, so we hired a driver & car to pick us up, bring us to a small town, and bring us back north again. They dropped me at the airport on the way home. For all that - and his overnight stay! - we paid something like $160 USD. Senegal is pretty inexpensive to visit! Our trip took us to a pair of towns called, jointly, Joal Fadiouth. Our first trick was getting out of Senegal - traffic was awful even at 2pm on a Friday, and it took us 90 minutes to go about 5 miles. We had AC in the car but I could see the outside temp hit well over 100 - the hottest temp the car showed was 45c, or 113f, while we were stuck on the road. Once we cleared town it was another 90 minutes, but much more interesting views!  We stayed in a nice little hotel that had ocean/beach access (through a gate in the wall; I suspect the wall is necessary to hold back storm water and high tides) and a po...

 I knew Kenya was a mostly very coddled experience, but going to Dakar was still quite a shock to my system. First of all, it was hot and sticky and did I mention steamy? I don’t think I’ve sweated that much in my life. Apparently it can be quite temperate most of the year, but I happened to be there in the hot season.  Dakar is on the westernmost edge of the African continent. Then, of course, there was the language barrier - everyone there speaks French, Wollof, and other native languages. Some people spoke some English, but definitely not everyone.  Then there’s the traffic - Dakar is on a point of land, and a big chunk of its center used to be an airport and is still closed off. There are often only two main roads to get from one area to another, and they are just jammed with cars, buses, some motorbikes, and even a few two-wheeled carts pulled by a horse or donkey! At one point it took us 90 minutes to move 5km, and my travel companions marveled that it was the worst...

To wrap up our safari, our travel planner recommended we spend a few nights at a beach in Kenya. In all my ignorance about Africa, I hadn’t realized that beach vacations were an option!  The place we ended up going was located on an island on the southern Kenya coast, called Chale. We arrived at high tide and took a small motorboat over; when we left it was low tide and we rode in a cart pulled by a tractor across the sandy expanse! The time there was good but three nights was all we needed as there wasn’t a ton to do aside from swim and relax. I hopped in the Indian Ocean the first day and it was warm enough to go all the way in and swim. The second day I went out on a snorkeling boat tour, and the last day we hung out in a shady spot by the pool until it was time to go. It was pretty clearly some kind of shoulder season, as the place didn’t feel full at all.  Even though this was a fairly fancy place, and even though it was pretty hot, we didn’t have power in our cabanas fro...

 After our visit to northern Kenya, it was lovely to come back south and see green everywhere!  A note about our flights: it was all so casual and was made very easy for us. Our drivers knew where to find us and deliver us, and we just got moved around the country without tracking flight times or changes or anything. I imagine that’s because we were doing a package deal, but it was flawless.  Anyway: if you go on safari to Kenya, the place to go is the Maasai Mara. There’s a Conservacy (public/private partnership) and a reserve (federally managed), and it flows into Tanzania’s famed Serengeti.  We did two full-day game drives and 3 or 4 shorter drives. We saw everything in massive abundance, including baby animals - giraffe, elephant, lion, cheetah, warthog, hippo, topi, gazelle, zebra, wildebeest, baboon, hyena, jackal… and tons of cool birds too.  I can’t possibly post enough pictures and videos to showcase it all.  We stayed in the only lodge that’s full...

 This part of the trip was the best in some ways, and the hardest in others.  Best: bed, lodging setup, hangout area, pool, food, staff. We stayed in a tent camp up on stilts in trees! I could watch giraffes and elephants wander through beneath me at ground level. My bed was super comfy and the sunrise view was gorgeous. Hard: so so so dry. It’s a dry part of the country anyway, and they’ve had two years of severe drought. Our lodging had to truck in water for us, and told is that hot showers weren’t really available - we’d have to run (waste!) a lot of water before we got hot. Everything was brown and dry and a lot of the language of our game drives was about what they used to see and experience.  Still, the people were absolutely lovely, and they did put water in troughs for animals so we regularly saw an elephant herd visit. I felt conflicted about the fact that they had a (not enormous) pool - obviously not the best use of a scarce resource… yet part of getting in tho...