Africa Unscripted

From the age of 13 when I read my first novel set in Africa, I determined to get to the continent someday. I read The Covenant by James Michener when I was 16. It was that novel that really instilled in me a desire to explore the wide world; and it focused my dreams on southern Africa in particular. For most of my life Africa was at the top of my travel destinations list. When the movie, Out of Africa, came to theaters in 1985 I was newly married and assumed we would do a lot of traveling. No holiday's materialized so we separated a half-decade later, having vastly different perceptions of how we would live our lives. I watched Out of Africa every year or so and this movie, (Meryl Streep's character in particular) reminded me of my life-long dream to see The Dark Continent. It also inspired me to get out of my hectic life in Southern California. I moved to my own farm in Oregon at the base of the Cascade Mountains, where I resolved to become a writer just like Out of Africa author, Karen Von Blixen (writing under the pseudonym, Isak Dinesoen). Soon thereafter I journeyed to Nepal, via a week-long stay in Hong Kong, simply because it was the first exotic opportunity to present itself.

Back home on my land in the remote Oregon wilderness I wrote, though not as successfully as I'd hoped, and continued to indulge my love of adventure and international travel. Greece and Turkey, Chile and Argentina, Spain and Portugal, Costa Rica and Panama, even remotest Borneo felt my footsteps over the years. For whatever reasons, the daunting and expensive journey to Africa, though still at the top of my travel list, never materialized.

On April 22, 2007 I attended an Earth Day a presentation in Bend with guest lecturer, Dr. Richard Leakey, the famed white African wildlife activist and politician. As with many things Africa, Richard Leakey, along with his celebrated parents, was well known to me. It was such an honor to hear him speak. The topic that affected me most was his response to a question about whether the wild life and lands of Africa were still worth traveling half-way around the world to experience (Dr. Leakey was the primary force in saving the elephant herds in Kenya). He explained that although the state of Africa's wilderness and its animals was nothing like it had been just five or ten years ago, it was indeed still worth a visit. "However," he cautioned, "Another five or ten years and the wildlife will be all but wiped out". Riding our bicycles home from Leakey's talk, my life-partner, Bob, who had been to South Africa on a surf trip in 1993, said we must make a journey to Africa our highest priority. He was well aware it was the one place I most wanted to visit.

We were about to settle on a departure date for Africa in April of 2008--to take advantage of good surfing--when we learned that my younger sister was using some of her divorce settlement to take my parents to Zimbabwe to raft the famed Zambezi River. Their trip was scheduled for September 14, 2007, which is one of the best times of year to paddle this gigantic river. Since we had hoped to make our way to Victoria Falls for a similar trip down the Zambezi, we decided it might be my last opportunity to paddle a major class V river with my parents, who are both in their seventies. We had taken a similar family trip to Chile in 1993 to raft the Bio Bio River so a reunion of sorts sounded like great fun. The only problem was that the best surfing season in southern Africa is June through August. In order to accommodate my desire to raft and see the wildlife in the African spring/summer (when viewing options are at their best), and get in a good surf trip, we would have to leave for Africa by August 1, at the latest. This would give us four to six weeks of prime surfing, then a couple of weeks to raft the Zambezi. We figured we would then need to spend the month of October on safaris, and perhaps climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

By the time we settle on this three-month timeline and secured a perch on the same rafting expedition as my family, it was June. This is an extremely busy month for Bob and I with the additional duties of operating our fly fishing camp at the ranch added to our regular work commitments. We managed to get the major "must do" tasks out the way just in time: Short-term renters for our little home in Bend, a caretaker for the ranch and our pets, $1,400 worth of immunizations, a couple of custom-built surfboards ordered from Spider Boards in Durban, and the securing of some inexpensive airline tickets from a good friend of ours who works for Delta Airlines. Buddy passes in hand and an ETD of August 1, we now had less than a month for any other preparations. At the last minute we found a vehicle to buy in Cape Town that would suit our needs. Our only activity that required pre-booking was the rafting trip, which would leave Victoria Falls on September 15. Without any more time to read, research, plan, arrange, or schedule, we headed off for Africa, unscripted.