ALASTAIR + LALEINIA

We have been so blessed recently to have been on many safaris. We have been in numerous trucks, big and small, a boat, and even on quad bikes, but now was the time to saddle-up and head off into the bush on the back of an elephant! We were picked up from our backpackers lodge early in the morning of our thirty-fourth month wedding anniversary, and made our way out of town with a bunch of older travelers who were in Zimbabwe as part of a group tour. Adventurous older people, we like it! Upon arriving at a massive, beautiful wooden lodge with a thatched roof, we were led into a room to receive instruction about our ride. We were excited, and even a fifteen minute chat on elephant safety couldn’t dampen the mood. Shortly after, we were introduced to a couple of elephants, in order to ease any nerves that we might have had. We were really excited, and so this nerve suppressing exercise just fueled our fire even more. After touching a massive elephants head and trunk, we were...

We said goodbye to Botswana and headed to the Zimbabwean border, where we spent the next thirty minutes being harassed for some paperwork that we weren’t quite sure that we needed to get the rental car into the country. After speaking with the rental company a few days later, it turns out that we did need the paperwork and got it for a good price! It goes to show that sometimes, what you might think to be a rip off, swindle, daylight robbery, might actually be exactly what you need. It would help if the guys in question looked somewhat professional, but my ways are not your ways, saith the Zimbabweans at the border, and this was another case of having to go with the flow! After passing through the border with our new shiny visas, we were off to the falls. Between the border and the falls is the middle of nowhere (luckily we could check this off the bucket list). The bush was thick and formed kind of a roofless tunnel through western Zimbabwe. We did see about seven or eight e...

One of the travel rules that we have lived by is to make the most of wherever you are. Chobe and Victoria Falls are quite close to the northeastern section of Namibia, known as the Caprivi Strip, and since we don't suppose that we will ever be in Namibia again (unless we get to hike the sand dunes at some point), we wanted to visit. We knew almost nothing about the Caprivi Strip, apart from that there is one village called Kabbe on Google maps, which we thought we would try to find. We figured that if we found nothing there, we could write it off as Bucket List item #7: Be in the middle of nowhere. Funnily enough, as we were about to leave for Namibia, we were approached by a Japanese guy called Kotaro who wanted a ride into Kasane. When he found out that we were headed to Namibia, he asked if he could tag along and be left at the border. No problem! He was a really cool guy, but Alastair wishes that he hadn’t asked to look at Kotaro’s passport. It was so impressive that i...

Valentines day 2014 was definitely one of the best days of our almost three year marriage. Who knew that you could pack so much into twenty-four hours. While staying in Botswana, we stayed in safari tents a few miles outside of Kasane, a town that makes the most of its close proximity to one of the best national parks in the world. But we should repeat that. We stayed in safari tents, in the bush! Well, it was at a safari lodge, but either way, it was overgrown. Chobe has the highest concentration of elephants on the planet, with between seventy to eighty-thousand of Botswana’s one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand elephants supposed to be wandering the land. One interesting, and really cool thing about Chobe is that it has no fences, meaning the animals are free to come and go as they please. The lack of fences, along with the complete absence of paved road, made our experience really authentic. But as with any safari, there are no guarantees, and so we said our prayers and cro...

The next port of call on our adventure was to be Kasane, Botswana, which is a short drive and a ferry from Livingstone, Zambia. On our way, we really wanted to visit a small village, since we haven’t really seen the stereotypical village set up since we got here. We were hoping for mud huts in the middle of the bush, and we got mud huts in the bush! About twenty kilometers outside of Livingstone, we stumbled upon a small village that we think is called Simonga. From our car, we saw the straw roofs rising above the tall grass that lined the road, and figured that this must be the place. No sooner than we pulled over, about a dozen children emerged from the bush with massive smiles and excitement. We spent the next hour or so touring their small village. We started at the most important part, the football pitch, and moved on past the houses towards a small school, which had recently been built, but definitely not finished. The village and the school were so cool. The b...

Livingstone, I presume? We started what was to be the most amazing African adventure in Zambia. After the short flight from Johannesburg, we picked up our rental car and headed to the Zambian side of Victoria Falls. On our way, we stumbled on our first baboon (of about 200), and watched as it crossed the road, made a beeline towards someone’s cargo loaded bike, and tore into a sack of grain! We arrived at the Zambian side of the falls with a lot of excitement in our hearts and a lot of free space on our memory cards. Our first stop was to walk away from the falls and towards the Victoria Falls Bridge. The bridge was started and finished in the early nineteen hundreds, and at the time was the highest bridge in the world. (If our facts are wrong, blame the museum that we got them from, and Wikipedia of course.) It was built as part of the Cape to Cairo railroad, and was purposely built close to the falls. Cecil Rhodes, who apparently never saw the falls, insisted that it was b...