Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
–African proverb.
Antelope Park
It’s official: we’re returning to Africa!
Destinations picked, deposits paid, flights booked. The luggage that has stood empty in the corner of our house, mocking me daily since our return for unpacking it in the first place, can rest easy; they’ll soon enough be called up for active duty. We’re going back! Now I just need to go dig up the zip-off pants from out back in the garden where they’ve been buried since a failed attempt to burn them. I simply had no idea they’d be so difficult to set fire to.
We’re happy to announce that Getaway Magazine has invited us to be contributing blog writers for their wonderful travel blog, and to share some of the stories, advice, and lessons learned from our honeymoon travels in Africa.
You can read our first post — a recap of our time volunteering for ALERT at Antelope Park — here:
We’re so very happy to see Milo, Moyo, Wakanaka, Lewa + Laili, the Southern Coalition, and the Honeymoon Pride featured alongside other great photos of penguins, sea turtles, sharks, and rhinos, and it warms our heart to be back alongside our lion friends in Africa on an otherwise cold and snowy day here at home.
Well, color us happy! We’ve been awarded GoAbroad’s Blog of the Week. How awesome is that? Pretty [redacted] awesome!
Here’s what they had to say about Africa or Bust!:
This week’s GoAbroad Blog of the Week, Africa or Bust!, comes from two lifelong conservationists who knew they couldn’t just travel and see the sights of Africa as passive tourists, but needed to be involved hands-on in something meaningful and close to their heart.
Africa or Bust! initially was launched by Craig and Kim Young as a way to document their 24,000 mile round-trip to Africa and back on a honeymoon adventure–but we love that it developed into much more than that. […] The posts and photography of Africa or Bust! serve as a way to encourage others to make similar journeys, to travel and see the world, to become involved, and to find more about themselves along the way.
GoAbroad has been the leading international education and experiential travel resource since 1998. Our directories at GoAbroad.com contain tens of thousands of opportunities abroad — updated daily — including study abroad, internships, volunteer opportunities, teach abroad, language schools and much more. We receive an average of 1.5+ million visitors each month and our resources are used by students, study abroad advisors, faculty members and travelers all over the world.
-Gabriel García Márquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
6:05am, 9/26/11 – Woke up this morning to sirens. Not the sounds of lions. Shortly after, it started raining.
This is my journal entry from our first day back home from Africa: “6:05am, 9/26/11 – Woke up this morning to sirens. Not the sounds of lions. Shortly after, it started raining.”
Just those three short sentences set against an otherwise empty, blank page. Nothing more. I keep staring at it. All the other entries in my journal are filled with page after page of notes, asides, and recollections of our trip. Sometimes I’d find myself awake in the middle of the night, listening to the lions roar, when some missed detail or other insight about the previous day would come to me and I’d switch on the nightstand light in our river tent, hoping it wouldn’t wake Kim, to furiously scribble down my thoughts before they faded back beyond my dimly lit recollection and into the dark. But in the weeks since returning, I’ve opened my journal to find that, sadly though not surprisingly, no other words have seemed fitting enough to pen; its emptiness a reflection of my own.
Below is a list of some, but by no means all, of the many animals we were lucky enough to witness while in Africa, and even luckier to recall. Where possible, we’ve included a photo taken by us.
Sometimes in the quiet just before dawn, I imagined that I could hear the thunder of hooves on the plains or the full-bellied roar of a lion splitting the night, or see the platinum elephants crossing a river in moonlight. I felt twisted, cracked, and dry, like the roots of a tough desert plant ripped out of the hardscrabble ground. How could we not go back to Africa? How does one decide not to breathe?
-Mark Owens, “Secrets of the Savanna.”
Baby oliphant!
The next couple of days at Elephant Plains continue along just fine. Because of the bad weather – it’s been windy and rainy – we do not have to eat in the boma again. The weather is disappointing, but at least we don’t have to skip dinner. Craig and I each have our second spa treatment, and it’s as wonderful as the first. After dinner one night, we find a petal-filled bubble bath along with a bottle of champagne waiting for us back in our rondavel;another honeymoon treat from the nice folks at Ele Plains. Most importantly, we have incredible wildlife sightings every time we go out. We see more lions and more rhinos. We see several big herds of elephants including baby ellies – some only a couple of weeks old. We see giraffe and zebra, and all sorts of antelope. We see hippo pods and buffalo herds. We see vervet monkeys, but only hear the bark of the baboons. And we see two more leopards. One is Shadow, the daughter of Karula, whom we saw our first time out; and the following morning we see a big male leopard, although Richard quickly loses sight of it while vehicles from other lodges seem to stay on his trail.
Last night we tentatively decided to skip this morning’s game drive, which comes with a 5am wake-up call, to sleep in after all the travel and stress of our first day at Elephant Plains. But I don’t sleep well. Maybe it was yesterday’s stress. Maybe it’s because I didn’t hear the lions roaring, which I miss terribly. Maybe it’s because I left my heart in Zim and it’s hard to sleep without it. We’re not in Zimbabwe anymore, and that was supposed to be okay. This part of the trip is supposed to be our honeymoon – the luxurious, relaxing reward after our hard volunteer work. But it doesn’t feel like a reward. It feels more like a sentence, because all we can think about is that we want to be back in Zim with the lions.
The good news is, we make our flight to Sabi Sands; a private game reserve adjacent to Kruger National Park in South Africa. We were worried that between our tight schedule and “Africa time” we might miss our flight, which only departs once a day. But we are soon on a ten-seat, open cockpit, prop plane; Craig and I both feeling under-dressed and a bit rough around the edges. Judging from our fellow passengers, we have definitely moved onto a different level of African vacation. I can only hope that once we share our unique stories of volunteering at Antelope Park, everyone will forgive how we look, and we will become the disheveled-but-interesting guests at Elephant Plains Lodge. Two landings at bush air strips later and we move onto a smaller six-seat plane. The ride is not as rough as I expected, but it’s also not as scenic. I had visions of flying low over the landscape watching the animals roam the bush. To the contrary, the bush looks more like a charred desert landscape without an animal in sight. Craig and I are nervous and disappointed. Where are we going? Did we make a mistake? We know this is considered one of the top locations in South Africa to view wildlife, but the landscape looks desolate. To make matters worse, there’s a large fire below us and a smoke-filled sky above us. Our hearts are already heavy enough having left AP, Zimbabwe, and the lions. The only thing that was keeping me going was knowing we still had another adventure ahead of us, but the outlook doesn’t appear very promising.
If you like piña coladas, and getting caught in the rain / If you’re not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain / If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape / I’m the lady you’ve looked for, write to me and escape.
-Rupert Holmes, “Escape – The Piña Colada Song.”
It’s a little after 5am, and we’re on the road out to the airport in Harare to catch a 7am flight to Johannesburg. Anne’s driving us, and in the pre-dawn darkness she’s telling us why you should avoid driving around Harare when it’s dark and, if you have happen to find yourself on the roads then, why you should never, ever stop at red lights. Especially on Airport Road. “They wait for you at the lights, ya. Then they come rushing out of the bushes and smash your car windows, taking anything they can. Sometimes they’ll wait in the airport parking lot and cut your of your tires just enough to give you a slow leak, and then phone their friends down the road who are waiting for you to pull over and fix the tire. It’s bloody scary, ya! So that’s why you don’t see anyone stopping at the lights around here after dark.” As Anne’s regaling us with her favorite Harare tourist and driving tips we find ourselves behind an omnibus, and as the bus approaches the intersection in front of us it comes to a stop at the light, which is red, forcing us to do the same. “Oh no,” Anne says, “this isn’t good.” Too close to the bus’ back bumper, with another car approaching us from behind, we can’t easily navigate around it. So instead, we start scanning the nearby bushes, nervously waiting for the inevitable attack on our car. “This is not good at all, ya.”
kimpluscraig.com
