Africa Trip Kickoff

 I started writing this form somewhere above Nebraska on Friday afternoon. After a busy few weeks before my trip — helping prepare a 2nd grade classroom that had moved locations, packing, and a few other things — I’m finally en route.

For those new to reading my blog, I write it mostly for me but also to share with friends. It’s not a “public” blog and should not be findable by an online search. I will try to include photos but I’m expecting poor internet access so those may need to wait. I do appreciate comments as it’s much more fun to write “to people” than into a black hole. 

The flight itinerary is Portland - Atlanta - Johannesburg. Yes, I took the requisite photo of my shoes on the PDX carpet. 

I’m arriving about 48 hours early to acclimate to the 9-hour time difference and, I’d hoped, go caching with a local reviewer and will be staying in Pretoria. The latter has been modified and I will be caching on Monday with a local Cacher. 

Then I meet with the tour “pre-trip” group — I think 9 of us — and we fly a bit east for a few days to a spot near but not in Kruger National Park. Then back to Pretoria, and a flight north to Livingston, Zimbabwe with the whole group — there should be 14 of us — where we will meet our guide (AKA “TEL” which I think is travel experience leader). We’ll spend about 3 nights each at safari camps in Zimbabwe, Zambia and two in Botswana before concluding the tour at Victoria Falls. 

———

The flight from Portland to Atlanta was fine and I had time for a leisurely trip from terminal A to terminal F (finding 8 of the 10 adventure lab locations). The flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg was great! I had upgraded to a legroom seat and was fortunate to have a vacant middle seat next to my window. Arrival, customs, baggage retrieval and transit to hotel were pleasantly uneventful — the one surprise was that I actually deplaned, hiked to customs, and cleared customs before any bags reached the carousel. And I had the bonus of getting to wait for two other passengers which gave me time to log the virtual cache that was where we were waiting … so officially I’ve now found caches in 69 countries (also logged some adventure labs). 

I have already learned a few things in South Africa:

1. Yes, I received a stamp in my passport for entering South Africa.
2. I’d meant to look it up but confirmed my suspicion that this is a drive-on-the-left country. 
3. Similarly, the hotel lobby is on the ground floor (floor 0) and my room is one floor up, on the 1st floor. 
4. Opening the bottled water requires an “out and up” motion. Just up won’t work. And twisting breaks the mechanism. Oops.
5. My Global Entry card is very useful for onepurpose, but it will not run the elevator at the hotel.

It’s now 11pm so I’m going to call it a night. Looks like there’s a tour to Soweto and the Apartheid museum that I may go on tomorrow. 

Hmm. 5am Sunday. I couldn’t attach the photo from Safari but I was able to using Google. Go figure.