"Something Beautiful"

"Do you see the colors changing? Can you feel them rearranging? Amazing."

Last week we returned from what I only now realize was a dream vacation. I always thought that was a funny term - Dream Vacation. I mean shouldn't all vacations be dreamy? amazing and wonderful and care-free? The word vacation practically implies it - but we all know they don't always work out that way. Flights are delayed, luggage is lost, kids get sick. But even if none of those things happen and your vacation is smooth and relaxing, you may not actually be visiting a "dream" destination or fulfilling "a dream" in some other way.

When I was 8, my parents' friends were expats in Nairobi, Kenya. My dad took us out of school and we visited them there. We spent one week exploring Cairo and two weeks traveling around the biggest game parks in Kenya - in a land rover. My sister was 10 and my mom was 5 months pregnant with my little brother. No one we knew had ever done anything like that. Other than the (monstrously large) anti-malarials I had to take and the flat tire we got in the middle of the desert, I loved every minute of it. The safari animals, the tribesman who would trade their jewelry for PB&J sandwiches, standing on the equator and seeing Mt. Kilamanjaro.  Since then, I have always wanted (dreamed, in fact) to take my own children back there. 

After we returned from South Africa in October, we started researching some safari destinations for the Christmas break but somewhere between E's hectic work schedule and my over-committed volunteer schedule, the weeks had flown by without any progress. Everyone had their flights and their plans booked and we were still thumbing through the Let's Go Africa guide. In a last ditch effort to find something kid-friendly and available (Christmas is the high season for most of the game parks) we contacted the travel agent that had helped us with our Cape Town holiday. She pulled together an itinerary almost overnight and we went for it, and a bit blindly at that.

It is hard to summarize what an absolutely amazing, and dream-like vacation it turned out to be (pics here!). We started at Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa, about an hour from Port Elizabeth and spent almost four days on game drives seeing the most beautiful animals in the wild. We chose it primarily because it is known to have kid-friendly programs and even child-minding (yay!) but we discovered that the Reserve is all conservation land and only highly trained rangers can make the drives. This made the experience even more unique. Larger parks often allow self-drives which leads to the all too common issues that accompany irresponsible tourists - littering the parks, off-roading, antagonizing the animals for the sake of photographs, and the most horrifying problem - poachers. I thought poaching elephants had been dealt with back in the 90s but it is the rhino that is the most endangered. Poachers sneak in or sometimes chopper in, shooting the rhinos for their horns who many believe have medicinal value. Sadly, they could remove the horn in a way that would allow for re-growth but mostly leave the rhinos injured and defenseless or dead.

Every drive was a learning experience and one that allowed us to witness animals in their natural habitat. We saw the one remaining alpha male, on both sides of a 60,000 hectare park attending to his prides, jackals salivating over baby impalas, herds of elephants hiding in the bush to keep cool. The fact that an entire herd of elephants could hide from us for 3 days in amazing in itself! We learned a group of warthogs (and we saw dozens w babies) is called a sounder, a group of hippos is called a pod, and my favorite - a group of giraffes is called a journey. On one particularly cool rainy day, we parked the truck and watched a herd of giraffes and zebras frolic and play in the rain as countless springbok nibbled grasses nearby. The kids tracked lions, rhinos and elephants by studying their droppings and their footprints in the mud. We saw the only two cheetahs left in the reserve, perched in their favorite tree, hunting for their dinner. We took a sunset safari and found baby rhinos nursing with their mothers after dark. Every outing was different and every one increased our addiction for game driving - it never got old!

It was hard to leave Shamwari and the lovely families we met there but our next stop (pics here!) offered some much needed rest after days of 5am wake-up calls; a gorgeous sea-side resort called Oceana in Port Alfred. While also a game reserve, Oceana is one of the only game parks situated on the water - a rare environment for safari animals. While the kids had already seen countless giraffes, it was truly beautiful to see them against a crystal blue and virtually uninhabited ocean. Since there were no predators in the reserve (lions, cheetahs, hyena) the animals were calm and welcoming. Many drifted towards the trucks, some having actually been bottle fed as babies. We walked along an endless and uninhabited beach, played in the dunes, went to the spa, and ate...and ate! The kids loved the hotel's game room (shuffle board, billiards, the South African version of Monopoly) and we just loved the view. The rooms were almost entirely made of glass overlooking the reserve and the ocean. It was not uncommon to see ostrich and kudu roaming the grounds in front of the cabin. We even indulged in a horse-back safari, which is one of my favorite things to do. It was more of a "trail ride" since 8 year old K had only been on a horse a few times but it was fun to trot through the bush the way the animals did.

The last part of our journey was an 11th hour decision to see Victoria Falls (pics here!). Originally we wanted to visit Zimbabwe but there are still some political tensions there and the currency is fragile. Our tour guide suggested we see the falls from Zambia which was wonderful because our hotel - The Royal Livingstone was in walking distance from the Falls. It was the perfect time to go since the rainy season had filled the falls to a point which allowed us to admire its thunderous roar but still walk around it. Zambia is not unlike Nigeria in that most of the people are poor. The people have an extremely low life expectancy (around 40) and AIDS is still a major factor in national deaths. But they are a very proud and friendly culture. The service at the hotel was amazing and the tiny airport was shockingly easy to manage despite the national draw of The Falls.

The trip ended on a glorious note as we spent Christmas Day taking in the scenery and the endless rainbows The Falls provided. The kids loved the trip but the day was also bittersweet - knowing "Santa" had already come to Lagos in their absence was hard on their little hearts. Thankfully Mommy packed a few special gifts and we opted for an 'activity-free' day of swimming, eating and watching monkeys try to sneak into the hotel kitchen. 

For me, the most amazing part of this journey was not fulfilling a dream I had set for myself or my children - an African safari is an amazing experience under any circumstances. But watching my children play together incessantly for 3 weeks? Listening to my children coo and yearn for "home"? Which after 10 months of transition, was, and is, Lagos, Nigeria?

That is amazing.

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