Our Excellent Adventure in Africa

Bob's Take on Things ... I went to school in Canada, so naturally my History lessons revolved around the British Empire and the British Commonwealth, in which several parts of Africa played an important role. We studied the Boar Wars, the colonization of South Africa, the Congo and Kenya ... I learned about Pretoria and Wildebeasts and the slave trade ... about diamonds and gold ... about Ghandi and the Cape of Good Hope and Dr. Livingston, I presume ... But actually going to Africa never made the leap from "Yeah, sure!" to "When?" ... until Bianca and I started talking about our travel fantasies ... Planning a trip like ours was no one-weekend task ... we started getting serious about it over 2 years ago now, and we both spent many hours on the internet and in bookstores soaking up everything we could find about present day Africa and how it got to be that way. The build-up was 12 months long, but the start of the trip somehow even seemed "normal" - packing, check-in, airplane food, airport hotels ... We flew to London, then Nairobi, then Entebbe ... and that's when it finally hit me, on August 4, 2002, that I was really in Africa. My memories tend to be moving images, not "snapshots" in time ... I remember people and places and things in motion, not as freeze-frames. And until the day I die, I will remember driving past the old airport in Entebbe, Uganda, and our guide saying "That's where the Israelis rescued the hostages ..." That's all Deo said, but those 7 words hit me like a ton of bricks: we're in Africa ... AFRICA!!! The next 5 weeks in so many ways are a blur ... a fully-grown male lion sleeping 5 feet from me, rolling over, and snoring ... 158 children in the grade 1 classroom, 3 to a desk, 3 to a book, 3 to a pencil ... an elephant reaching up with his trunk for the leaves at the top of a sapling, not 20 feet from us ... the 6' square dirt hovel that was one man's place of business, where he had rigged up a solar panel to recharge cel phone batteries for a fee ... 3,500 Cape Buffalo walking slowly away from the water, and the dust cloud they kicked up obliterating the sun ... meeting a man who was sweating profusely, working in the mid-day heat building a second house, this one for his second wife, right next to the house he shared with his first wife and their 4 children ... watching a crane swoop in for a landing in a treetop about 8 feet in front of me ... I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when a woman spit at us the instant she saw we were white ... I remember my heart swelling when a 10 year old boy asked me to look at his schoolwork - he had learned to write! I remember the fear of being stranded on a Ugandan mountain, in total darkness, wet, cold, hungry and thirsty, with no assurance that we could even start down again before dawn ... I remember walking with Bianca on the rocks at the water's edge, on the bottom of the world, thinking of the men in sailing ships who braved the storms off this coastline because it was the only way to get between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans ... they thought ... I remember walking down the same corridor Nelson Mandella walked down, looking into the 5 square meter cell where he spent much of his 27 years in prison ... I remember friends, before we left, asking why we would ever want to go to Africa ... well, the answer is simple, although I didn't know it until we got home. Because there was a lesson for me to learn in Africa, a lesson about myself and my place in the world ... We're all the same. The entrepreneur in the Ugandan village who gets 2 shillings to recharge a cel phone battery needs food on his table and has to buy a new tire for his bike ... the woman who hates me for the color of my skin has two children to cloth and feed and keep healthy ... the Ugandan school teacher complains of an over-crowded classroom and not enough books ... our guide in Zambia works 90 days straight then has 21 days off - he hitchhikes to his village so he can meet his daughter's teachers and celebrate his Anniversary and re-sign the lease on their apartment ... the former South African political prisoner who was our tour guide on Robben Island apologized to us - if he seemed distracted, it was because he and his wife were leaving on vacation that evening, leaving for 2 weeks in London -- "Have you ever been there, sir ...?" My problems and challenges and goals may have different price tags than the problems and challenges and goals of the people we met ... but they're the same. To all our friends who raised an eyebrow when we told them of our trip - that's why I went. And to all our friends in Africa -- we'll be back ... We shot over 4,000 photos, but even if you looked at every single one, you'd still only scratch the surface ... no set of images can begin to capture the experiences we had. One of those experiences was to behold the beauty of Africa and her people, and that the photos did capture, to the limits of our photographic abilities ... so take a look, and enjoy ... we sure did! Bob.
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Bob's Take on Things ...

I went to school in Canada, so naturally my History lessons revolved around the British Empire and the British Commonwealth, in which several parts of Africa played an important role. We studied the Boar Wars, the colonization of South Africa, the Congo and Kenya ... I learned about Pretoria and Wildebeasts and the slave trade ... about diamonds and gold ... about Ghandi and the Cape of Good Hope and Dr. Livingston, I presume ...

But actually going to Africa never made the leap from "Yeah, sure!" to "When?" ... until Bianca and I started talking about our travel fantasies ...

Planning a trip like ours was no one-weekend task ... we started getting serious about it over 2 years ago now, and we both spent many hours on the internet and in bookstores soaking up everything we could find about present day Africa and how it got to be that way.

The build-up was 12 months long, but the start of the trip somehow even seemed "normal" - packing, check-in, airplane food, airport hotels ... We flew to London, then Nairobi, then Entebbe ... and that's when it finally hit me, on August 4, 2002, that I was really in Africa.

My memories tend to be moving images, not "snapshots" in time ... I remember people and places and things in motion, not as freeze-frames. And until the day I die, I will remember driving past the old airport in Entebbe, Uganda, and our guide saying "That's where the Israelis rescued the hostages ..."

That's all Deo said, but those 7 words hit me like a ton of bricks: we're in Africa ... AFRICA!!!

The next 5 weeks in so many ways are a blur ... a fully-grown male lion sleeping 5 feet from me, rolling over, and snoring ... 158 children in the grade 1 classroom, 3 to a desk, 3 to a book, 3 to a pencil ... an elephant reaching up with his trunk for the leaves at the top of a sapling, not 20 feet from us ... the 6' square dirt hovel that was one man's place of business, where he had rigged up a solar panel to recharge cel phone batteries for a fee ... 3,500 Cape Buffalo walking slowly away from the water, and the dust cloud they kicked up obliterating the sun ... meeting a man who was sweating profusely, working in the mid-day heat building a second house, this one for his second wife, right next to the house he shared with his first wife and their 4 children ... watching a crane swoop in for a landing in a treetop about 8 feet in front of me ...

I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when a woman spit at us the instant she saw we were white ... I remember my heart swelling when a 10 year old boy asked me to look at his schoolwork - he had learned to write! I remember the fear of being stranded on a Ugandan mountain, in total darkness, wet, cold, hungry and thirsty, with no assurance that we could even start down again before dawn ...

I remember walking with Bianca on the rocks at the water's edge, on the bottom of the world, thinking of the men in sailing ships who braved the storms off this coastline because it was the only way to get between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans ... they thought ... I remember walking down the same corridor Nelson Mandella walked down, looking into the 5 square meter cell where he spent much of his 27 years in prison ...

I remember friends, before we left, asking why we would ever want to go to Africa ... well, the answer is simple, although I didn't know it until we got home. Because there was a lesson for me to learn in Africa, a lesson about myself and my place in the world ...

We're all the same.

The entrepreneur in the Ugandan village who gets 2 shillings to recharge a cel phone battery needs food on his table and has to buy a new tire for his bike ... the woman who hates me for the color of my skin has two children to cloth and feed and keep healthy ... the Ugandan school teacher complains of an over-crowded classroom and not enough books ... our guide in Zambia works 90 days straight then has 21 days off - he hitchhikes to his village so he can meet his daughter's teachers and celebrate his Anniversary and re-sign the lease on their apartment ... the former South African political prisoner who was our tour guide on Robben Island apologized to us - if he seemed distracted, it was because he and his wife were leaving on vacation that evening, leaving for 2 weeks in London -- "Have you ever been there, sir ...?"

My problems and challenges and goals may have different price tags than the problems and challenges and goals of the people we met ... but they're the same. To all our friends who raised an eyebrow when we told them of our trip - that's why I went. And to all our friends in Africa -- we'll be back ...

We shot over 4,000 photos, but even if you looked at every single one, you'd still only scratch the surface ... no set of images can begin to capture the experiences we had. One of those experiences was to behold the beauty of Africa and her people, and that the photos did capture, to the limits of our photographic abilities ... so take a look, and enjoy ... we sure did!

Bob.

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