Safari

A safari is primarily driving. If you have been to Yellowstone, it's surprisingly similar. Instead of a rented minivan, you have a Land Cruiser, with a driver who is also a guide. The Land Cruiser opens on the top so that you can stand up and look out.

You get up in the morning and drive out to somewhere where your guide guesses that there will be animals. Sometimes the animals are around every corner, like the illusion you always suspect they are creating in a wildlife show: On your right, Grant's gazelles! On your left, a family of warthogs! Just ahead, a herd of elephants munching acacia! Look, in the grass, a cheetah! Other times, you drive for an hour or more and see hardly a single animal, just an ocean of grass or a forest of vines or whatever the landscape is. This is tedious and hot and dusty and fairly bone-rattling, because the roads are all dirt tracks and very bumpy. Fortunately our driver is terrific with both animals and transportation.

You either have a picnic lunch out on the drive (packed by the lodge you are staying in), or come back to your lodge for lunch. I greatly prefer the latter, because I very much enjoy a couple hours of down time in the middle of the day. One day, for example, we got back for lunch at 12:30, and had until 4pm to rest, swim in the pool, write, do a little laundry, etc. Other days we didn't have that luxury; we were only there for a week, so sometimes we had to spend the afternoon driving on to the next place. On those days, we might be in the car for ten hours. That's very tiring. But the kids slept on the floor, and the scenery was exotic, so we bumped along and took pictures out the window.

We mostly stayed in lodges, which are beautiful old hunting-lodge type of places, with grand architecture and extraordinary settings. One was built into a kopje (rock "island" in the middle of the savannah), full of giant boulders and passageways through the rock, teeming with lizards and rock hyraxes and dwarf mongooses. Another was on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, and every room overlooked the crater, where the herds move with the cloud shadows over the crater floor.

Two of the nights, we stayed not in lodges but in "tented camps": these were some tents! They had full beds and bathrooms, in some cases quite luxurious. At these places, you had to be careful of unwanted encounters with wildlife, to the extent that a guide would always escort you to and from your tent. We were never troubled, but the noises at night made it clear this was not just a formality.