Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So last summer we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.
We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.
Our first three Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto, recounted my hike to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, and reviewed The Pillars of the Earth, a mesmerizing novel, by Ken Follett.
Today we recapture a once-in-a-lifetime experience: going on safari in Africa. We went to Chobe National Park (and stayed at the spectacular Chobe Game Lodge) in Botswana, via Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
At the time we went, Zimbabwe was a relatively stable country. It isn't anymore, and I wouldn’t recommend visiting it until things return to some semblance of normalcy. Most of our story took place in neighboring Botswana.
by Thomas J. Lee
One of the extraordinary joys of work that takes you around the world is squeezing in a few vacation days now and then in phenomenal, exotic places. Some years ago, making the most of one of my speaking engagements, I was able to realize a lifelong dream of a safari in southern Africa. Here is the story.
I had been invited to speak to a professional association and spend a day working with the senior management team of a global conglomerate based in suburban Johannesburg, South Africa. That provided all the excuse I needed to go.
With a nod from my daughter’s middle-school principal, we took her out of school for two weeks and flew to South Africa. After my work was complete, we spent several days in Cape Town—an absolutely delightful city—and then flew north to a small airport near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to see the incredible “smoking” cataract and to embark on our big adventure.
On driving from the airport into Victoria Falls, we could only chuckle at elephant crossing signs alongside the highway: a silhouette of an elephant with X ING printed below it. Only moments later our driver slowed, and our jaws fell slack as two trumpeting, rogue elephants lifted their enormous bulk out of the jungle and crossed the road just 30 or 40 yards in front of us. We certainly weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Several school kids in uniforms, walking home on a nearby path, briefly looked up, threw a few stones at the massive beasts, and then blithely continued on their way. A few miles on, we saw weary men pushing wooden barrows loaded with the day’s harvest and a gaunt old woman leading a donkey saddled with firewood, all on a dirt street in the center of town.
Setting out on safari the next morning, we entered Botswana at a remote border crossing awash in mud puddles. Over the next few days we saw unforgettable things.
One day, only a few hundred yards from the lodge in Chobe National Park, our open-air Land Rover pulled up right alongside a muscular lion on her own morning safari.
Two or three days later, we watched in the quiet of an African dawn as a steely-eyed lion stalked her prey right in front of us. For twenty or thirty minutes she inched closer and closer—one silent, slow, half step after another—to the rear of a kudu paralyzed by fear. Then in a few graceful bounds she lunged at his flank. He leaped high, kicked his legs, and barely escaped with his breath—for the moment, anyway. Our guide said the kudu was probably killed within seconds by another lion, waiting in ambush.
Later, we got real nervous real quickly—and boy did we ever get outta there fast—when a fierce, irascible hippo, the meanest of the mean, took a bead on our river cruiser and abruptly charged. He came at us with phenomenal power and astonishing speed. We lurched back into our seats as the boat whooshed away. This time our guide explained that the hippo was just trying to frighten us; had she been serious about attacking, she would have quietly capsized our boat and then drowned us. Hippos can hold their breath for 45 minutes, and they kill people for the sport of it.
On yet another ride, we edged too close to a slumbering crocodile on a riverbank. Suddenly a blur of teeth and hide flew at us like shrapnel. For an instant this ugly beast was two feet into the air: tail whipsawing, eyes glaring, snout wide open, its rows of teeth reaching for our flesh. Plunging 
into the water mere inches from our boat, and now stilled, he looked up at us with contemptuous regret (top picture). The attack took no more than two or three seconds. Never so happy to be ever so drenched, we looked at him with stunned and blessed relief.
Back on land, we watched matriarchal herds of elephant swaggering across the veldt. The littlest ones, scolded by mama, scurried along like Dumbo to keep up. Then we saw dozens of grazing impala freeze up in cold fright at the scent of an unseen predator. Giraffes, zebras, monkeys, and cape buffalo completed the wild menagerie.
Once we came upon a grandfatherly lion—his regal, resplendent mane straight off a Barnum & Bailey billboard. He had condescended to watch over a half-dozen cute but impudent little cubs. They were frolicking in their den, only a couple of arm lengths from our open-air vehicle. Then that aristocratic old king yawned so wide you could literally count his glistening incisors and the bubbles of saliva on his tongue. I exaggerate not the least.
Perhaps most memorably, we stopped to chat with four young Tswana bushmen (below left) working waist-deep in a rain-swollen Zambezi River tributary, just inside Namibia. The men were 
fishing with spears—literally hand-chiseled out of stone and tied together with strips of animal hide—and using dug-out canoes carved from tree trunks. Honestly, it looked like a scene straight out of National Geographic. I could not believe what I was seeing. Our guide, offering cigarettes and Coca-Cola for their courtesy, did double duty as a translator. They showed off their catch of the day: a huge tiger fish, surely enough to feed several hungry families. All four men smiled with evident pride.
The next day our long journey home began in a lashing monsoon. We bumped along a muddy two-rut path in the back of a leaking, tarpaulin-sheathed pickup truck. When we finally arrived at the airport 125 miles away, the electricity was out. Not to fret, there were no computers anyway. Finally, the sky cleared. We flew south to Johannesburg, north to Germany, and home.
That night, in the discomfiting comfort of a jetliner somewhere over the Sahara Desert, we could only wonder about it all. You cannot visit Africa without drop-jawed awe for her feral beauty, diversity, romance, size, and, most especially, abject pain. Africa is her pain.
In just the two weeks we were there, 40,000 children alone in sub-Saharan Africa alone died of malaria alone. Imagine, the equivalent of seven jumbo jets slamming into Mount Kilimanjaro every single day, all year long, and the world is almost mute on the tragedy. Getting shots for yellow fever and taking weekly malaria pills—not to mention watching aboriginal tribesmen fish for dinner with Pleistocene gear—swiftly brings you face-to-face with a starkly different world, and to a real appreciation for our own largesse of civilization, sanitation, industry, literacy, and medicine.
Fast forward now to 2010. A few weeks ago, I asked my daughter—now 23 and in law school—what her favorite memory was from childhood. Without hesitation, she replied the trip to Africa. “Even now,” she added, “there are times that I just can’t believe I went to Africa.”
Come to think of it, neither can I.
If you are in a position to take the time and spend the money to see Africa, you have my strong encouragement to do so. I can promise you that it will absolutely change your life. For now, avoid Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Congo. My choice would be Kenya or Tanzania. Be sure to consult with the U.S. Department of State or, for those of you outside the United States, your own national foreign ministry long before finalizing your plans. You will need inoculations against multiple diseases.
