The truth about overland safaris

If you asked me whether I could recommend an overland safari trip in Africa, based on my recent experience, I wouldn’t know what to say. Would I do it again? – Certainly, I would not repeat the long journey from Cape Town to Nairobi, but I would however gladly go for smaller trips, more focused on an area or a few neighboring countries – a tour of just Kenya and Tanzania would be an example. Many factors will influence your overall experience; here are a few ones that I considered important:

• Driving time – during “overland safaris” (as these trips are somewhat emphatically named), you will mostly sit in a truck together with the other passengers, traveling between two camp sites. Driving for 12 hours is not uncommon, 8 hours is the norm. You must usually wake up with the sun, except on few days when there’s either no driving, or the distance is short and there’s enough time to allow for a late breakfast. There isn’t always something to do at the destination –it’s often just a place to set up the tents for the night and wake up the next morning for another day of driving. Besides talking (if talking to your neighbor for 8 hours is appealing to you…), the only source of entertainment is reading – if reading in a moving vehicle doesn’t bother you, better bring a lot of books – you’ll have ample time for them.
• Road quality influences driving times (and most roads in Africa are bad indeed) but not significantly. It takes so much time to get between places because the distances are large and the trucks are not made to speed up. Nevertheless, some unpaved roads can be really trying – you bounce up and down in the seat, and run the risk of injury, if you don’t hold on to something when you stand up while the truck is moving. The overhead luggage compartments can become a source of flying books, shoes or food bags. Just about every single object in the truck is vibrating.
• Safari trucks come in a variety of comfort styles. Our trucks, owned by Wildlife Adventures, seemed to have been built in the 80s and not upgraded since. The seats were uncomfortable and didn’t recline. Some seats had previously broken and have been welded clumsily making them even more uncomfortable. Since all safari companies follow more or less the same routes, I had the chance to see many other truck models, and while they all seem to be similarly built, some were obviously more modern and more comfortable – with reclining seats, on-board kitchen , opposing seats and a table (so people could play cards), and individual safe boxes. The higher-comfort trucks were more expensive as well and ours wasn’t the most beat-up truck around, so there was not much to worry about.
• Group size - Comfort is as much about the truck as it is about how many people you travel with. If every single seat on the truck is taken, you’ll be likely to feel ill at ease at one moment or the other. Out truck has 20 seats; we started the tour with 17 people; 8 of them were just visiting Namibia and left in Windhoek. For the rest of the trip, although we changed guides, dropped off and picked up some people, we remained 9 passengers. Each had two adjacent seats if needed. We took advantage of this generous seating and sprawled. The most crowded truck we met en route was one belonging to the Africa Travel Co. They had 26 passengers and 2 guides. Quite the madness!
• People – they can make or break your fun. Being the antisocial type that I am, I didn’t like any of my tour-mates in particular but didn’t dislike anybody excessively either. The ratio of men to women was clearly tipped in the favor of women, and the only guy of my age was an Aussie, whose heavily accented English I could barely understand – my fault not his, I guess. I didn’t make any friends. There was some animosity in the group, but nothing too conflictual; we survived the whole 6 weeks without killing each other. Nevertheless, if you doubt you can share quarters with the same people, day in, day out, for 6 weeks, think twice before booking.
• Food – is the essential ingredient whose lack of quality or quantity can ruin the trip no matter how beautiful the landscapes and the animals are. The more people you share the truck with, the higher the chance that there isn’t enough food for everyone at every meal (and this is one of the main complaints about some of the safari companies). Luckily food wasn’t a problem for us. Breakfasts were simple: cornflakes, toast, jam, peanut butter and instant coffee, sometimes eggs. Lunches, on the side of the road, were mostly baloney sandwiches and some salad. For dinner, when our guides cooked in the camp sites, there was always enough food for everybody, and nobody had anything to complain about the quality. Occasionally we had to have restaurant dinners at our expense; with few exceptions, most campsites had decent food.
• Camping – can you sleep in a tent for 42 days? An essential question to ask before considering a long safari trip. With few exceptions – Swakopmund, Victoria Falls and Zanzibar – where hotel accommodations were booked, for the rest of the trip we slept in campsites. It was easier and more comfortable than we had imagined – the tents were spacious and the sponge mattresses were thick. The tents were functional and easy to set up and pack, but they were old, weighed too much (two people would usually carry one) and had all kinds of rips and cuts. The company is obviously cutting its own corners by not upgrading their equipment… The campsites (who I judge by their bathrooms and ablution facilities) were mostly decent except in a few cases. Sometimes I wonder… what were they thinking in the busy Arusha campsite where the male and female population have one sink each in the bathrooms?
• Back pain – all that sitting and driving for hours doesn’t come without side-effects: it can lead to terrible lower-back pain (I wasn’t spared) and will atrophy your leg muscles – we learned this the hard way when we arrived in Cairo and started walking all day; going up any flight of stairs made our feet numb with pain. We caught up and got in shape in a week or so, but not without a lot of panting and cursing.
• Toilet stops – ah, don’t forget about your bladder. The driver will stop once in a while on the side of the road, so everybody can find their favorite bush. And where there are no bushes, it’s the boys in the front of the truck, the girls in the back. The truck has an “emergency” button for these situations, but the guides don’t want to stop as often as some passengers would need, so they just ignore it sometimes. When asked why, they mumble something about losing time because there’s a lot left to drive and generally act as if by asking them to stop you’re talking something away from them. A common attitude of bus drivers around the world…
• Attitude – there’s a pervasive attitude among safari tour guides best described by the slogan “This is Africa, Fit in or Fuck Off” (seen on a t-shirt). This double-edged line, meant to be funny - no doubt, contains a lot of bitter truth. Sure, the roads are bad, you have to sleep in a tent, Africa is dusty and hot, and you may not always find clean bathrooms and hot water. Nobody argues with that. But some guides are pushing this further and act condescending to the tourists, being unhelpful and incompetent at best. Our “guides” acted mostly as drivers and cooks; hardly any information about the places we were seeing trickled from them, not even trivia that anybody already knew. They were either genuinely bored or totally disinterested with their jobs. Most local guides we hired in a few game parks were even worse, hardly bothering to acknowledge our presence. The attitude could be also summarized by another line seen on a t-shirt: “I am too poorly paid to be nice to you, so fit in or fuck off!” Haven’t these people heard of tips? Of the fact that pay may increase with performance? Their tips could have been better if they had been actually nice to me. The rest doesn’t matter.
• It looks like I only listed a string of problems related to overland safaris and none of the things that make them worthwhile. It’s not like that. There were many beautiful moments, and mentioning each one will only re-iterate what I already said in past blog entries and would make a very long list. Coming close to the wild animals, getting immersed in new and unfamiliar landscapes of incredible beauty, and meeting the local people – especially when they didn’t want to sell us anything – will survive in my memory forever. I am glad I went through this.

Overland Tour ended in Nairobi, Kenya on October 14. Posted from Aswan, Egypt. Stories from Egypt coming next.

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Namibia

Dead Vlei - dry, but not lifeless.
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What could have prompted a nation usually characterized by thoughtfulness and calculated intelligence, to throw itself into a futile colonial adventure in the least hospitable patch of African desert? Once you have seen Namibia, you can’t help asking yourself this question. This barren stretch of land on the southwestern coast of the continent, home to some of the most ruthless temperature extremes, doesn’t look like a rewarding prize, no matter how starved for land or glory the few Germans that started this insane adventure may have been, a hundred years ago. Whether they really wanted colonies or they just wanted to annoy the British, their pathetic choice of location must have made them the laughingstock of jokes at the Whitehall for a while. The dream only lasted for thirty-five years (until the British got annoyed indeed), but it left a legacy that is still visible today: commercial signs and billboards along the road are often in German and the centers of the old colonial outposts of Lüderitz and Swakopmund look like miniature German towns, with gabled houses, protestant churches, Schweinebraten, Erdinger Weissbier and Bavarian Gemütlichkeit...

Fish river canyon at dusk

The first days of our trip we rolled along the coast to the Orange river, which marks the border between South Africa and Namibia, and then inched our way north on the highways that have become unpaved as soon as we crossed the border. This part of Namibia is the land of wire fences, of which there are miles and miles as long as your eyes can see, along the road and across the land. Those wires may be there to isolate wildlife from cattle ranches (of which I haven’t seen any) or maybe they protect the environment from the devastating hordes of tourists; either way I can’t help noticing the irony of partitioning and fencing out patches of this arid land sprinkled with little boulders which look like salt and pepper fallen from the sky … is every Namibian entitled to its own desert lot?

The truck

For hours each day we roll through the desert in our sturdy Mercedes truck specially retrofitted for the purpose of transporting tourists on safaris. It has an elevated passenger cabin and plenty of storage space underneath, for luggage, tents, mattresses, folding chairs, food and cooking utensils. Each day, our guides, Ian and Thembe and the driver, all three from Zimbabwe, prepare breakfast and lunch for us by the side of the truck, and most days they also cook dinner. Occasionally, we have to buy our own dinner meal, when we stay overnight in a town, or in certain campsites. After the horror of camping on the Inca trail, I was reluctant to sleep in a tent for so many nights (the trip takes 40 days), but it hasn’t been too bad so far, because the tent mattresses are thick (not the kind you can roll and attach to your backpack) and your hipbone and shoulders don’t hurt in the morning. The voyage is not entirely without pain though – sitting in a vehicle for hours in a row has always given me backaches, and I’m not the only one to feel happy when we take a break from driving and we can stretch our legs walking around. The distances between the tourist spots are immense, so we do spend quite a lot of hours driving, but there’s something good in this as well: we have been reading book after book in the past days.

It's always easier downhill

It wasn’t until we got to Namibia – when we reached Sossusvlei, the country’s number one attraction – that we understood what desert heat really was. There was no more pleasant breeze; there were no more clouds and no trees. The air lay on the land like a blanket of hot coals. For us, every moment spent out of shade was just another moment spent looking for shade. However I still found this dry heat more bearable than the sweltering, humid Yucatan hothouse. If the wind would pick up while we were camping, we had to wait for it to stop and then clean the inside of the tents and everything that was in them, waging a bitter losing battle against the fine, permeating, ubiquitous African dust. If you travel in Africa there is no choice but to get used to the dust, which has become a permanent companion since we left the lush lands of the Cape. In camp sites, at lunch stops along the road, on the majestic dunes of the Sossusvlei Sea of sand, in the Etosha National Park, in our truck – which rides with open windows most of the time – everywhere we go, dust is king. After a day in the open my hair feels so thick with all the dirt in it that I almost forget I don’t have much of it left. Fortunately there are showers and hot water at every camp site.

Indifferent giraffe.
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The group isn’t very interesting or particularly cohesive, which is a convoluted way of saying that I didn’t have much fun getting to know the other people we shared the truck with. But it isn’t bad either. The guides have lots of stories about Africa; they tell funny anecdotes about past safaris they have lead, they talk about African traditions, but mostly, they like to talk about Zimbabwe, their homeland. The troubles of their land preoccupy them like a sore spot; heartfelt and with bitter irony, they talk about the ruin that has befallen their beloved country, about “Uncle Bob” – Robert Mugabe, their eternal president who holds onto power like a fish on a hook, and about his irrational politics that seem to be cut out of equal parts of tragedy and comedy.

Shaking a leg

Namibia is mostly desert, but one teeming with wildlife, and there’s no place like the Etosha National Park to convince you of this. Zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, kudus, oryxes, springboks, elephants, rhinos, lions and tigers roam free through the thorny bushes, looking for food, water or shadow, all but ignoring the curious rolling metal beasts that roar and puff passing by, with their load of strange little two-legged creatures armed with their inoffensive one-eyed weapons… Did I mention tigers? Of course, there are no tigers in Africa, but how can I not put lions and tigers together after years of having this song on my mind: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya? It just won't go away...

Posted from Livingstone, Zambia, two countries later...

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