A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

16 November 1997 - The Compleat Wimp's Guide to African Travel

I'm done with jury duty, without having had to go back to the courthouse at all. Mary Joan told me the court clerks are on strike, which very likely had something to do with that. Being in call-in limbo with jury duty left me plenty of time to think about travel and I went a major step further with my plans. I called up Adventure Center and booked an overland truck trip from Nairobi to Harare via Botswana. I feel like a bit of a wimp for doing this with a group but I thought long and hard about it and came up with several reasons this makes sense:

1. East Africa is not exactly the most stable region in the world right now. In particular, there's been a lot of trouble in coastal Kenya.
2. It's not significantly more expensive than what I'm likely to be able to do on my own bargaining with safari companies. I don't really enjoy haggling so I tend to give in too soon and there's also the time and energy involved in trying to get together with other travelers to go on safari.
3. Botswana is notoriously expensive. It's their deliberate policy to cater primarily to high end safari tourism. While it's a strategy that has worked well (Botswana is probably the most affluent country in Africa), it does make things harder for the budget travel types like me.
4. One of the key things about taking this sabbatical is that I want to do things that are different from what I'd normally do. Spending 8 1/2 weeks on a camping trip with about 20 strangers definitely qualifies. I admit I am nervous about this aspect of it. Every bit of anxiety I've ever had about fitting in comes up when I think about this. Though, if I think about it, while shyness has been a problem for me in other aspects of life, it hasn't in travel, other than some of my hesitancy with foreign languages. On the other hand, I've run into cabin fever in surprisingly short time periods, like after the third day of being snowed in with several people in a cabin near Tahoe. I suspect these anxieties are a very good reason to go on this trip!
5. I read Laura Resnick's A Blonde in Africa, which is about her overland trip, which included some segments similar to the one I've booked (though her trip was with another company). Despite the horrible title, the book was quite entertaining and her descriptions didn't sound wimpy at all.
6. I can't be a total wimp since I still plan on three months on my own in southern Africa after the truck trip and before the St. Helena boat.

   This step in travel planning was more or less the only accomplishment of the week, which was a tedious one at work between two long days of meetings and a lot of documents to review. I had my performance review on Tuesday and got good marks. I was less successful in one of my personal projects, having found that the Los Angeles branch of the Mormon Family History Library didn't have any of the materials on South Africa I was looking for (though they can order them from Salt Lake City, of course). So I've made no progress in tracing the branch of my family I am looking for. I suppose my easy success in locating the Atlanta relatives, which really relied on a major coincidence of someone seeing my query knowing someone who knew them, has made me overconfident. I did post to soc.genealogy.jewish and got some possibly helpful info. Marsha (who went with me to the FHL) was surprised I found so little, but her family has been in the U.S. forever so records are probably much easier for her to find. I know she's found whole towns of people who she is probably related to.

   And I've made damn little progress on any of my other personal projects, most of which fall under the category of "housework". There's a part of me that likes things very neat and organized and it's that part of me that wants every paper filed in the right place and all of my books catalogued in a database and so on. Unfortunately, there's also a big part of me that likes to sleep half the day on weekends and waste the rest reading trashy novels. I'd like to say that they battle, but the efficient, organized me doesn't even put up much of a fight most of the time. How I am going to cope with putting everything into storage is the biggest dilemma that raises.

   

   

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   Copyright 1997 Miriam H. Nadel
   Send comments to: mhnadel@alum.mit.edu