Barb and Baden’s Excellent African Adventure – Part 1
One of the most common things that I hear from people when we get a few days away from going on one of our Excellent Adventures is along the lines “you must be pretty used to going away on these trips”. True enough, there’s a lot in common with the planning stages for most of our trips but I can’t help but think that there’s something fundamentally different with this African Adventure. Whatever it is it has both Barb and I being much more anxious about this trip than we can remember about any other trip.
It’s possible that all of this anxiety has something to do with all of the people who we’ve spoken to over the past few months and who have told us how unsafe Africa is. Dire warnings have been passed on to us about things like never venturing out at night and not stopping your car at red lights leaves one to wonder how safe things really are.
So all things considered, it has to be a fair question to ask if the risks of going to Africa are worth it?
Well, obviously we’ve answered that question ourselves by the very fact that we’re already committed. We’ve had lots of chances to reconsider and every time that we’ve talked about it we’ve never seriously planned on cancelling. The only real change that we’ve made since we started doing serious travel planning about 10 months ago was that we were originally planning on doing our safari in Kenya. Unfortunately, the political situation in Kenya was a bit too uncertain and we decided to change to Tanzania where we will now be going.
Our Excellent African Adventure has four stages too with the first stage not even in Africa. I’m writing this prologue 3 days before we leave and in less than 48 hours from now Barb and I will have our suitcases out and we will start packing. Both of us are working on Friday so we will go straight to the airport when we get home for our evening flight out of Vancouver.
For those of you who have followed along with us on many of our previous Excellent Adventures, you know that I’ll be posting updates every few days along with recent pictures (where I am able to get Internet access). Without a doubt, Barb and Baden’s Excellent African Adventure will be our greatest adventure yet!
Getting there in style
Well, it’s officially started. We’re sitting here at the boarding lounge at the Vancouver airport waiting to board our first flight off to London which is the first leg of our journey down to the southern hemisphere of the world (or more specifically, Cape Town, South Africa ).
As we were walking through the airport on the way to the security check-in, we were both saying how it was kind of surreal that we were actually going to Africa now. First, we’ve had almost 10 months of planning for this trip (if you recall we booked our flights last December) and secondly, we’ve both had all kinds of things wrapping up at work today so it just seems like any other day after work right now. I think that it will take a few more hours before we’re in the right frame of mind. We do have about 9 hours to take care of this before we land in London.
I’ve mentioned to a few people that we are flying business class with British Airways for the entire journey to Africa and back. We’ve been fortunate to have travelled business class 3 times over the years and it’s really something on which you can get spoiled. The biggest benefit has to be the extra large seats with the 5 feet of legroom. The seats also fold down almost flat so this makes attempting to sleep on the flight all that more possible.
Of course, there’s the royalty treatment that comes with business class travel like expedited check-in, free access to food and drinks in the BA boarding lounge and of course the personal service on board. All of these are nice (I won’t try and convince you otherwise) but I’d be willing to give us all of this if I could just keep the extra large seats.
We have about a day and a half stay in London and we plan on visiting my cousins who live in London and try and do a few more things if we can. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since we last visited England. For some reason, it really feels like it has only been just a few years but if I think back there has been a lot of travelling in between those years since 1998.
The time now is about 11:45 AM (London time) and I’ve just woke up about 30 minutes ago. We’re about 2.5 hours from Heathrow airport and I’ve managed to get about 4-5 hours of sleep on the flight. For the record, I would normally get about 1-2 hours of sleep so yet another plus for the fold-flat business class seats.
Barb and I are seated in the “pods” type of seats which means that we are facing each other side by side with me facing forward and Barb towards the rear of the plane. There is a fold-down footstool on the wall in front of me for each seat which becomes the end part of the “bed” when I adjust the seat fully flat for sleeping.
When we boarded the plane last night, of course, they allow first class and business class passengers on first so we are seated and are already been served drinks (champagne or orange juice) when the other passengers come walking by to their seats in the economy seats (or as British Airways calls it: World Traveller class). To be fair, even the regular seats on BA flights are pretty good but let’s not kid ourselves that those people walking by you while you’re drinking champagne are thinking that it would be pretty nice to be in business class. But hey, Barb and I have done our fair share of the same thing on our way to the back of the plane. I think that actually having travelled in business class even once makes it that much harder to make that adjustment.
As we had a late evening departure out of Vancouver, I only had a salad for dinner trying desperately to avoid ordering the beef tenderloin from the menu that I had my eye on. Under normal circumstances I would have had no problems having a good meal on board but had we had an earlier flight it would have been a different story. Getting used to an 8-hour time zone change will often make eating hard on your body because you are often eating when your body thinks that it should be asleep. To me, the best approach has always been to take it easy and not eat too much until you’ve landed. Besides, there’s plenty of time to indulge in the local cuisine when we get to our first African destination of Cape Town on Monday.
That’s all that I’m going to write for now. I’ve brought my laptop with me so typing out a few paragraphs here and there is relatively easy. When travelling, I find that there’s always some time throughout the day (especially in the morning before Barb gets up or late at night) that I can spend 30 minutes and write down this stuff. So, the next stop is London and I’ll provide at least one posting there before we move on to our real destination of Africa.
Baden

