Just a view of the beach from Cape Coast Ghana, at castle restaurant. A nice moment to lighten the mood. After our very depressing tour of Cape Coast castle one of the largest exporters of slaves. A place made even more famous, when Obama visited a few years ago. I will say both tourists and locals come to the tours and seem to leave believing in a better future than our past.
There are far too many thoughts, to really ever sum up our safari in one post. I am sure we will make a couple posts over time about specific parts of the trip, or reviewing G adventures whom we did the trip with. In the end though, there is an overwhelming amount of feelings and thoughts that you have over a 24-day overland Africa trip. I won’t begin to try to cover it here, but I did want to write out a few thoughts before they fade from memory. (From Erin — the long and short of it is that it is awesome and you can totally hang. [Even we totally hung, and if you ask around, you will find that I am not low maintenance.] If you are thinking of doing a 24-day overland African safari…just do it…it will be amazing. Sure, sometimes you will be uncomfortable, but mostly, it will be just fine. We had a good time on our G Adventures tour — one awesome guide and one fine guide. We are guessing that other operators do it just fine too. Find an operator with a sale going on, and just book it.)
1. A safari is like a really long unedited version of Discovery channel.
Seriously, all the things you see on animal planet are real, and common — not even that hard to find. You can find a sleeping lion next to it’s kill with baboons taunting it for fun, while a jackal tries to creep in and steal some loose meat from the kill.
2. You will appreciate zoos a bit more
I am not talking about sad zoos that mistreat animals. I am talking about ones with breeding programs for endangered animals. Ones that are helping study animal behavior in responsible ways. Even things like Disney’s animal kingdom, which is massive, and really simulates open wild game parks. There are tons of animals in the wild having their habitats split up and destroyed in ways that will decimate the animal populations. Without study and intervention, some species will die because we don’t understand their migration patterns and we destroyed a part of it.
Some of the breeding programs are the best bets to help some animals survive. Also, when an environment is built really well it can help study animal behavior in less invasive and destructive ways than completely invading the space of the few remaining wild groups of animals.
Finally, having seen some animals in a zoo and as a child, I thought the animals just laid around boring like that because they are in captivity — so not true. Free and wild lions will sleep 20 hours a day, and really don’t give a crap about tourists or most other animals if they aren’t hungry at the moment. So, what you see in a good zoo is a pretty accurate sample of their lifestyle. If you are at a humane zoo, you can see real animals behavior without hours in a hot truck. I am not saying that zoos are the same as safaris, or that we don’t need protected parks if we have zoos, I am just saying that good zoos can be part of the overall solution to protect and fund habitats for the planet’s animal population.
3. Everything is 50/50 in Africa.
4. After the Safari I have come to appreciate some things much more than I used to, a few examples below:
5. You will watch something amazingly beautiful and brutal at the same time
Probably the most interesting thing we watched on safari was a leopard that carried it’s Red Buck kill across the road and then up into a tree. It was pretty incredible to watch and it seemed a bit odd to so casually watch the rawness of life.
“When you see a herd of animals with a predator nearby, you always cheer for the prey. ‘You can do it, run, run…stay together… ‘ but once it is obvious that the predator is going in for the kill, you begin to cheer for the predator, ‘kill, kill,’ because you realize that the lion is hungry… and you want to see it happen.” -Erin
Erin has the paddle boarding bug. Enjoying the zen of spending all thoughts on not falling over 😉 Our last Asia beach day of the trip.
After a small hiccup with airport security involving Erin’s favorite sunscreen we had a lovely flight to Thailand.
We ended up moving a few things around between our international flight and domestic flight. During that reorganization, we accidentally put the bag of sunscreen in our carry on. After we had checked bags we went through security and they said one bottle of sunscreen was over the size limit.
This was Erin’s favorite which she had just received as a resupply from her awesome mother a few days prior. Erin was arguing to keep it and trying to pour it into ridiculously small openings of other sunscreen bottles. Dan stood by trying to not argue knowing he had about 4 other too large to travel sunscreens they hadn’t found tucked away in his carry on. After failing to convince them to let us through, Erin took the bottle and said meet you at the gate and left security with her bottle in frustration headed back to the check in counter. I went to our gate to wait, and eventually heard this story.
Back at the check in counter Erin tried to check the bottle…
Desk: Mam you cant check a bottle
Erin: (puts it in a zip lock bag) can I check this bag?
Desk: no no, a real bag
Erin: puts zip lock back inside larger black plastic bag
Desk: no no, you need luggage or box
Erin: (walks to nearby airport book store, please do you have any boxes around) Can I check this double bagged box with sunscreen
Desk: OK thank you
Lesson is, always check your sunscreen and never upset my wife 😉
We got some scuba diving in during our Thailand visit. We are diving on the island of Ko Samui, which has been lovely. We chose to dive with Discovery Dive Center. It included “free” photos with your diving… IE you get photos for free but they aren’t the cheapest dive operators on the island, not that I ever look for “cheapest” when diving 😉
Our last stop in Malaysia was Malacca, so we could see something outside of the big city. We had delicious food for next to nothing, and learned some history. The port at Malacca was so important to early trade that it was considered the capital of the world. It lead to some of the first maritime laws, harbor masters, and usages of multiple currencies. The strait of Malacca, now often called the strait of Malaysia, still sees 120,000 ships pass by. No ships really doc with Malacca anymore as Penang and Singapore have long since surpassed this old port town. Now the river leading to the ocean has tour boats and is surrounded by lovely restaurants for tourists, both local and foreign alike.
The Malacca church needs to be straightened out a bit (picture doesn’t show it too well, but it is like the leaning tower of Pisa).
The once famous river that had the largest market in the world, now home of cute cafes, and good Indian food.
Erin tries a mystery egg and sausage stick, got to eat something odd at the night market. The melting honey pastries were the best.
The most delicious food in Malacca, red pork noodles… The locals wait in lines for over an hour to eat these $1.50 noodles… apparently no one has thought to just raise the price 😉
Food is very popular here both locals and tourists line up for hours at the favorite spots. Both the famous chicken rice balls and city satay had over hour long waits… Sadly neither of those was worth the wait, but the red pork noodles mentioned above was easily worth the wait. Duck noodles below had no wait at all and were pretty outstanding as well.
Vertical pano gives and idea of the dizzying heights of the towers.
After a day looking at salt flats, pepper farms, and exploring the town enjoying the sunset back at our guest house. The reflection in the preaek tuek chhu river, is pretty wonderful.
Our tuk tuk driver pulled over at a local fishing spot. So we could watch people fishing. It was cool to watch the nets flying through the air. I got lucky enough with my timing to have google #autoawesome a couple photos together.
We saw a lot of locals out fishing on a Tuesday but were told there aren’t many fish left in the river. We saw some small catches, but nothing big and not much was being caught. Sort of seemed the same in Vietnam where most of the rivers had been over fished as well.
I think I did a really good job packing. I read a bunch of travel blogs, I had various backups, little tools, repair kits, first aid, expandable overflow bag, and lots of little useful things not always thought of. I thought I had everything covered, but some things you learn on the road.
I had packed a travel body wash / shampoo combo and my wife had picked us both up some awesome Lunatec self cleaning travel wash cloths that can be used as loofahs (gear that has already proved very valuable — thanks for the tip, ZINK Year).
As we traveled from hot city to very hot city I started to sweat. Especially as we started to reach locations like Beijing, with less than ideal sanitary conditions, I noticed something. I started to smell!
A smell in hot weather when you are walking 13 miles or so a day (thanks fitbit) might seem obvious to people. I have never really been a very sweaty person, in the states I don’t normally need antiperspirant or deodorant. I smell fine showing once a day even if with a light workout. If I have a real workout I shower after and all is good. Not so much in Beijing I tried to shower 4 times in one day and still couldn’t stay smelling clean. Something wasn’t right and I needed to solve the problem. (I went through this little journey of discovery while a friend was traveling with us, sorry Dina!)
We had been in and out of hotels and I had been using a loofah often with the hotel provided liquid body wash. I realized that wasn’t strong enough, back home I always use a soap bar. Buying a real bar of soap and keeping it in a little zip lock bag (you did pack some of those didn’t you) between hotels. This got me most of the way back to normal, but with the extra daypack on my back and hotter temperatures I eventually added travel size deodorant to my arsenal. It is safe to say even if you don’t normally need these kinds of things at home, you might need them while traveling.
Only later did I remember my lush shampoo bar, which is great for travel, and very powerful. I have since used this bar as soap when needed and it works great, definitely cleans better than many of the free shower gels provided by hotels. I mostly have this item for the 24 day camping Safari in Africa, but I’m happy it has already come in handy.
Happy to be back to a nice clean non-smelly person, I figured I should share that nothing beats a real soap bar, a little extra packing space and weight easily worth it.
As long as we are on keeping things clean and smell free, let’s talk laundry. When doing laundry in the sink, we learned from our Vietnemes host family that we needed less water and about 2X the soap in the mix when hand washing clothes. The tip has definitely improved the freshness and lasting effects of a sink clothes cleaning. Also, allowing our clothes to soak in the soap water in the sink a longer time helped improve the freshness. A sink was is really best for use for the times between finding real laundry facilities (which is still highly recommended every couple washes as nothing really beats it). We did have access to several buckets in our home-stay, which is a way better way to hand wash clothes, than in the sink. Our host family really upped my clothes washing skills.
Single use packets of Tide travel (or similar), are highly recommended for sink cleaning. We originally had little sheets of soap, Travelon travel laundry soap, which looked great and travel really well, but they don’t really get clothes very clean and certainly can’t get socks back to smelling fresh after a hike. If you are out of single serve laundry soap, you can find it at little markets all over the world. If you are in a pinch, I have found shampoo, body wash, or directly rubbing a bar of soap on clothes to be effective.
We have also learned some tricks and improved our skill drying clothes while traveling.
When you have a nice sunny desk, hook up a travel laundry line, we love our sea to summit clothes line. Things dry great outside and smell amazing. Remember to keep and eye on the weather, we left a set of clothes drying out through a storm and had to start over. If you don’t have a deck you can string it up as best you can inside, which sometimes makes the room hard to navigate (effectively making a trip wire, which nearly kills me in the night). This works but depending on humidity, AC, and such it can take more than 24 hours to really dry out and then it doesn’t smell quite as nice.
So what to do if you have to sink wash, and you can’t hang outside in the sun, be it lack of space or current weather situation?
We have started to dry pretty much all our clothes using the, Exofficio drying method. While they recommend this for their excellent give-and-go underwear. It works great on t-shirts, travel pants, socks, etc. Basically, a simple 4 step drying process.
While this requires extra towels, most hotels didn’t have a problem giving us one extra. We also sometimes just showered using a travel towel and would use one hotel towel to help dry clothes. In a rush or didn’t use the Exofficio method? Don’t worry, you can always bust out the hotel hair drier in a last ditch effort to get your clothes dry for your night out.
Go out & destroy your clothes again.
Adventures of the Miller Mayers 