Zimbabwe

Wow what an experience!

We just wrapped up 4 days / 3 nights on the African Queen houseboat on Lake Kariba booked with Rhino Rendezvous.

The boat was so great – we had a big table / sitting area on the top deck, complete with a small chill down pool and a big cooler full of cold drinks. There were 4 rooms on the main level (2 on each side) and a bathroom/shower on each side of the boat as well. Our captain Marco and deck hand Prince treated us to all the amazing sights of the Lake; and our cook Norman spoiled our taste buds with amazing fare.

We spent our days sipping coffee at sunrise, some fishing for a couple of hours, then a big good ole English breakfast, card games and chilling on the upper deck while we sailed to a new bay, sunset cruise on the tender boat with some fishing again, some sun downer appies, more card games or reading, then an amazing dinner! Rinse and repeat!

Our nights were filled with sweat – yup you read that right. Zimbabwe is experiencing a crazy heat wave with temps in the 40s for us Celcius people or about 115 for those in Farenheit. During the day the boat was usually moving so you got a breeze (but still the wheelhouse was 35 C degrees on the thermometer) at night though the boat was docked and wow was it a scorcher. We literally had every window and door open in our rooms and laid stock still soaking the sheets. It was not surprising some of us could be found wandering the deck in the middle of the night trying to find even the smallest breeze. The mosquito nets on each bed didn’t help either – while you kinda feel like a princess in a veiled bed, they prevent both mosquitos from biting you but also any kind of breeze from cooling you down. The upside … every time you woke in the night you would be lulled back to sleep by the awesome laughing sound of hippos near by!

Here are just a couple of the views we sailed past or docked near:

Highlights of the houseboat: jumping into the Lake from the top decks of the boat to cool off (don’t worry we were in the middle of lake where the crocs and hippos don’t go so it was ‘safe’), the sounds of hippos, and catching Breame fish which Norman would cook up for our afternoon appy!

We are now in Vic Falls for the adventure portion of our trip! Shenanigan stories coming soon …

Brande

Project management geek on!

Our 6 week great African adventure starts in Tanzania (climbing Mount Kilimanjaro), then into Zimbabwe (Lake Kariba, Zambezi River, Harare) and South Africa (Cape Town, Drakensburg, Table Mountain, Shark Diving) as tourists. We may even toss in some Zambia (Devil’s Pool) and maybe some Mozambique.

Planning all of this has been interesting – especially with the added nuance this is not just a trip for 2, this is a trip for 7 people at any one time. Wow, that is a lot of moving parts!

So how do you approach planning a trip like this? Well you ‘geek it up’ and go into full blown project management mode. We have itineraries, calendars, task lists and spreadsheets. And those are not all mine, some of the other travelers are doing spreadsheets too! I have to admit there was some mocking when I brought out poster sized post it notes and colour coordinated small post its.

To officially kick off the planning, we gathered on our big deck, ordered in some sushi, cracked some cold pints and started laying out the details:

The group had their iPads, travel books, notes and whatever else
Everyone had an idea of what they wanted to see, where they wanted to go
We drew up a massive calendar with all our travel dates
We added to the calendar anything that was booked (flights to and from Africa, etc.) using post it notes so things could be moved about as needed
We added to the calendar things that we needed to book on certain days in post it notes again so we could shuffle as and when needed to accommodate other items
The end result was an exciting start to a travel calendar, and pretty large task list with action items (things to book) and who was doing the booking
We put the task list and travel calendar up on our private Facebook Group ‘Africa or Bust’

We are now all working on our tasks, using Facebook as our communication vehicle so everyone sees all of the conversations going on, and will meet again in August and September to finalize. Loving the ability to ask a Poll question on Facebook – this is dream with 7 people involved.

At the end of the day we now know we have some serious thrill and monkey seekers in the group – and some sightseeing, museum and wine tour seekers in the group. The combination of both will give us a plan with a bit of lazy and a bit of crazy…perfect!

Brande

PS …73 sleeps to go