Until recently, Africa wasn’t on my travel radar. Not only was it extremely far away from the States, it also seemed like a difficult (and potentially unsafe) place to travel. But after 2.5 years of living and working out of our tiny apartment in Seattle, I started to reconsider. Tom and I were both lucky enough to survive the pandemic with our health, jobs, and marriage intact, but after 2.5 years of sheltering in place, we were increasingly desperate to get on the road again.
Suddenly, Africa — a continent both Tom and I had yet to visit — seemed like the perfect place to travel in the post-covid era. We’d spend our days on safari, our nights camping outside, and everyone on our tour was required to be vaccinated. Plus, if we left right now — when Covid (fingers crossed) finally seemed under control — Tom would be able to visit his 7th continent before his 40th birthday in January.
So that’s how we came to quit our jobs, pack up our apartment, and fly to Africa using money we’d managed to save during 2+ years in lockdown. Along the way, we stopped in NYC and Mystic, CT, to reconnect with old friends and catch up with Tom’s family in England before boarding an overnight flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, to begin our months-long overland tour.
Over the next 4 months, we’ll journey through nine African countries, climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, and get up close to spectacular wildlife, including some of the 2 million zebras, antelopes, and wildebeest who participate in the Great Migration — the world’s largest migration of wildlife — across the savannah each year.
In between safaris, we’ll visit Victoria Falls, look for gorillas in Uganda, and wrap up our trip by spending three weeks volunteering at a wildlife conservation park in Kenya before heading back to the U.S. in February to hunt for new jobs. Please read on if you’d like to follow along!
By Jen Swanson