ZIMBABWE TO LOS ANGELES: THE END OF OUR GREAT SOUTHERN AFRICA ADVENTURE

Well, all good things must come to an end, and after three weeks, we were ready to go home. We met our driver at 7:00 AM and got on the road. 

It was 4℃ or about 39℉, which doesn't seem THAT cold--unless you are riding in an open air vehicle. I was lucky to sit next to our driver and benefit from the heater and windshield. I still used one of the camp's ponchos, however. Bob was on the first of the three passenger rows and wore not just the poncho, but wrapped a wool blanket around himself as well. (See his reflection in the mirror.)

We saw a few animals along the way, including a steenbok, a small antelope we had never seen before:

Photo by Bob

A little later we saw a beautiful saddle-billed stork standing on a tiny island in the middle of a pond. The water was completely still and made a perfect mirror for the stork, the grass and the tree:

Just to mess with your mind, here is a flipped version of part of the photo above:

Bob took this much closer-up photo of the stork and its fabulous mirror image twin:

ZIMBABWE: SHOPPING, A WALKING SAFARI, AND OUR LAST SUNDOWNER

One of the things this camp had that we hadn't seen in other camps was a small gift shop. Most of the items for sale were made by local women as part of the "Womans Craft Initiative." Since wwe were a day away from heading home, we decided to splurge just a little bit.

The first thing that caught my eye were these beaded placemats.  Our dinner table the previous night had been set with similar ones, and I had said to Bob, "Now, if they sold THESE in the gift shop, I would buy them!"  I bought eight!

The water pitchers on our table had also been covered with these clever nets edged with beads to give them enough weight to keep the bugs out. I bought four.

In addition to Nelson Mandela, I had become obsessed with guinea fowl on this trip. Lucky for me, there were guinea fowl salad servers for sale! (These were obviously not made by the "womans" cooperative, but I think everything else was.)

Bob's obsession was painted dogs, and lucky for him, they had these small beaded painted dogs, perfect for the bookshelf in his home office.

On a trip to Ghana several years ago, I bought some beads that were made from recycled glass bottles and look like the long green and blue ones on this poster:

The gift shop in Hwange had some beads quite different than those but still made by local women from melted bottles:

ZIMBABWE: HWANGE NATIONAL PARK

After a good sleep in a cozy bed in our tent in The Hide Safari Camp, we had a 5:30 AM wake-up call, complete with a tray bearing hot chocolate for Bob and herbal tea for me, along with some "biscuits," which were not very sweet cookies:

We dressed quickly and made our way to breakfast--muesli for me and eggs and sausage for Bob--which we ate sitting as close to the fire as possible in our roofed but wall-less dining area. It was barely 3° C, which is about 37° F, an unusually frigid morning in June for the area.

By 6:30 AM we were out on our six-hour game drive, for the first time accompanied by four others, a couple from Northern California and two men from Switzerland. The latter had massive cameras. One told another passenger that his lens cost €5,000, or about $7,000 U.S.

It was so cold, especially once the vehicle got moving. The camp supplied us with flannel-lined hooded ponchos. Under that I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, my lightweight down coat, and my white rain jacket. The other woman, who was sitting in front because she had injured her foot and couldn't climb the ladder to the elevated viewing seats, had a slight advantage provided by the wimpy car heater. She was wearing gloves and very kindly gave me her right glove to keep my note-taking and camera button-pushing hand warm.

I kept a list of everything I took a picture of. Here is what we saw:

Grey louries in a thorn tree, AKA "the go-away bird" because they alert animals about approaching predators:

Brown hooded vulture (the smallest of the five vulture species in Hwange National Park):

A tree full of baboons:

ZIMBABWE: THE HIDE SAFARI CAMP

Our final destination in Africa was a private safari camp in Hwange National Park called The Hide. A driver took us to the entrance of the park, two hours from the city of Victoria Falls.


The scenery along the way was really interesting. Our driver pointed out residential/farm compounds made up of grass huts:

Although the compounds looked primitive, they all seemed to have power lines:

We saw women walking along the road carrying packages in typical African style:

Having a painted dog cross the street in front of us would have been Bob's dream come true: