Before We Left

This trip began, as most of them do, with a previous one. In April of 2024 I went to Kenya with EF Go Ahead, and came back the way people come back from Kenya — unable to stop talking about it, and quietly aware that I had seen one corner of something very large. Africa does not resolve into a single visit. It only tells you how much of it you have not seen. So at the Jansen family reunion, when the subject came up, Bonnie already had an answer ready. Botswana. She had been hearing about Botswana from people who had been there, and what they said had the particular quality of a place that had exceeded expectations rather than merely met them. The Okavango Delta. Chobe. Country that floods every year with water that fell somewhere else entirely. She went and investigated. And she came back with a problem: no single tour did everything. Every itinerary was missing something, and the thing most of them were missing was Kruger. In the end we went with EF Go Ahead — we had used them before, and we had credits sitting there — and then simply built Kruger onto the front ourselves.

The Route

Bonnie found the tour. I found the flights, and they produced a happy accident. Flying into Johannesburg and home from Cape Town — the sensible-looking plan, the one the tour is designed around — turned out to cost more than a plain round trip to Cape Town. It was cheaper to go to the far end of the country and work backwards. It was also, we suspected, more interesting: Cape Town is a city worth landing in, and Johannesburg is a city worth landing in on the way to somewhere else. So we flew into Cape Town and gave ourselves two days. Then up to Johannesburg, a night at an airport lodge, and two days in Kruger — just the two of us and a guide — before being dropped at the hotel where the tour began, joining everyone else as though we had arrived that morning like normal people. The tour then ran north: Victoria Falls, Hwange, Chobe, the Delta. And at the end of it, it came back to Cape Town, which was technically an extension and which everybody took but one. So the city bookends this book. We saw it first, alone and jet-lagged, and again at the end with nine other people and three weeks of Africa behind us.

There was one more piece of arithmetic, and it was the one that made the whole thing simple. If Bonnie flew to Washington first, then every option I could find worked for both of us — one itinerary, one set of connections, one pair of seats. Otherwise we would spend the entire trip trying to converge on some airport at some hour, hoping the other one's flight had also survived the day. So she came to me, and we left from there. It cost her a day and bought her Washington. We walked to the Lincoln Memorial and the Monument, did the ordinary business of a city I know well and she does not, and then we got on a Delta flight through Atlanta and went to Africa. The way home was less civilized. Cape Town to Amsterdam to JFK to National, twenty-nine hours door to door, beginning at 11:45 at night. There is no graceful way to leave Africa. You simply get on the first airplane and keep getting on airplanes until the continent is gone.

Who Went

The invitation had gone out more widely than this. The idea was a group — family, friends, whoever wanted in. What thinned it was arithmetic. Getting to southern Africa is expensive before you have gone anywhere at all, and there is no version of the trip that is cheap. One by one the maybes became no, and in the end the Jansen contingent was Bonnie and me. We were ten on the tour. Natasha. Debra and Bill. Tara, Meredith, Kirsten, and Kathryn — who had traveled together before and had the shorthand of people who have already survived an airport together. Paul. And the two of us. Dylan was our guide from EF, and he will recur in these pages, usually saying something we did not want to hear about the odds of seeing a leopard. Africa is big. I said it out loud more than once on this trip, usually while looking out of the window of something, and it never stopped being the correct thing to say.

The size of it

Africa covers about 30.4 million square kilometers. You can set the United States, China, India, and most of Western Europe inside it and still have room left over — that is not a figure of speech, it is arithmetic, and the four of them together come to roughly 30 million.

The reason nobody knows this is the map. On the Mercator projection that hangs in every classroom, Greenland and Africa look about the same size. Africa is fourteen times larger. Mercator was drawn for sailors, who needed compass bearings to come out straight and did not much care what that did to the far north and south; it inflates everything near the poles and flattens everything near the equator, which is to say it shrinks Africa specifically. We grow up with a picture of the world that is wrong in exactly this one direction, and then we go there, and the ground keeps going.

This was the second corner of it. There will be a third — Morocco, probably, and then Egypt — and I expect that one will also begin with somebody saying “you have to see it,” and meaning it.