Welcome to the Africa Blog!

I have about five to-do lists on the go, but items are slowly getting checked off -- and a good thing, too! Only five days from now, we'll be getting on a plane to London enroute to Africa!

As part of my pre-travel organization binge, I dug out my travel journal from our 2004 Africa tour and reread parts of it. It's gotten me even more excited that we're leaving so soon -- there are so many details I'd forgotten about, little incidents and things that happened along the way. The first thing I pasted in the book, before we'd even left, were the farewell concert blurbs that I wrote. The last one's funny -- it's a list of some 'tour figures', things like "59 people...60 seats on the bus", and "$4300 per person...4300 hours spent practice packing".

You tend to forget the blurry small details of travelling after time has passed, but oddly enough, those details are often the things that are recorded because travel diary writing happens, perforce, during the downtimes. From my 2004 journal:

- the LAX Scavenger Hunt challenge list (yay for 14-hour layovers!), including (oddly enough) such items as 'one (1) blade of fake grass', and 'one (1) sample of J.Lo's 'Still' perfume'.
- our first taste of Namibia: "the airline served us a meat sandwich with a side of dried meat"
- a little prognosticating sentence: "We are determined to have Mascato come to Canada."
- mid-tour blahs: "We are a tired group, but no one really understands why. We're way past the jet lag and there haven't been any exhausting days, but we all start drooping around 9 p.m."
- we're going to visit Joe's Beerhouse in Windhoek again, where last time we dined on the "Bushman Sosatie": crocodile, springbok, kudu, zebra, ostrich -- and chicken!
- our African animal names -- including such gems as 'Laelephant', 'Girathi', and 'Nijackal'
- our amazing concert at Wonderboom High School (still, incidentally, the best name ever!) -- including the story of the school's headmaster, whose daughter had passed away at the age of 18, and who was moved to tears by our performance of "Come, Sweet Death".

Finally, Marijke's nephew, who was our tour guide in Cape Town, said the following:

"All of South Africa is paved in gold, and that gold is in our people. You have all picked up a piece of that gold -- you are all a little African now -- and you may do with that gold what you will."

I hope we've each earned our little piece of Africa, and I think that those of us who are lucky enough to be returning are feeling the almost homesick tug of our African selves: the lure of song and joy, of sorrow and mutual understanding, of the desert and the ocean.

Next time on the blog -- practice packing! Yes, we REALLY DO THIS. WE ARE THAT COOL.