October 25, 2021

Hereford, Arizona

 

Preparations….

 

One week from now, travel and other gods willing, I’ll be settled in at the City Lodge at OR Tambo International Airport.  I’ll have arrived there early evening, probably eaten something, showered, and dropped into bed, horizontal for the first time in almost 30 hours.  It will take hours before the sensation of continuous movement subsides, and several days before my body and my brain align with the rising and setting of the sun in the southern hemisphere.

 

For now, I’m sitting at my table, drinking a partially caffeinated espresso.  Apparently looking for trouble tonight, since sleep is difficult enough under the best circumstances.  But, for someone who’s entire adult life has been governed by the calendar, I have nothing on my calendar tomorrow and can stay up late if I want. It’s a strange transition – one of the central challenges of retirement – how do you shift from a life driven by obsessively thinking about what’s next to one where nothing is next but the daylight and the dark, and the rhythms of managing a household, and the almost imperceptibly slow dissolution of self.  But Wednesday I have appointments.  And Thursday.  And… Saturday. And then Sunday, so I have things to drive me.  They’re just more spread out.

 

Early Sunday morning I depart Tucson International and begin the long journey back to South Africa.  This will be my tenth trip to southern Africa.  I think that there’s a good chance that this will be my last trip to southern Africa, for a lot of reasons. Suffice it to say, I am looking forward to going back to familiar places and trying to take it all in. One blessing of getting old is that knowing that this might be the last time you see or experience something helps to focus concentration on holding on to and appreciating the little things in each moment.

 

The basic itinerary is that I land in Johannesburg and spend the night at a hotel on the airport premises. The next morning, I meet Luke Street.  Luke is a guide for Wild Eye, a South African based company that offers photographic safaris around the world, specializing in Africa.  I’ve worked some with the team at Wild Eye over the past years and they’re friends.  And they’re good at what they do.  They’re also expensive so this is a pared down private safari where Luke and I will spend 4 days at Umlani Private Game Reserve in the Timbavati, which is a cluster of private reserves adjacent to Kruger National Park.  I haven’t worked with Luke before, but he spent 6 years as a guide in the Timbavati and so will know the area and its wildlife very well.  I could have booked Umlani and gone by myself of course, but this will give me the opportunity to batter Luke with questions about the bush to an obnoxious degree.  He’s aware and, well, he still took the job.

 

After 4 days at Umlani, they’ll drop me off at Eastgate Airport in Hoedspruit where I’ve reserved a rental car from Avis.  I’ll hit a grocery store in Hoedspruit to stock up on food/provisions, and then drive into Kruger National Park’s Orpen gate.  The charm of Kruger is that you can self-drive. One can go anywhere there’s a road. By contrast, in private reserves one typically rides with a guide in a Land Rover or Land Cruiser, which will frequently go off-road to get guests closer to animals.  In Kruger, one must stay in a camp at night and there are designated hours when gates open and close.  Camps offer many levels of accommodation, from very rustic camping spots to luxury accommodations. Kruger is huge, so these camps are scattered throughout the Park.  Each camp has its own character so much of the pre-planning is about where in the Park one wants to go, and in which camps one wants to stay.  I’ll start my journey in Kruger at Tamboti tent camp (which offers basic, permanent tent accommodations) and then gradually work my way to the far north of the Park, staying a few nights at several camps, and then back to where I started, spending about 3 weeks total in Kruger. Then drop the rental car off at Eastgate, catch a flight back to Johannesburg, and then spend the day at the airport in preparation for returning to the US.

 

There’s a fair amount of planning that goes into this.  Wild Eye planned the hotel in JNB, transfer from Johannesburg to Umlani, the days in Umlani and then the flight back to JNB. I booked the flight from Tucson to JNB (which is a straightforward flight to Atlanta and then a direct flight to JNB). Booking accommodations in Kruger is easy - the South African national park system, SANParks, has a very good website and it seems to get better every year. Rental car booking is straightforward.

 

I think traveling with a photographer must not be much fun.  I was still shooting professionally when I started going to Africa and approached it much like a job. Photographers tend to obsess over details, and one of the key elements of a photographer’s approach seems to be to imagine everything that could go wrong and have a plan for it.  That means both a lot of forethought and sufficient redundancy so that the loss of any one thing (equipment failure, lost luggage, theft, dropping something, etc.) will not put you out of action. I have a Pelican carry-on case and will carry on enough gear that if my luggage disappeared, I could still get by. I have two camera bodies and enough lenses that if anything failed, I’d have to adjust, but could keep going. The weakest link is probably the laptop, but if the laptop failed or was stolen or lost, I have enough storage that I could continue to shoot throughout the trip, though, again, I’d have to adjust.  And I back-up everything I shoot on two external hard drives, stored in separate places. 

 

And then there’s the Covid wild card.  I feel very fortunate that there seems to be a window to go. Both SA and the US have travel restrictions, but those don’t seem to be insurmountable. The biggest challenge is the PCR Covid test…. First, understand that the rules are murky.  The CDC has guidelines.  The State Department has rules.  The airlines have rules.  The South African health authority has rules.  Those rules change and sometimes don’t seem to say what they mean. But, as it sits now, it appears that SA requires a negative PCR test within 72 hours of initial departure.  Originally the rule seemed to say that the specimen had to be collected within 72 hours of departure, but I assume because many testing sites require several days to get results from PCR testing, it looks like that’s been modified.  The Delta site now says that tests much be “issued” within 72 hours of departure.  “Issued” is a strange word in this context, but I think they mean results issued within 72 hours.  They’ve also added the option to present a “Certificate of Recovery” from a licensed health professional. What I think they’re getting at here is that people who have contracted Covid, and have recovered, can continue to get positive PCR test results for weeks or even months after they’ve recovered, well past the time when they can transmit the disease.  The Certificate of Recovery must be matched with a positive test result and issued by a health professional, certifying that the person is safe to travel, not more than 72 hours before departure.  And then one also must have a negative PCR test to get back into the US from SA, though it appears that one can also use the Certificate of Recovery approach.  Fortunately, there is apparently a testing facility in the airport in JNB.

 

One reason that I have had to pay so much attention is that I contracted Covid in mid-September. I am fully vaccinated, and it was thankfully a mild case, but it sets in motion all these wheels…. Because of the possibility that PCR testing could return a positive result, I am trying to cover all my bases (remember how obnoxious photographers are). I did get a negative PCR 10 days ago.  While not within the window of acceptability for travel, I do feel confident that I will be cleared to travel, but to hedge my bets, I’m testing twice this week and I’ve also asked my primary care doctor to write up a Certificate of Recovery.  He has agreed so if PCR tests come back positive, I will still be able to demonstrate recovery and, I believe, meet the applicable travel requirements. And I don’t feel great about any of this. At a time when much of the world has insufficient access to testing resources, this feels wasteful. But the rules seem rigid, and I think will be enforced in a black and white way. No one will be interested in hearing my story. Bottom line is that without taking these steps, there would be the possibility that I might find out the day before leaving that I couldn’t go.  That’s still a possibility, but I think a small one at this point.

 

No plan is foolproof, but I’m reasonably confident that I’ll be able to go and to shoot throughout the trip. I think I’m ready.