We saw so many things on Phase 2–the villages of Zambia, the desolation of Namibia, Zimbabwe–that I never thought I’d see. And we just barely touched Africa. There are so many places we had wanted to stretch our Phase 2 into (Mozambique, we’re coming for you), but time and money were short, so instead we just got a taste of it.

By The Numbers

Phase 2 lasted right about 2 months, leaving Washington, DC on June 3, 2018, and leaving Dubai to begin Phase 3 on July 31, 2018. In this short time, we:

• Visited 8 countries
• Stayed in 14 different hotels or AirBnbs
• Stayed at 4 camp sites
• Stayed with 2 different friends
• Took 10 flights
• Still missed 0 flights!
• Changed 1 flat tire (2 including Brennan’s)
• Flew 7 different airlines
• Flew a distance of over 17,844 miles
• Drove ourselves more than a ridiculous 2,592 miles
• Walked 133 miles
• Took 3 day safaris in national parks
• Saw 14 total lions
• Saw approximately 2,388,100 elephants
• Toured wineries on only one day (again, mothers!)

On top of all this, we’d still been lucky enough to not have lost anything, get robbed, or vomit! Well, Erika may have thrown up in her mouth from a coughing fit in Dubai Mall, but otherwise, we’re good!

Isn’t Africa Scary?!

No! Well, maybe Johannesburg. The people in the countries we visited are some of the most friendly, most helpful people on earth. Our biggest fear was malaria. But we had prophylaxis so we were fine. Probably.

We Can Stay Anywhere

Standing in the bathroom in our place in Stonetown, I looked around myself.

The window was only a screen–no glass. There was just a too-small shower curtain separating the part of the bathroom deemed ‘the shower’ from the rest of it. Ants and other bugs walked occasionally across the floor. I looked through the open door into the main room. Our beds were two twin beds, each with their own mosquito net enveloping it, that we had pushed together.

And I just started laughing. I laughed because I remembered coming into the room earlier in the day, putting Franz down, and saying, “yeah, this is pretty good!”

We can stay anywhere.

To an extent, this turned out to be true from the beginning of the trip. But we’ve only become more and more skilled at it as the trip has gone on.

We make anywhere we stay home. Even if it’s just for two nights, we spread our stuff out and take the space. And it doesn’t much matter how uncomfortable the bed is, or what bugs there are, or how humid the bathroom is, or how small the shower is, or whatever.

Conservation

Our trip has definitely made us ever more conscious of our ecological footprint. Many of the places we’ve visited don’t have reliably safe drinking water, so we’re forced into buying bottled water. We try to get the biggest bottles we can, instead of having a bunch of small bottles, but inevitably every time we leave a place, we leave behind a mountain of plastic that we hope somehow gets recycled (but we know it doesn’t).

Conservation concerns were brought into even sharper focus when we visited Cape Town, and Cape Town was struggling with water shortages. Tap water is safe to drink there, there just isn’t any of it–the irony!

When we got there, the water problem had been greatly abated, but they had wisely kept the restrictions in place to let the reservoirs further improve. We were very conscious of our water use there, trying not to waste a drop. This was true also with showering, which it was suggested people limit to 90 seconds per day.

Ninety seconds is not a lot of time! We implemented a strategy of only one of us showering each day, and taking both of our 90 seconds, for a total of 3 minutes. Three minutes is not a lot of time! We would turn on the water to rinse, turn it off to soap up, turn it on to rinse, etc. We’d have the other of us time how long we had the water on, yelling out when we turn it on or off.

Keeping it to three minutes is incredibly hard! We never quite pulled it off, usually coming in around four minutes. It really makes you think about just how much water you use for your regular shower, when you obviously keep the water on for far, far longer. These sort of considerations have stuck with us ever since.

What’s Next?

No rest for the weary. And, unfortunately, we weren’t able to work in a US trip between phases. So, instead we dove straight into Phase 3 of the trip: Europe!

After our busy morning touring Dubai, we had a flight that afternoon direct to Geneva, where we’d begin Europe with a trip to Switzerland that had slowly spun itself up to a 2-week long itinerary. Come back next time to read about the start of it in Geneva!