We giggled. It was surprising, and faintly ridiculous, seeing all our earthly possessions (for the past 6 months, anyway) shoved into one tiny locker. Franz and Helga never looked so small. If it fits so easily in there, how come all this stuff is such a pain in the ass to carry?! Travel Day We were in Martigny, Switzerland, halfway through our travel day from Chamonix to our next stop, Zermatt, Switzerland. We’d taken the train to Martigny, then had…
“I want to go there,” Erika said, pointing at a picture on her friend Celia’s Instagram feed. It was of a beautiful Alpine landscape, in Chamonix, France. And as simple as that, thus began the transformation of our Switzerland trip from a brief visit of Geneva and Zurich, into a two-week tour of the Alps along with those two cities. So much for getting out of Switzerland as cheaply as possible. I’m glad that transformation happened. Because, though it wasn’t…
Phase 3 of our trip began with about the most luxury we’ve had the entire trip: a 7-hour flight on Emirates Airlines to Geneva. Comfortable seating! Lunch! Cheese! Wine! Hundreds of movies! I’d always heard that Emirates is one of the nicest airlines in the world, but it really lives up to it. Three movies later—including finally catching Avengers: Infinity War (my take? A good Guardians of the Galaxy movie mixed with a less good Iron Man movie mixed with…
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…
A woman in the back of the airplane screamed, which only served to put everyone else more on edge. It’s just a little turbulence, I thought, I mean if every time it– The plane rocked violently, and she screamed again. Alright, that’s a lot of turbulence. Still, though! It was a rough approach to Dubai International. On top of that, you couldn’t see anything: sand, smog, both, I don’t know. I was watching the screen where you could see the flight statistics–air speed, temperature, altitude, etc.–and the altitude was in the low 100s, in feet….
We hated Zanzibar. I’ve thought a lot about how I wanted to construct this blog post and build up to that revelation, but I just don’t want to bury the lede. We didn’t enjoy our time there, and we would not go back, and it’s the only place on our trip so far that we would definitively say we would not go back. So let’s get to Zanzibar, and talk about why we disliked it so much. Getting In We…
After Lusaka, our next stop was Zanzibar. That was the plan, and had been the plan for a while. But flights there were incredibly expensive. I was getting very discouraged while looking for flights back in South Luangwa (you’ll remember that I was fairly on edge about expenses while there…) An interesting answer materialized. For a little more than the cheapest tickets available, Ethiopian Airlines had flights that connected through Addis Ababa. But Ethiopian will let you extend that layover…
After South Luangwa, Erika and I smashed head-long into a wall. We were exhausted, having just made a tear through southern Africa, visiting Johannesburg, Harare, Victoria Falls, Livingstone, and South Luangwa in under two weeks, with three safaris in that time. It was time for a break. So we didn’t see Lusaka. We didn’t go out into Lusaka. We didn’t do anything in Lusaka. All we did was rest, recover, and spend time with Erika’s friend, Lindsey, who we visited…
Since Namibia, we’d been chasing that feeling we’d had from doing the self-drive safari. We wanted awesome camping trucks again, and the ability to chart our own path without taking expensive tours. Originally, we were looking to do something really crazy–get awesome camping trucks in Harare, Zimbabwe, drive/camp our way to Victoria Falls, across the border to Zambia, and loop all the way around to Lusaka, Zambia. However, we couldn’t find any reasonable availability for awesome camping trucks. The ones…
Crunched into the back of a rusty old Toyota van with nine of our closest Zambian friends, we handed over our kwacha when the operator started collecting fares. Some paid in Zambian kwacha, some paid in US dollars. We paid in kwacha because, naturally, the exchange rate was in their favor if you used dollars. Exchange rate… I’m talking as though it would have been a large difference, the rate in kwacha was under a dollar. Welcome to the combi…
