Five Years Ago: Revisiting an African Adventure

I realized the other day that five years has passed since Mom invited me to go with her on an African adventure. It was just about as amazing as you might imagine, just from those two words, “African adventure”.

Back then, I posted photos to Instagram at the end of each day’s exploration, but Instagram is an awful format for sharing photography, despite that being its primary purpose. And it is extremely difficult to dig back through an account to revisit memories, the search tool is completely useless for simple tasks.

Between the two of us taking pictures, my Africa_2016 photo folder contains 3,741 images from the three weeks we were on the continent. I’m going to revisit the adventure here, trying to recall fond memories as best I can. The pictures really do tell the story though.

We arrived in Johannesburg on October 23, 2016 after more than 20 hours traveling. We flew directly to Capetown and had a couple of days to explore the city before we flew north to begin the actual wildlife safari portion of the trip.

We took a bus tour around the countryside and down to the Cape of Good Hope. We walked through touristy areas of town and went to some famous gardens. Really lots of interesting sights, sounds and history.

(Click any image for larger versions and captions.)

We flew north to Hoedspruit to begin our first wildlife safari, and took a fairly long ride out to the Monwana Lodge on the Thornybush Game Reserve. Driving through the gate felt just a little bit like the scene in Jurassic Park, where they enter the massive gates with high expectations…