Traveling With Tools

Our last night in Africa happened to coincide with a supermoon. The hosts at Bologonja Under Canvas had lit a campfire, and the full moon rose up out of the Serengeti, past a very old tree that may or may not have sheltered a family of leopards. In South Africa, they had referred to sitting…

Serengeti National Park was the final stop on our 2016 African adventure. Our guide Rick, who had been with us since we arrived in Tanzania, drove the Land Cruiser from Ngorongoro while we flew from the Lake Manyara airport to the Lobo airstrip. The drive from Lobo to the Bologonja tent camp was a safari…

Two million years ago, give or take, a giant volcano exploded and collapsed into itself. Ngorongoro is the resulting caldera, the walls of which rise up 2,000 feet from the crater floor. It is claimed to be the largest intact, unfilled caldera on earth. Having spent the last summer around Yellowstone, which is also a…

On November 2, we flew out of the small airstrip at Kadizora Camp to the city of Kasane, and from there drove to our next stop at Chobe National Park. Ngoma Safari Lodge was perched on a hillside overlooking the Chobe River, with virtually every seat in the house getting a premium view. Five years…

Monwana Lodge at Thornybush was a great way to start our safari adventure. They had all of the big five African game animals, and we had closeup experiences with them all. That’s the benefit of a game reserve that’s relatively compact in size. The Okavango Delta, our next stop, is much more vast and open.…

For a long time, my favorite fishing hat was a black ball cap with the California Republic bear on it that I bought at the Laguna Seca racetrack sometime in the mid-2000s. I’d forgotten to bring a hat to work, you see, so was forced to pay track-side concession prices to keep my pale bald…