A month from yesterday

A and I went out and bought our tent for Africa this last weekend.  We bought an Octance 2 tent from Blacks, which looks to be a good balance between size and weight.  We’re both a little nervous about this, as neither of us has really spent much/any time camping, but I’m sure that after seven weeks in Africa, we’ll be fine!

I’m also going to get a good tripod to take with me.  I’ve been wanting a good one for years - I love low-light shots but have shaky hands.  This is a probably the best time to get it, as I want to make sure I have lots of wonderful photos from this trip!  It’s also a great time to get one because my wonderful mom and grandfather have offered to cover the cost.  ::grin::  I’m going to get a Velbon Sherpa Pro tripod with a Manfrotto ball-and-socket head.  Overall, what with the tripod and the head and the 30-year-old, metal-body camera and all the film, my photo equipment is going to be by far the heaviest things in my backpack, but, again, how often am I going to make a trip like this?

We went down to London last Wednesday and dropped our passports and visa applications off at the Kenyan embassy.  All being well, they should be in the mail back to us today.  We probably won’t be getting any other visas before we go, as our plans are flexible and so we aren’t really sure where we’re going to go.

Looking at the state of things now, we’re probably going to follow something like the following route: fly into Jo’burg.  Leave South Africa pretty much immediately.  Head up the Mozambique coast, possibly stopping in to visit a friend’s daughter, who lives there.  Cross over into Malawi, thence to Zambia.  Canoe trip on the Zambezi (note: don’t annoy the hippos).  Train from Kapiri Mposhi up to Dar es Salaam.  Zanzibar.  Travel along the northern part of Tanzania, past Kilimanjaro (but not up it), into Uganda.  Out of Uganda, down through Kenya, out of Nairobi. 

Three days after arriving back in the UK, travel up north for some friends’ wedding.  Eat lots and lots of food there, and enjoy sleeping on real beds.

I’m finally starting to get excited about this trip.  Before now I hadn’t been too bothered, mostly because it seemed so remote and impossible.  Now, however - we leave in less than a month!  And we’ve bought a tent.  I mean, we must be going somewhere if we’ve bought a tent, right?

As mentioned before, our plans are very flexible.  The one thing we definitely do not want to do is rush too much, try to fit too much in.  One of my big failings is a tendency to look towards the future too much, to the detriment of my experience of the present.  So I’m going to try my best to be very conscious and in-the-moment, and not to worry about what’s going to happen next or where we’re going to go next or how we’re going to get there.  That’s one reason (for me, at least) that I haven’t been pushing to plan more for this trip.  Up until just a week ago, all we really had was the arrival date and departure date; now we have a date to enter Kenya.  We still don’t really have much of anything in between, and that’s fine by me.  It’s good for me, too.  ::grin::