Pre-trip thoughts

Tomorrow I will probably go out briefly in Westerly, but I leave around noon for New Jersey and my departure to South Africa.

In Rhode Island I can’t say I recognize all the birds, but usually I know when I don’t know the bird. The tour sent me a list of birds that numbers over 600. Of those 600 birds I know about 20 of them from previous birding. Thinking about that is more than a little overwhelming, but here I go. I’m looking forward to being out of my element for a while and seeing what growth that will bring.

The tour itself is two weeks long – the first week is spent in the Western Cape area centered around Cape Town but moves to the southern coast for a few days and includes, weather permitting, a pelagic (I am really looking forward to seeing a Giant Petrel – because the ones we have here are tiny!). The second week we fly to the east – start in the Drakensberg Mountains(apparently replete with monkeys) and move on to a Safari in Kruger National Park. People tell me that the animals will be so big and unexpected that I will forget about the birds. I hope not, but we’ll see. The tour only has six other guests, so its nice and small. Maps below…

Don’t worry about the cats, they have wonderful cat sitters and I have friends checking in on them too. I’m sure they will be annoyed for the first few days, but they will also be annoyed when I get back. They will get more playtime and attention daily than they EVER get from me.

I will try to post on a regular basis, likely just a few photos for three reasons.

1) I’m not sure how much free time I will have

2) If I have free time I’m not sure it will be where I have wifi

3) South Africa has a power shortage and to deal with that, they do what is called Load Shedding. We would call them scheduled blackouts – I would likely not have wifi and it might be my only free time.

And who knows what else. I will be processing a lot of photos when I get home and I am keeping a manual (gasp) journal/sketchbook on the trip… now that is out of my element.

This is an overview of the trip called "Cape Town to Kruger"

More Detail of the Cape Town week -- places I expect we will visit (although that could change of all kinds of reasons) so we need to be a little flexible...

More Detail on the Kurger week.

This has already changed a little we are going to De Hoop on day 3-4 and back in Cape Town on day 5.

Cheers! More to come!