Africa – Kids on Camels

How much risk is too much? Uganda and Rwanda (with a happy ending)

10/14/22-10/30/22

“Cough, cough, oh no, I have Ebola diarrhea!”

That was my unfortunate joke to the kids as we discussed what we might say to discourage other travelers from entering our closed cabin on the train from Poland to the Czech Republic. I probably shouldn’t ever joke about a deadly disease that kills roughly half of those infected–I was going for absurd, but sometimes my humor is a little off in that way. I few weeks later, I found myself clarifying to the kids that they should never, ever, joke about Ebola.

Risks and the US State Department

A few months ago (when I started this post!), if you went to travel.state.gov, you’d see this at the very top of the page:

Just in case you haven’t been following world news for the past 15 months. As an aside, we saw a lot of Russian tourists in Thailand. One of them concurred with our State Department advice: “Oh yeah, don’t go to Russia, it’s a mess there right now.”

Russia is maybe the most extreme example of what the US State Department classifies as “Level 4: Do Not Travel”. Others with that distinction include rather obviously North Korea, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Belarus. (The remaining countries might be more or less obvious depending on how closely you follow the news: Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Haiti, Venezuela, Mali, Central African Republic, Somalia, and Burkina Faso.)

Generally, Karen and I are in complete agreement with the State Department about these Level 4 countries. For our aborted 2020 trip around the world, we were planning to visit Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and Myanmar, but there weren’t wars to worry about in those places back then. (We were a week or two away from buying our very expensive Russian visas when COVID hit, so lucky timing on that!)

The next tier of warning, “Level 3: Reconsider Travel”, is a little murkier. It currently contains 31 countries. We’ve visited two (Egypt & Uganda), are planning to go to two others (Colombia & Peru), and went to another that was Level 3 at the time (Tunisia). We also considered and decided against going to three others–Ethiopia, Indonesia, & Madagascar. (The latter, like Tunisia, is back down to “Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution”.)

Assessing Risks

In most cases, these risks are more nuanced–for all the countries we’ve gone to or are planning to go to, they are some combination of high risks of crime or terrorism, but almost always specific to geographic regions of the country we could avoid: in Tunisia within 20 kilometers of the border with Algeria (we were about 30 away), in Peru and Columbia more remote parts that struggle with drug trafficking and terrorism.

In Uganda, there were warnings for regions we were planning to visit, but our mode of travel–driving our own car between resort hotels during the day–mitigated those risks substantially. Having always wanted to visit the “Pearl of Africa”, we felt confident enough to transfer several thousand dollars for our 4×4 rental and hotel stays to Road Trip Uganda for a non-refundable deposit.

Ebola in Uganda

As bad luck would have it, about two weeks after I made that big deposit and only a few weeks before we planned to arrive, I got this news alert:

Uganda declares Ebola Virus Disease outbreak

If you’re like me, 2+ years of a COVID pandemic leaves you a little more nervous about other potential pandemics. Many other tourists cancelled their travel plans immediately, but (a) doing so would have cost us roughly our travel budget for an entire month, (b) Ebola doesn’t spread particularly easily, (c) the alert for Ebola specifically was only Level 2. We decided to risk it, and I made an even bigger final payment for what we’d planned to be the most expensive month of our trip. I did, however start checking Uganda Ebola news on twitter so frequently that my Google recommended articles became entirely about Uganda and the Ugandan government.

We felt pretty good about that approach until this story popped up a couple of days after we arrived:

Ebola in Uganda: Three-week lockdown announced for two districts

It was two districts we weren’t planning to travel to, except for driving straight through, and again the risk of contracting Ebola for tourists was very low. We mostly started worrying about airport lockdowns that could get us stuck without the ability to move on to another country. After seeing this news, we briefly considered how we might abandon the rental car in Rwanda (after we’d crossed that border) and fly onwards to Egypt without coming back to Uganda. It wasn’t practical, though, so we continued onwards.

Henry is constantly judging us. Teenagers, right?

A Great Time in Uganda and Rwanda

Luckily, this story worked out just fine, both for us and the Ugandans. Here is a happy headline from early January:

Ebola Outbreak Over in Uganda

I’m also happy to report that Google has finally stopped giving me recommended articles about Uganda, now favoring endless posts about cell phones, although that’s probably the subject of a whole other post.

In the end, we had an OK time in Rwanda and a wonderful time in Uganda–certainly one of the top countries of our trip and a place I’d recommend to everyone. To recap, here are our Instagram posts from those days.

Country counter after Uganda and Rwanda:

25th & 26th countries of our trip
Me: 65 countries (including 37 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 65 countries
Henry: 39 countries
Charlie: 35 countries
James: 32 countries

Guest Post by James: Egypt

10/31/22-11/10/22

For something a little different, in the next few posts I’m going to share (with his permission) what 8-year-old James wrote in his private blog. My Instagram posts appear below James’ writing.

After weeks of safaris, fancy lodges, national parks, and gentle but wild animals, we needed a little bit of chaos! We flew from Entebbe, Uganda to Cairo, Egypt. Rather than dodging monkeys on the streets, we dodged motorcycles and street vendors. Our favorite street vendor in Cairo was a guy selling sushi on his bike! Rules of the road did not exist and our cab once drove across a sidewalk to make a U-turn, and walking across streets was almost impossible.

In Cairo, we stayed at a massive, amazing apartment, mostly because we all had our own rooms (mom edit: and a washing machine!) Besides the huge living room with a the huge TV (where we watched Gorillas in the Mist), I loved the second-floor deck that overlooked the (busy, busy) street. On our first day, Dad bought too many donuts and we ate them on the deck; we snacked on those donuts for days. Other than the pyramids at Giza (I wrote a post about that already), we went to the Egyptian Museum, where we saw King Tut’s golden burial mask and a bunch of mummies.

After a few days in Cairo, I took my first overnight train (1st class!) to Aswan, a lovely city on the Nile and home to many Egyptian archeological sites. On the train, I also discovered my love of spagetti-rice: rice cooked with bay leaves and vermicelli noodles. We arrived very early in the morning and walked 2 kilometers with our heavy backpacks and had to take a ferry across the Nile River to get to our hotel on Elephantine Island, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its Nubian villages. While I did homework, Mom and Dad walked to the museum and some ancient Egyptian ruins. We also took a ferry to see the ancient city of Philae, which is an island with a bunch of temples. We saw a square where people discussed politics in ancient Egyptian times.

The main reason we visited Aswan was because it was the only way to see Abu Shimel, the Tomb of Ramses II. We had to leave at 4 am for a 3.5-4 hour drive to Abu Shimel. It is a complex made up of two temples and was HUGE. The Egyptians, in 1968, had to move the entire complex away from its original spot to the current location because of water rising in Lake Nasser. Lake Nasser is also the largest artificial lake the world. Because of the heat, we could stay for 2 hours and we had to drive 3.5-4 hours back to Aswan.

The next day, we took a 3-4 hour train to Luxor, Egypt and then another public ferry to our hotel on the other side of the Nile. We visited Valley of the Kings and saw three tombs, but it was also very hot. On our last day, we saw Luxor Temple, but it was at the end of our time in Egypt so we didn’t really care anymore.

After Luxor, we took a 10 hour train back to Cairo, but it was delayed for 5 hours so it was longer than we hoped.

He’s great, right? Karen helped some with the editing, but the content is all his. Here are my Instagram posts from Egypt along with a country counter at the end:

Country counter after Egypt:

27th country of our trip
Me: 66 countries (including 38 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 66 countries
Henry: 40 countries
Charlie: 36 countries
James: 33 countries

Can you do a Kenyan safari on a budget?

10/5-10/13

Planning the African leg of our trip

We started this trip with a rough plan of spending about 3 months total in Africa and the Middle East after about 3 months in Europe. As I shared before, we ended up with closer to 4 months in Europe, but were still interested in spending more time in Africa if we could figure it out.

Surprisingly to a lot of people, Africa is the most expensive part of the world we’re visiting. It’s counterintuitive because of the concentration of poverty in Africa compared to the rest of the world: almost 2/3 of all of the people in the world living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90/day) live in Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s 39% of the population compared to less than 9% within the world as a whole. Here’s a graph from the World Bank showing how this has changed over the last 30 years:

Regional trends of extreme poverty ($1.90/day or less), measured in millions of people per region from 1990-2019. I’m focusing on Africa here, but I’ve always been inspired by how much the East Asia and South Asia lines have dropped, driven by the phenomenal growth China has experienced since the 1980s and India since the 1990s.

What that means for travelers is it’s harder for us to find food and services up to our standard of expectations, and we have to pay more to do so. If Karen and I were by ourselves, we’d be willing to take a few more risks, but we tend to play it a little safer since we’re thinking about our kids as well. (We want them to like traveling internationally.)

In other words, it’s cheaper to go to France than Kenya, where there aren’t anywhere near as many international tourists and budget hotels and tours catering to them. Instead, the market is more heavily focused on wealthier people looking to do “once in a lifetime” safari trips, who are willing to pay several hundred dollars a night (or more!) for the opportunity.

Pre-kids, Karen and I spent about half a year living in South Africa and were happy to rent a car and drive around there and in neighboring countries, but Kenya and the rest of East Africa seemed more challenging from the bit we’d started to read from guidebooks. We have a budget we’re trying to follow, though, so I started piecing together an itinerary one location at a time, starting with a budget lodge near Maasai Mara, the most famous reserve in Kenya, and hoping we could figure out the logistics and next steps as we went.

Luckily, the lodge I picked (because it was only $100/night for a family room!) was tied to a great tour operator as well. When I emailed to ask only about game drives locally, the helpful woman on the other side of the “info” email address offered up a couple of tour packages for touring Kenya that were only about 50% higher than our normal daily budget. We were lucky to have found Kairi Tours & Safaris in this way, because we had a great time! (I should also point out that Elizabeth, the woman answering that email, was incredibly helpful and patient–our Gmail thread for planning the trip eventually hit 48 total messages!)

Recovering in Nairobi

So, a couple of months after planning this trip, we finally came to Kenya. After a long couple of days of travel (an overnight ferry from Crete to Athens and a stopover in Istanbul), culminating in a 3:30am arrival in Nairobi, we planned a couple of rest days before starting our real trip. We were lucky to find this Airbnb farmhouse cabin in a fancy suburb of Nairobi:

You can see a dog and chicken here, but here’s my Instagram post with a little more of the local “wildlife”

Our second day also included a visit to the awesome Giraffe Centre, which was small, but provided this up close and personal experience of giraffe tongues, which are pretty dry:

Travel to Maasai Mara

Our view of the Rift Valley, about an hour outside of Nairobi

After our time in Nairobi, we met our driver/guide, James (pictured at the top of the post with our James), who picked us up in the morning and expertly navigated us through traffic and then some very bumpy roads to our lodge on the outskirts of the reserve. We then went for a short sunset drive of the camp, where we took in the great views, spotted impala, buffalo, gazelle, and guinea fowl for the first time, and got excited for our full-day drive the next day. (We also spotted a python, but my family hates snakes and tries not to talk about that!)

Here’s my Instagram post about everything we saw that next day. James did a great job talking to other drivers and peering through binoculars to find as many great animal sightings as possible. It was excellent!

Crescent Island/Lake Naivasha and Lake Nakuru

We left the next morning (across the same bumpy roads) for a day that was mostly driving north so we could visit Lake Nakuru National Park the following day. However, we had a lovely couple of hours in the afternoon visiting Lake Naivasha, where we spotted some hippos and birds before stopping at Crescent Island, a private, walking only, little reserve where the boat dropped us then picked us up at the other end of the “crescent”.

We were having a pleasant walk at the island, ambling along and not seeing too much when a guard came hustling over the hill towards us. I was worried we were doing something wrong until he said, “do you want to see giraffes?!”

Now with giraffes. Helpful guard on the right!

After the lake, we traveled a bit further to the Lanet Matfam Resort, which served our favorite food of the trip. It was well seasoned, but also was quite obviously fresh. Here’s a turkey that was wandering around the parking lot:

Taken less than an hour before we ate it.

One thing we liked about the Lanet Matfam as well as the Sweet Lake Resort, where we stayed the next night, was that they weren’t secluded resorts with only western tourists. In fact most of the other guests were Kenyans. I felt underdressed at Sweet Lake because there was some kind of business conference there that all the other guests seemed to be attending. I said at the top of the post that the tourist infrastructure wasn’t as developed as we were used to, but in Kenya at least, we learned that isn’t exactly true.

The day after the drive from Maasai Mara and visiting Crescent Island, we spent 5-6 hours at Lake Nakura park, which was notable for the large numbers of rhinos and the namesake lake stocked full of flamingos and other birds. You can see pictures in the second half of this Instagram post (which also includes Lake Naivashu and Crescent Island):

Hell’s Gate and Amboseli

The following morning, we spent a couple hours riding bikes in Hell’s Gate National Park before a 6-7 hour drive to the South of Kenya for Amboseli National Park, in the shadow of Mt Kilimanjaro. This last day was the most expensive part of the trip, both because of the added park fees ($225) and our most expensive lodge, but we were excited to see one of the most famous mountains in the world, even though we were skipping Tanzania where it was actually located.

Hell’s Gate, right before we surprised three hyena eating a zebra. Thankfully, they ran off! (Picture includes my whole family if you count the fact that our James stayed in the 4×4 with driver James because he didn’t want to ride. The road was quite bumpy, so he was happy with his choice.)

From the Sentrim Amboseli, which was the only place we stayed that had only western tourists. Big buffet spreads, though.

The famous mountain. Driver James tracked this elephant family for 30-minutes or so in order to get us the picture you see at the start of this next Instagram post:

And that concludes our safari trip. After the whole morning at Amboseli National Park, James shuttled us back to Nairobi where we had another couple of nights relaxing at our Airbnb farmhouse before flying onwards to Uganda. On the day in-between, Karen, James, and I made a return trip to the Giraffe Centre for a little more giraffe feeding and also visited the excellent Karen Blixen Museum. We had a wonderful time in Kenya, and with the excellent introduction to the region were feeling confident about being a little more independent in Uganda and Rwanda.

Coffee roasting machine at the Karen Blixen Museum. The neighborhood we stayed in Nairobi, “Karen”, got it’s name from this Danish transplant, who tried to run a farm after an unsuccessful marriage brought her to Kenya. You might know her as the author of her memoir “Out of Africa”, which became a Best Picture-winning film with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.

Stay tuned for a next post about Uganda and Rwanda, which will hopefully come a lot faster than this one!

Country counter after Kenya:

24th country of our trip
Me: 63 countries (including 37 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 63 countries
Henry: 37 countries
Charlie: 33 countries
James: 30 countries (he’s kind of a fancy 8-year-old, averaging greater than 3 per year!)

Catchup Post: Italy, Tunisia, and Greece

9/5-10/3

One last short post to finish the European leg of our trep, covering our time in Italy, Tunisia (not in Europe!), and Greece. Again just linking to the Instagram posts I made for these countries, which were shared previously on Instagram or Facebook.

Italy, Part 1 (9/5-9/10)

Tunisia (9/11-9/17)

Italy, Part 2 (9/18-9/23)

Greece (9/24-10/3)

Country counter after these places:

21st, 22nd, and 23rd countries of our trip
Me: 62 countries (including 37 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 62 countries
Henry: 36 countries
Charlie: 32 countries
James: 29 countries