The plane, a big double decker A380, left efficiently on time, 22.15, and pretty much full. A fairly uneventful flight with Anne as our aisle companion with whom Peg chatted quite a lot. One passable chicken curry and an underwhelming breakfast, reasonably successful attempt at sleeping and arrival at 7.05 local time, 11 hours flight!
The only formality was passport control, as no tests now needed, for some reason my, new, passport wasn’t recognised by the automatic control but the alternative real person was surprisingly fast and friendly. We, meaning me, made the mistake of not using the train to get to baggage reclaim, so we had the long, blade runner style walk and hop on and off walkways for what felt like a couple of kilometres, more walking than we’ve done for weeks!
We needn’t have hurried as the baggage reclaim was very slow and very random. As Richard was saying I’m not sure how they shuffle the bags but it seems to be a great randomisation, with bags from our group arriving both early and late, but mostly late. We said fond farewells to what had been the nicest of the three groups we’ve travelled with and oozed home. Easy and not crowded tube to St Pancras, where we just had enough time to get coffee and sandwich from Prêt before getting the 10.27. This was 3 hours on a Sunday, again uncrowded, and we waited 20 mins for the bus home and here we are.
Impressions
So glad that we took what was certainly a risk, in going ahead with this. It cost an arm and a leg, plus more body parts for lots of testing, but was easily, easily worth it.
275+ birds on my list, of definitely seen in the binoculars, if not fully identified. We both feel we were much better birders this time compared with Cambodia. Not so overwhelmed, able to pick up birds relatively quickly, get a feel for whether they were new etc. The birds were great and Neil and Jakes were excellent. I’ll add bird photos when uploaded.
The app BirdPro was truly excellent and I’ll miss it.
There was a lot of driving and sitting in the vehicles, 3,000 km in total. We knew this and it’s inevitable when covering the different environments but was quite tiring at times. Getting out isn’t allowed in most of the parks, for safety reasons.
The group dynamic was good, everyone at least rubbed along fine and many friendships were made. This type of holiday is a way of life for many, it seems, and is becoming that way for us, probably more so if we could afford it!
Neil and Jakes were both very good guides with different strengths. Neil is the owner of Safariwise and is quite extrovert and strong minded, Jakes was genuinely very keen to make sure everyone had a good time. They both spotted well for us. Jakes had an interesting background in agriculture.
Despite spending more than two weeks driving through their area, we have ended up with next to no idea of how the local people live. We have no idea what the interior of their houses look like, what they eat, even what they do all day. This is partly because Neil and Jakes also had no idea and it’s an indictment of all of our societies. In the main they look healthy, walk long distances and seem happy, but are they?
We will, hopefully, be on other trips within the year, watch this space.
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