Here we go again... Beth and Ted's African Adventure

We are off once again on another epic trip – an African adventure.  Why Africa?   Beth’s sister, Barbara, has been in Tanzania for the last year teaching in a small rural school as a Peace Corps volunteer.  So Africa moved up on the list of places to visit.

It has been quite interesting to try to plan this trip.   Beth started by searching out companies that dealt with safari trips in Tanzania.  African Travel Safari’s was highly rated so she began with them.  Narrowing choices on where and what to see became the challenge.  We wanted to see Barbara and see the Big 5 (elephants, lions, cape buffalo, rhinos, and leopard) on safari plus we hope to see hippos and giraffe as well.  

Where we will be in Africa

We initially decided this would not be a biking trip, but then found a bike tour company, KE Adventures, that runs a group tour from Livingston, Zambia (Victoria Falls) to Cape Town, South Africa.  Ironically both companies are based in the UK so we’ve been dealing with pound to dollar conversion and some interesting lessons in British slang.  For example, a trapezoid is a car bike rack.  Faf as in “It is a little bit of a faf to book, but very much worth it.” is slang for a hassle. But in the end, we think we have quite the trip planned.

Our first days will be spent in Tanzania.  We will fly into Dar es Salaam, the capital city.  Our time in Tanzania will encompass a visit to a tea plantation, time with Barbara in her village and time on safari.  We then transfer to Livingston to see Victoria Falls and spend a day rafting on the Zambez.  We meet our bike group in Livingston.  The next three weeks takes us from Zambia through Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.  You can see a more detailed map of places we will visit 

HERE.  

The bike tour should be a really different experience with “camping”…and  it is a mountain bike tour.  We have a new mountain bike tandem just for this trip, and we’re pretty sure it will get a lot of use.  Since 3 days will be spent riding dirt roads in the Namibia desert, we have been practicing our “sand” riding.  The tour has never had a tandem so we will be the first for them as well.

We hope to post to this blog and share our adventures with you; however, access to wifi is likely to be limited.  We will post whenever we can.  However, for this trip we will be taking our "Spot" satellite locator and you can at least see where we are or have been for the last seven days.  Click Here to see the Spot Locator map 

The new mountain tandem with front shock

We are leaving late in the evening on June 2^nd and after two overnight flights and 33 hours of airport/airplane time will arrive in Dar es Salaam on the 4^th.  We will try to post again on the 4^th from Dar or on the 5^th from our first lodge.

The tandem packed in 2 airline "standard" suit cases with 2 sets of tires... The front shock fork goes in the KE bag with bike clothes, helmets, shoes, tools, sleeping bags, etc.  All packed up it is 3 very full bags and 150 lbs of biking stuff!!