Leaving civilization

Dreaming On

We've received a proposal from Chris Worden of African Bush Camps.  It describes in mouth-watering detail an eight-night safari experience in the Victoria Falls, Upper Zambezi and Hwange National Park.  If we could afford it today, we would be leaving almost immediately.  The following extract describes only the first two days.  

Jan at the falls - March 2001

Tuesday 17^th July, 2011:  After breakfast Safari Club will transfer you to Johannesburg Airport, where you will check in and connect to your British Airways/Comair flight 6285, to Victoria Falls, departing Johannesburg at 1125hrs, arriving Victoria Falls at 1310hrs. 

Here you will be met by Wild Horizons Safaris and transferred to The Elephant Camp, situated only 15 minutes from Victoria Falls Airport and 10 minutes from Victoria Falls village and the Victoria Falls themselves.

Riding an Elephant in August - the dry season

March 2001 - in the rainy season

The tented suites are all equipped with indoor and outdoor showers, huge baths, private lounges, mini bar and tea/coffee stations, overhead fans plus air conditioning and are all mosquito proofed.

The Elephant Camp overlooks a waterhole that is fed by natural streams in the rainy season that rush down to meet the Masuwe River, and the Zambezi gorges below the Victoria Falls.

Bush walks and birding for guests supply boundless photographic opportunities in addition to the variety of activities that are available in Victoria Falls.

Interaction with the resident Elephants and Elephant back safaris are a unique attraction of this camp.

Managing the Elephant Camp is Jonathan Elway, who has 21 years experience in the tourism industry. 

The views from the elephant camp towards the spray of the Victoria Falls are breathtaking!

2 nights at The Elephant Camp, in a twin bedded room, with en suite facilities, on a fully inclusive basis.

These photos from our previous visits to Victoria Falls and Elephant Camp may put this whole mouth-watering reference above into better perspective.

Leaving Civilization

Let me recap my historical origins prior to stepping on African soil in Port Elizabeth in July 1956.

Indigenous peoples inhabited the Gadsden, Alabama, area for thousands of years and the agrarian Mississippian culture lived here from 1000 to 1600 AD.  The French first settled in the Mobile region in 1702 and knew the local tribe as the Alibamon. The Spanish Hernando DeSoto expedition of 1540 described the Alibamo tribe of the area.

I had been born and raised in the city of Gadsden. In 1956 it was not considered a big city having a population, as I recall, of about 70,000.  The first white settlement in the area was reputedly a house built in about 1825.  After 1840 the first survey of land was made and the first steamboat arrived on the Coosa River from Mobile, on the Gulf of Mexico, in 1845.  The new “town” was named Gadsden in honor of Colonel James Gadsden of South Carolina who, a few years later, would gain notoriety for his part, as American Ambassador to Mexico, in the Gadsden Purchase.  The Gadsden Purchase was the final acquisition of territory from Mexico by the United States in 1854 and comprised an area about the size of Scotland across southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.

It should be noted that Col. Gadsden was an extremely vocal supporter of the practice and continuation of slavery.  The State of Alabama was to gain statehood in 1819 although it seceded from the union in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War.  Also noteworthy is that Alabama created a public school system only during the years of reconstruction which followed the end of the war in 1865.  It was during those post Civil War years that the Ku Klux Klan would gain enormous influence.

“After the Civil War, the state was still chiefly agricultural, with an economy tied to cotton.  Planters resisted working with free labor during Reconstruction and sought to re-establish controls over freedmen.  In the early years the Ku Klux Klan had numerous independent chapters in Alabama that attacked freedmen and other Republicans.  After it was suppressed, insurgent whites organized paramilitary groups, such as the Red Shirts and White League, which acted more openly to suppress black voting.  After regaining power by the late 1870s, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, white Democrats passed electoral laws and constitutional amendments to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites.  Having regained power in the state legislature, Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, including racial segregation in public facilities, to restore white supremacy.” (Source:  Wikipedia)

I mention these historical facts to put my new home region and school system into perspective.  We were thought to be going back in time, to settle in a third world country, which would almost certainly be backward in technology and education.  My parents clearly did not think this way, but many of our family back home certainly did.   From the moment we set sail to cross the Atlantic, they were counting the days until we would return and reestablish ourselves in civilization once more.  That my father would take his young wife and three small children into such an uncertain and unsafe environment was disgraceful.

My brother and I would be attending an all boys High School, Muir College Boys High School, which was first established in 1822 as the “English Free School,” in the town of Uitenhage; established 18 years earlier on April 25, 1804 (41 Years before naming of the new town of Gadsden).  It was in the town of Uitenhage (pronounced U-tin-hāge) that the Goodyear Tire Company had built a manufacturing plant in 1948, and where my dad would become the Production Director for the company.  

More on these topics in my next post.   

  

Africa is a very big place! 6,812 miles from Cape Town to Cairo.