The African Queen, Part 1

Our daughter Tammy has set a goal for herself that most of us would find intimidating, if not downright inconceivable: she wants to have visited all seven continents before she turns 26.

Like the rest of us, her first one was a freebie: she was born in North America.

The spring when she was 17 years old, the three of us went to Europe and saw England, Ireland and France together. That was Tammy's first foray outside of North America, and it may have been what first got her thinking along these lines. She returned to Europe several years later, once university was finished, and cut a much wider and deeper swath across the continent. She traveled with a couple of girlfriends for most of it, but also spent some time by herself which probably solidified the wanderlust more than anything else.

Last year, she used a whole lot of "time in lieu" that she'd built up at work to see Asia for the first time. She was over there for most of two months and absolutely loved it. I think she'd started planning that particular journey while watching Lost in Translation the first time.

Right now, Tammy is almost halfway through her African voyage. She's traveling with a tour group (thank goodness!) and she assures us that they're sticking to "safe" areas only. This trip puts her over the hump in terms of seeing each continent, as she only has Oceania (Australia/New Zealand/etc), South America and Antarctica left. She already has plans in mind on how to get to each of those in the next 2.5 years, as that's how long she has left before her 26th birthday arrives in December of 2012 (just in time for the end of the world, according to the Mayan calendar).

Anyway, since Tammy is sending us such lovely updates on her current vacation via e-mail, I thought I might share some of them here (with her permission, of course). She hasn't passed along any photos yet, but once I have some, I'll post them, too. These are just snippets of longer e-mails, but they should provide a taste of what she's been up to.

"Day 4 - early morning canoe trip along the Orange River. Including rapids! I've never canoed through rapids before (or white water rafted or anything like that), so that was an easy introduction to it I think. By the way, apparently compared to the rest of the world ALL Canadians are expert canoers. I was by far the best at it, and I suck. Drove the rest of the day until we got to Fish River Canyon, where we watched the sunset. That is the second biggest canyon in the world (after the Grand Canyon, of course).

"Day 5 - today was just a long driving day through Namibia. Amazing scenery changes from brown mountains to golden wheat fields to red sand dunes. Also some wildlife: mountain zebras, spring bok, warthogs, orxy, etc. We aren't in Big 5 country yet so no lions, elephants, etc... I think that will be Day 12 when we visit Etosha.

"Day 6 - Desert day! We got up at 4am and scrambled to the top of Dune 45 to see the sunrise. Google "Sossusvlei" and you'll see what I saw. I made it to the top of the dune first and let me tell you that was quite the morning exercise. It was about 200m up, straight up it seemed! Then we took a jeep into the middle of the desert (near where some scenes in that movie 'The Cell' was filmed) and had a guided walk with a local who showed us the desert wildlife and told us how they survive in the desert and stuff like that - very interesting. Last night we camped on a big rock in the middle of the desert with not so much as a toilet or another person in sight.

"Our campsites have been so different each night which is nice, though I kind of prefer the ones with showers and other people around. At our site in Fish River Canyon I had a little encounter with a jackal on the way to the toilet in the middle of the night. I just yelled at it and it ran away in one direction and I ran in the other. Jackals are just like little (vicious) dogs, so not that scary - hyenas are worse, but we haven't encountered those just yet (but apparently we will - I've heard LOTS of stories of people accidentally cuddling up with them in the middle of the night because the hyenas will lie right next to our tents to keep warm).

"Mmmm let's see - guess I left off my reports in Swakopmund, which I loved. Would live there. Went skydiving and survived, and went sand boarding on some of the dunes on the outskirts of town. It was wet that morning, so the boarding was difficult but we also went down on mats and I think clocked in at about 70 km/hr.

"We spent the next couple of nights in the bush with the San Bushmen, a traditional African tribe. Oh and two days in Etosha - which was amazing. We saw too many elephants, zebra, and giraffe to count, as well as 5 lions. We ALMOST saw a kill (that's the official terminology for when a lion catches and kills its dinner) - a female lion was stalking a zebra for about 20 minutes, but then a silly spring bok spotted the lion and alerted the zebra. When the lion realized that the zebra had seen her, she just stood up non-chantlantly, yawned, and walked back to the rest of her pride."

... more to come.