Fellow Travelers in East Africa

Crazy people can be great, until you have to hang out with them all day, every day.

Yoda/Patricia gets the prize. Going braless as a busty 72 year old would normally be enough, but not for her. Add on biker chick head gear, a past that includes owning 2 strip clubs, having the bad luck to have an attack of diarrhea while lying in her sleeping bag and the bad sense to tell everyone about it, and a tendency to do her laundry in the nude in shared public bathrooms, and you start to get the flavor. Definitely the winner.The runners up pale in comparison.

On the good side, we had a lovely French-Canadian family: hip parents in their late 30s, charming sisters of 12 and 13 who were smart and well-adjusted enough to be taken out of school for an extended trip in southern and eastern Africa. Bonus points to the mother of the family for giving me her pee tube (yay!).
Also great: a father and daughter (mid 40s and late 60s) from North Carolina traveling as a pair for the first time. The daughter and I had a lot in common (well, enough in common, plus she's incredibly nice), so I'm not surprised that we hit it off. What surprised me more is how much I liked her father: a registered Republican, former army chaplain from the South who said grace (aloud) the first time I ate dinner with them. He was also a huge practical joker, a great father and a really sweet man. So, lots of good family dynamics on the trip.

An honorable mention goes to another traveler, in her late 60s. I never got to know her as well as I would have liked, but she was very cool: a native Alabaman who moved to Colorado in her 40s to get a PhD and an MPH, she'd trekked in Nepal several times (in her 60s), wore an Obama bracelet every day (despite having a Republican husband in tow, the one whose disappearance caused Crazy to take off her bra) and always had a smile on her face (even when Crazy stole her binoculars). It's always nice to meet cool women of a certain age. Such a contrast to the bossy Canadian woman on my Ethiopian trip.

Given the presence of 7 very likable people on my safari, I guess it's not a surprise that I'm still dreaming about them...