Member Letters

Hennie V. and her brother took a trip to South Africa in September 2024 with CAA's Extraordinary Explorations. She shared her trip diary and we've selected some of the highlights: I’m amazed at the different landscapes changing all the time. It’s a vast land of varieties: mountains, oceans, rolling hills, flat, flowering shrubs, trees, farmland, orchards, and villages. Then there’s all the different animals in the meadows, like eland, gemsbok, cape buffalo, sheep, horses, cows, goats almost hitting our bus, etc. It continually amazes me. [On a drive] we heard the grunt of a leopard, and there he is with his huge tail, spots all over and only 30 feet away! What a sight to behold as we stopped to ooh and ahh for a long time! Then all of a sudden, four giraffes with their babies appeared almost next to us, unbelievably beautiful and majestic looking. And then when the impalas ran right in front of us, we had to suddenly stop. How exciting all this was! At the local community and school, we brought school supplies, and I also included shampoos, conditioners and soap that I had collected in the different hotels where we stayed. The kids, all under six years old, sang their hearts out, welcoming us in their language as well as some English songs, clapping their little hands. [They] kept wanting to shake our hands. On the afternoon game drive, we looked at the large kudu with its huge ears, waterbuck and honey badger — black, with most of the upper body grey, and skin around the neck six millimetres thick. Like our large deer, the impalas are just everywhere, standing in the middle of the road as if they own the place, and because they’re so beautiful, we can forgive them. It seems no one minds getting up at five a.m. to again be on the game drive and hoping to see elephants. We heard this strange noise, and there appeared the spectacle of a herd of elephants right in front of us, with the closest one not even five feet away, almost touching our vehicle, and nibbling on branches of the trees. The biggest one, a 60-year-old male, had the longest and biggest tusks, and was incredible to look at! The female tusks are shorter, and the three-year-old baby elephant was, needless to say, so cute! What a treat to see all of this.

As all good things come to an end, so did our game rides and stay at the safari lodge. After a hearty breakfast, we're on the bus for the seven hours to Johannesburg, driving through villages, where a woman walked with a 25-pound bag of potatoes on her head and local fruit stands, with people sitting there all day selling mostly bags of oranges. The patience people have here is just amazing, unlike our hurried society back home!