This is shaping up to be the travel day to end all travel days.
The morning began with a few-hour drive from the Cheetah Conservation Fund to the airport in Windhoek. Thankfully only a small portion of the route qualified as what Abraham liked to call a “Namibian massage” — those corrugated dirt roads that rearrange your spine and loosen every screw in the vehicle.
After a month in southern Africa, though, even that felt normal.
From there it was onto the overnight flight from Windhoek to Frankfurt — was it twelve hours in the air? — followed by an impressive eight-and-a-half-hour layover in the Frankfurt airport.
American Express had confidently assured me I could use a lounge here.
They were wrong.
Spectacularly wrong.
So after a certain amount of wandering, coffee, and people-watching, I’m now sitting here with about two and a half hours left before boarding the final leg home to San Francisco.
Dr. Laurie is somewhere in the air on her complicated rerouting adventure to California (I have prayed to the packing angels her bags make it), Lynn is safely on her way home, and I’m sitting here with dust still on my boots, a camera full of memories, and — for reasons that seemed entirely logical at the time — a small stuffed Pumbaa whose tusked snout is sticking out of my carry-on bag.
Africa does that to you.
It seems like a good moment to try to sum up what this trip actually meant.
Because something happened here that I didn’t quite expect.
The Moment on Big Daddy
One of the most powerful moments of the entire trip happened standing on the ridge of Big Daddy, the massive red dune in Sossusvlei.
The climb itself had been physical, of course.
But the real moment came when I reached the top.
There was no one else there.
No one to cheer me on.
No one to follow and whoop with and holler.
Just wind.
Silence.
The enormous sweep of desert far, far below.
And the realization that if I stepped off that ridge, there would be no footprints to follow.
No one to watch first.
No reassuring example.
Just me.
I remember walking down the ridge a little, finding someone’s old tracks in the sand and thinking maybe I could follow those.
Then walking back up again.
Looking.
Thinking.
Talking to myself.
Finally realizing that if I was going to do it, I would have to do it alone.
That first step off the ridge was, strangely, the hardest moment of the entire climb.
Not physically.
Mentally.
It was the moment that said:
I am doing this alone.
A Very Different Moment
A few days later I was sitting on the veranda at Babson House at the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
Morning coffee in hand.
Birds calling in the trees.
I heard a low rumbling sound.
When I leaned forward and looked over the edge of the veranda, one of the cheetah boys had flopped down directly below me.
And he was purring.
Loudly.
Deeply.
The kind of contented rumble that vibrates through the ground.
For a few minutes I sat there drinking my coffee while a cheetah purred five feet below me in the Namibian bush.
And suddenly something about the entire trip made sense.
Because Herbert loved cheetahs.
We had supported CCF for years and always talked about visiting someday — maybe when we were older, when life slowed down a little.
And there I was.
Coffee.
Cheetah.
Namibia.
His marble placed under the paw of the sculpture outside Babson House.
And the quiet realization that even though I had climbed that dune alone…
I wasn’t actually alone at all.
The Other Moments
Of course there were dozens of other moments.
Standing soaked to the skin at Victoria Falls (but protecting the camera!).
The helicopter flight over the gorge.
Feeding elephants who delicately snuffled chow out of your palm.
The overwhelming smell — and the surprisingly goat-like sounds — of two hundred thousand seals at Cape Cross (but…BABIES!!)
Elephants blocking our way to the gate in Kruger just at closing… a baby elephant charging us as we backed our jeep up as fast as it could go (wee baby elephant voice: “I gunna kick your @ss!”)… and a rhino in Entabeni moseying along before calmly cornering another group.
A coalition of cheetah brothers appearing out of the bush.
Birds — so many birds!
Wild dogs.
Giraffes.
And, somewhat unexpectedly, discovering that throwing enormous hunks of meat to growling cheetahs is a pretty memorable life experience.
I can confirm:
A day without blood under your fingernails… how can that be a good day?
The Small Moments
And then there were the quieter moments.
The conversations.
Passionate discussions and education about history — so it is never forgotten, even if it wasn’t actually taught in the first place.
The kindness of people working patiently to protect landscapes and animals that most of the world will never see.
One of those moments came at CCF while dinner was delayed because the stove had decided not to cooperate.
What started as a kitchen problem turned into a long conversation with Himee, the assistant manager.
We discovered that both of us had lost someone important during the early days of COVID.
His father.
My husband.
I asked him what his father’s best attribute had been.
Without hesitation he said: his father was an incredible joke teller.
I told him something that has helped me think about loss.
Sometimes I imagine that God needs people with very specific talents.
And when S/he does, S/he calls them home because of that need.
During those early COVID months, heaven must have been a very sad place.
Maybe heaven needed someone who could tell good jokes.
Himee’s eyes filled with tears.
Later he helped me place Herbert’s marble under the paw of the cheetah sculpture.
Travel sometimes does that.
It brings strangers together in ways you never could have planned.
But travel also has another way of revealing people.
When you spend weeks together — long days in vans, shared meals, dusty roads, early mornings — some folks arrive with a silent little story in their head about how things are going to go.
Who will sit where.
Who will be friends with whom.
Who will play what role in the unfolding adventure.
And sometimes it turns out that someone has written an entire script in their mind without mentioning it to the rest of the cast.
If you unknowingly fail to perform the role they imagined for you, that can be a difficult realization for them.
Over the course of the trip several people quietly pulled me aside to apologize for how one traveler had been behaving toward me.
Which, honestly, wasn’t necessary.
Travel has a way of sorting these things out on its own.
Given enough miles, dusty roads, and shared days, people eventually reveal exactly who they are.
And the road moves on.
The Lesson
If this trip reinforced anything for me, it’s this:
Nothing in this landscape exists alone.
Not the animals.
Not the land.
Not the people trying to protect it.
Everything is connected.
Cheetahs survive when farmers succeed.
Grasslands recover when thorn bush is cleared.
Predators live when communities can make a living from the land.
And people carry the ones they love with them in ways they don’t always expect.
One Last Souvenir
Early in the trip we watched a warthog sprint across the road, trip spectacularly over his own feet, and then stop and look back at us as if the entire incident had somehow been our fault.
From that moment on I was determined to find a stuffed version.
After searching the entire trip, success finally came in the Windhoek duty-free shop.
As I sit here waiting to board the final flight home, his tusked snout is sticking out of my carry-on bag.
After a month in Africa, that somehow feels like the most reasonable thing in the world.
Carrying It Forward
In a couple of hours I’ll board a plane headed for San Francisco.
But part of me will stay behind.
In the dunes.
In the bush.
In the places where warthogs casually wander beneath rhinos to scratch their backs against a convenient rhino belly.
And in the marbles left behind along the way:
one resting on Table Mountain, overlooking Cape Town as the fog rolls in over the city and the ocean beyond…
another tucked quietly into the sand at Dune 40, where Abraham will know exactly where to find it when he walks that ridge again…
and one beneath the raised paw of a bronze cheetah at the Cheetah Conservation Fund, where Himee helped place it and will smile when he passes by.
And the fourth?
The fourth is still traveling with me.
It’s the one we toasted in champagne during an oysters-and-champagne feast before careening down enormous mountains of sand where the desert meets the ocean.
The same marble Ari held up for a photo in Kruger National Park.
That one is still in my bag.
Still moving.
Still seeing the world.
Because that first step off the ridge of Big Daddy may have been taken alone.
But the journey that followed reminded me of something far more important.
Sometimes the stories we think we’re living turn out not to be the ones that matter most.
Sometimes someone else has already written a script in their mind and expects you to play a role in it — without ever telling you the part.
But the road has its own way of clarifying things.
And sometimes the most important thing you can do is simply keep walking the path that is true to you.
Because stepping off the ridge — even when you think you’re doing it alone — is often exactly how you discover the people and moments that were meant to be part of the journey all along.
Africa has a way of rewriting the script.
And I’m grateful for the version I was given. 🌍🐆