THE AFRICA TRIP, 50th ANNIVERSARY: Celebrating 10 Years of My Travel Blog

The 10th Anniversary of The Intrepid Tourist  

Exactly fifty years ago this week, in April 1971, I arrived in Kampala, Uganda for a four month stay in East Africa, while my husband Art participated in a field course in animal behavior.  Still my most memorable travel experience, a repost of the blog I wrote for the fortieth anniversary seemed a fitting choice to celebrate ten years of The Intrepid Tourist. My plan when I first launched The Intrepid Tourist was to share some of my own travel writing, but it has expanded over the years to include the photos and travel adventures of friends and family as well, for a total of more than 500 posts to date. I am deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed to the blog and for all my dedicated readers.

Trip of a Lifetime, East Africa, 1971
 In 1971, Art, along with four other graduate students at Rockefeller University in New York, embarked on a four month field course in western Uganda.  I didn’t want to miss out on a chance to go to Africa, even with a year-old baby (our daughter, Jennifer) to look after. One other student wife went along on the trip and we became traveling companions. During the first six weeks of the course, while our husbands were doing research in the Kibale forest near the town of Fort Portal we traveled in Kenya and Tanzania.  Then, for the second half of the course, conducted in Queen Elizabeth National Park, we were able to join our husbands. (To read the full post about the trip, go to The Intrepid Tourist.)

Impact on My Life as a Writer
As a wife, I was not involved with the course itself, but without it I would never have had the opportunity to go to Africa. At the time, I had not yet begun to write books for children, but my experiences seeing wildlife, meeting people who lived and worked in Africa, and just being there has been important for many of the books I’ve written since then. In a larger sense, the trip also greatly impacted my world view. Before then, I had never traveled outside the United States and had no idea what it was like to live in a third world country or in a place so rich with wildlife. From the time I was a child, I had always dreamed of travel and adventure. The trip to Africa certainly fulfilled that dream. When I do school presentations and kids ask me what was the most exciting place I’ve ever been, the answer is always the same–Africa.

My memories of the three months in Africa are vivid, reinforced by the hundreds of photos we took (some appear in my books) and by letters and diary entries. My parents eagerly awaited my weekly letters, vicariously traveling Africa with me. My father typed all the letters, making them legible, and put them into a book. A few excerpts are in my post at The Intrepid Tourist. I used my diary mostly to record animal sightings, brief reports of the events of the day, and our dinner menus. One entry says we ate stewed waterbuck, from meat given to us by a park ranger!Now, fifty years later, as I reread my letters and entries in my diary, I am reliving the Africa trip once again.

My Africa Trip Diary