For Four Days… NO BIRDING – South Africa

For four days we packed up and prepared ourselves for our oncoming trip to Gabon. No birds were involved. The portion of our trip where we lived out of our 2017 double cab Toyota Hilux fully outfitted for overlanding was coming to an end. For four days we ate good food, hung out with friends, and started every morning with the house special, a flat white. For four days we cleaned and packed and organized and donated all of the items we would no longer need. For four days we responded to the requests we got from potential buyers. We were officially selling the truck.

Ross joked that the four days we had spent in the Pietermaritzburg area at the home of our friends, the Lindie’s, doing all of these errands, and the two days in transit to get there, a total of 6 days, was the longest he’s gone without birding in a very long time. We hadn’t been out in search of a target bird in nearly a week! Even at home Ross goes out birding every single day. The man has no idea how to sit still. (Trust me, I should know.)
How is it possible that someone who does as much birding as this wouldn’t want to take a day off? It’s because birding is more than just looking at birds. Birding is a time spent wandering the outdoors, staying active, and most important of all, keeping mentally grounded. With as many anxieties that our society is riddled with these days, birding offers the same kind of relief as an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. (Seriously, try it sometime!) I used to always say to Ross that birding was an addiction. And maybe for him it is…but it’s also the cure to so much more.

Our Africa trip was about to look very different because we no longer would be living out of a truck, but our “camping as much as possible to save a few dollars” philosophy would continue. We were headed to Gabon, one of the most expensive countries in all of Africa. We planned to pack our ground tent and stay in the cheapest accommodations. Next on the agenda, a trip to the islands of São Tomé and Principé, and then back to mainland Africa to bird Gabon, before going back to the states.
Because of COVID, countries we hoped to visit such as Ethiopia and Angola were off limits. (Although the land border closures of Ethiopia might be more closely linked to the ongoing civil war, the war has been exacerbated by COVID economic downturns so perhaps “because of COVID” still applies here.) In an effort to maximize our time we needed to look at what countries still had open borders. Eventually we settled on visiting the countries of São Tomé & Principé and Gabon, each country producing almost the same number of potential lifers for Ross.
Someone serious on seeing more species would likely have gone elsewhere, but Gabon was quality over quantity and a chance to do even more exploring because Western Africa is a completely different ball game. Gabon is a country that has yet to be figured out by independent travelers.

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So for four days we prepared to leave the world of overlanding behind and continue our African adventure in a slightly different format. It was bittersweet to leave our truck, our home, and our lifestyle behind. For four days we may have rested, but the next race was about to begin! And we were ending this African “marathon” with an all-out sprint!