Sheer Tenacity

This trip was originally planned, booked, and paid for in 2019, to take place for Mary’s 70^th Birthday treat in June/July2020! However, the best made plans etc…. Covid came along a couple of weeks before departure, and all travel was stopped & game Parks closed, along with a host of other daft ANC rules, the list being both too long, and too unbelievable to include in this post!

We had to postpone the trip, and rebook for the following year. This booking too had to suddenly get postponed again, when Mary was rushed into hospital for a right hemicolectomy. Fortunately, the bowel tumour was removed before it had spread or metastasized, and biopsies confirmed that she had no signs off cancer at all! The surgeon said it was only a matter of weeks! The rebooked trip for 2022, again had to be delayed as Mary struggled to recover from some maxio-facial surgery, which got infected, so shortly after her earlier abdominal surgery, and did not feel up to sleeping in roof tents &bush camping! So, we rebooked the trip for April 2023. I should also like to point out, that having paid for the trip in 2019, did not exempt us from having to pay the 10 % annual price increase each year, despite the fact that they had been sitting with our money for 4 years!! So we renamed the trip “Rod & Mary’s Wedding Anniversay” trip, and upgraded our bookings to include as many ”luxury” Wilderness camps as possible. These included Kielkrankie, Urikarus honeymoon suite, Mata Mata Riverside cottages, a couple of days in the Nossob Premier Campsites (with own ablutions & covered kitchen area, our favourites),Grootkolk, Gharagab, then back to Nossob Premier sites! A magic itinerary!

However, even this trip was put in jeopardy with my own diagnosis in January, of inoperable lung cancer, which called for a steady regime of chemotherapy every 3 weeks, for 8 cycles, to enable ct scans to monitor effectiveness. Fortunately, the oncologist worked the chemo sessions around our Kalagadi bookings, and encouraged us to go! We managed the full 3 week holiday, and had a fantastic time, with some special sightings, an overview of which we will include below.