When I was a child growing up in a small, rural town in Georgia, I was an addict of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes" series of books in that they opened the door to my love affair with Africa. Even as young as I was, my imagination often carried me away to Africa, to the jungles and creatures of Tarzan's wild kingdom.
On the rare occasion that we would journey from my hometown to the Georgia coast for a day at the beach, I would sit in the sand and stare wistfully across the Atlantic. Africa lay on the other side of that great expanse of ocean, and my heart and soul longed to explore it.
Decades would pass before I first journeyed to the Dark Continent, which I would find inexplicably nicknamed since the African sun blazes incessantly. For that initial sojourn, I traveled to Kenya. Until then, I had rarely ventured outside of the United States, and then only to the Caribbean and Canada.
As a non-seasoned international traveler, I didn't know what to expect on safari in Kenya. No one had forewarned me about the bazillion bugs I would have to sidestep, that dust is omnipresent, and the incredible heat of the day quickly dissipates as sundown brings bone-chilling cold.
And no one told me that time, normally measured in minutes and hours, does not exist in Africa. Almost the entire continent moves at its own pace, where punctuality is not a concern.
Most of all, no one told me that I would come to love Africa so much _ its wildlife, its people, and its colors and aromas _ that I long to return to it every single day of my life and dream of it almost as often. Ernest Hemingway wrote in "True at First Light," a fictionalized account of his experiences in Africa, "I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy." This, I understand.
Since that first trip, I've traveled to Africa several times and have been on dozens and dozens of game drives in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. So, then, I've learned a trick or two about going on safari, things that I wish someone had told me before I ever set foot in Nairobi on that first sojourn there so many years ago.
