2022: Looking Back at the Year

Lake Bunyonyi, Uganda

 

Somehow the ellipse has (more or less) closed on itself after 365.24 days of orbital motion and we are once again at the end of a year. As the years go by, I am sometimes startled by the numbers of the years: surely I’m not that old, am I? The end of 2022 marks 23 years since I welcomed in the millennium with my family in Cuzco Peru, and an unsettling 36.5 years since I graduated from Hillcrest High School (now sadly no longer operational as a school, transformed into condominiums). I am far closer to the end of my working life than to its start, and presumably well over halfway along my mortal coil. With these thoughts in mind, it’s time to summarize what I got up to during the past 12 months.

The year started in Tuatapere, New Zealand where Terri and I were exploring the South Island in our tiny Nissan Elgrand van named Edmund. We would spend the first two months of the year hiking and camping our way around that spectacular island. Highlights included Stewart Island (even if we failed to see any kiwis), hiking in the Mount Cook area, spending five days tramping the fabulous Rees-Dart Track, climbing up to lovely Angelus Hut in the Nelson Lakes, ambling through the coastal wonderland of the Abel Tasman Track, and finally strolling along the Queen Charlotte Track, eating fresh green-lipped mussels while we intersected the path of Captain Cook two and a half centuries earlier.

Near Mt. Cook/Aoraki

On the Rees-Dart Track

The view from Angelus Hut

From there we spent three weeks on a victory lap of the North Island, visiting friends and family and staying indoors rather more often than we were used to. All too soon my time Down Under was over and I was on an airplane winging my way to Switzerland, into a world in which covid-related travel restrictions were just a memory.

My mom and I above Leysin

I spent nearly four months in Leysin, my old stomping ground. My sister Audie and her husband Serge had taken their daughters Malaika and Ellie on the trip of their young lifetimes, through South Africa and Botswana up to Livingstone, Zambia, where they volunteered at Olive Tree Learning Centre, the community elementary school that Terri has been nurturing for the past 15 years. This trip, for which Serge had requested a six-month sabbatical from his teaching job, had been planned before my mother came to live with them rather suddenly during the pandemic in 2021. My sister Saakje spent February and March in Leysin before handing off to me. My job was live with my mother while the family was in Africa, and it was a pleasure to be back in my beloved Alpine village with a car, a bicycle and skis at my disposal. I did a tiny bit of skiing at the beginning of my stay, and then rode Serge’s racing bike all summer up and down the passes of the Swiss Alps, taking time to play a bit of tennis here and there as well (as well as going to my first live pro tennis tournament in six years, in Geneva in May), and to see my first-ever live stage of the Tour de France as it rolled right past the Leysin area.  It was an idyllic way to spend a summer.

Jonas Vingegard in the yellow jersey

The reason that I had to keep an eye on my mother was that she had entered a period of cognitive decline during the pandemic, while she was living alone and none of us were visiting her. When Saakje finally visited her in late 2020, it was obvious that she was going to need some assistance in the coming years, which was why Audie volunteered to have my mother come live with her beloved grandchildren. While I was there, it was pretty easy for me to make sure that my mother was fine; I cooked delicious meals to encourage her to eat enough, and played cribbage and watched movies with her. The signs of decline were obvious, but not debilitating. All that changed the day before I flew out of Switzerland, when she fell getting into bed and fractured her hip. Audie has been doing a heroic job of looking after my mother since then, but it has become a much more all-consuming duty than when I was there. It was a precious period of time to spend with my mother while she was still very much her old self.

I spent all of August in Lipah, Bali, which has become the closest thing that Terri and I have to a home base during our global peregrinations. It was an idyllic time, spent kayaking, diving, swimming, snorkelling and hiking in our little corner of northeastern Bali, as well as getting ready for the final part of the year’s journey: a return to Stanley’s Travels, which had been on hold for the previous two pandemic-blighted years.

A yawning rhinopias scorpionfish

A rare paddleflap rhinopias scorpionfish

I never get tired of this view from our terrace!

In early September I flew to Cape Town, where Terri joined me a week later. We spent a couple of weeks getting Stanley back into driving shape after four years in storage, and then drove out of Cape Town on October 2^nd, headed (we hoped) for Switzerland, up the east side of the African continent. We set a quick pace north to the Kalahari, stopping to look at meerkats and other wild creatures in the Kgalakgadi Transfrontier Park, and then heading up to northern Botswana to visit Drifter’s Camp, Planet Baobab, the ethereal Makgadikgadi Pans, amazing Elephant Sands and finally Chobe National Park. We then crossed to Livingstone, Zambia to spend three weeks working with Olive Tree Learning Centre, the first time Terri had been there in three years (and the first time I’d been there in five and a half!).

At the southernmost point of Africa

Meerkat!!

Stanley in the Makgadikgadi Pans

Elephant Sands

One of our star OTLC students

More OTLC students with new bookbags

The time flew by in Livingstone, and before we knew it our time was up and we were driving north, visiting two favourite spots of particular loveliness from our previous travels (Kasanka National Park and Kapishya Hot Springs) and one spot new to us which made us both fall in love with the place (Mutinondo Wilderness). Kasanka let us see the massive bat migration (the largest mammalian migration on earth), Mutinondo gave us the opportunity to hike, canoe and swim on our own in African miombo woodlands, and Kapishya was a great place to relax and catch up on our video editing endeavours.

Going batty in Kasanka

Mutinondo Wilderness

From Kapishya we have been on the move steadily northward towards the Equator. We drove up the west side of Tanzania, paralleling mighty Lake Tanganyika and visiting the outstanding Katavi National Park; it was a return to a country that I called home in 1981-2, although we were far from my former town of Morogoro. Then we raced through the tiny countries of Burundi and Rwanda, seeing chimpanzees in the wild and grinding Stanley over endless steep mountain slopes. We arrived in Uganda a week ago and have so far stuck to the southwest corner, at Mgahinga National Park and Lake Bunyonyi. We plan to move northward up the west side of the country, visiting as many national parks and nature reserves as possible, before turning east to Kenya.

Lioness in Katavi

Mighty Lake Tanganyika

A wild chimpanzee in Bururi Forest Reserve, Burundi

At the southernmost source of the Nile, Burundi

The green hills of Rwanda

Lake Bunyonyi, Uganda

2022 has been an outstanding year in terms of travel, although strangely I have only added two countries (Burundi and Rwanda) to my life list. Terri and I have had the chance to see plenty of nature, do lots of hiking and other active travel pursuits, and set a leisurely, sustainable pace for our journeys. We also launched our Stanley’s Travels YouTube channel (if you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so! You can follow along our journey through the wonders of video.) We are looking forward to an action-packed 2023 as well, continuing on our way around the African continent, either up the east side or (if Ethiopia doesn’t change its new customs regulations for cars) back to South Africa and then up (or down) the west coast of Africa.

I hope that you, my faithful readers, have had a successful, healthy and satisfying 2022, and that 2023 is even better. I will post again soon about our African trip in more detail, and in a year’s time I will once again try to summarize the year that was.

Peace and Tailwinds!!

Graydon