Travels with Anne: One Couple's Amazing, Stupendous, Almost Unbelievable Adventures in Remote Parts of the World

By Stuart Anderson

Travels with Anne is a hilarious account of vacation misadventures. Join Stuart Anderson and his ever-faithful companion, Anne, as they try their luck in various unlikely vacation spots, including: southern Africa, where Anne and Stuart learn about the perils of traveling with a guide who knows absolutely nothing about the country; Central America, where the vacationers learn about humidity, jungle insects, and why it doesnt pay to drop your eyeglasses into the ocean; the Yukon Territory, where Anne and Stuart find that grizzly bears can be very annoying; the Canadian High Arctic, where it turns outif you can believe itthat the weather can be pretty darned bad; Trinidad and Tobago, where the most notable things about the weather are the rain and the fact that it never stops; Mexicos Copper Canyon, where Stuart and Anne are lucky enough to travel with the quintessential Texas windbag; and, finally, West Texass Chihuahan Desert, where the vacationers enjoy missing car keys, flat tires, and repeated encounters with seemingly insane bird watchers.

Along with being endlessly funny, Travels with Anne is also a surefire cure for wanderlust. Read this book, and for heavens sake stay at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 20, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462834440

Stuart Anderson

Stuart Anderson grew up in Monson, Maine, and attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, and Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. He has worked as a writer, editor, political researcher, publishing coordinator, and quality manager. He has previously authored or edited four books, most dealing with United States history. He lives in Upland, California, with Anne.

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Copyright © 2000 by Stuart Anderson.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

Zimbabwe and Botswana

CHAPTER TWO

Belize and Guatemala

CHAPTER THREE

The Tatshenshini River

CHAPTER FOUR

The Canadian High Arctic

CHAPTER FIVE

Trinidad and Tobago

CHAPTER SIX

Copper Canyon

CHAPTER SEVEN

Big Bend Country, West Texas

TO EVERYONE WHO LOVES—

TRULY LOVES—

WILD PLACES AND WILD THINGS

INTRODUCTION

ANNE IS THE woman who blames me for everything that goes wrong on our vacations. She’s probably right, but I resent her attitude.

Anne is also the woman with whom I have lived for a quarter of a century.

Many years ago, on our first major vacation together, Anne and I drove from our home outside Los Angeles to the canyon country of southern Utah. A hurricane came barreling up the Gulf of California, crossed California, Arizona, and Nevada, and smashed into … southern Utah. The people at the Weather Bureau said it was the damnedest thing they ever saw.

It was all downhill thereafter.

Anne and I went to northern New England for two weeks to see the autumn foliage, and it rained every day but one. We were in Concord, New Hampshire, on the day it did not rain, and the motel in which we were staying took advantage of the lack of precipitation to catch on fire during the night. Anne and I, fortunately, had a room in a wing of the motel that did not burn, although it was hard trying to sleep with all the commotion going on outside.

Anne and I drove from north to south down the Rocky Mountain States in June. We got rain on ten days out of fifteen, ran into a blizzard on one of the days when it did not rain, had our car break down near a ten-thousand-foot pass in Colorado, went to a Mexican restaurant with terrible food to ease our sorrows and the restaurant’s fireplace exploded while we were eating dinner. Later, I got us lost in freezing weather in Santa Fe and we could not find a respectable motel, so we ended up in a seedy place that had bugs but no heat, and we seriously damaged our car the next day trying to drive to the Indian ruins at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. After we got to the park and out again and had congratulated ourselves that our car had made it despite the damage, we discovered that we had been shooting pictures with a camera that had no film in it.

Anne and I then went to visit my parents at their home in central Maine, and while we were there it rained ten days out of thirteen, which did not prevent my parents’ well from going dry so we had to go to the neighbors’ house to perform any activity requiring water. Simultaneously with the well’s going dry, my father blew the engine on his car, the cesspool backed up, and my parents’ house was invaded by squirrels in the attic, mice in the living room, and ants in the kitchen. Fleeing this situation, Anne and I spent a few days at a fishing camp on Nesowadnehunk Lake, in northern Maine, and I almost killed the two of us by crashing our rented motorboat at high speed into the dock during a hailstorm, although I only did this after taking over from Anne after she had already crashed into two other boats while going in reverse.

A year later, Anne and I vacationed in the Canadian Rockies in August, and the people in Alberta and British Columbia suffered record low temperatures with rain and snow and fog so thick the entire mass of the Rocky Mountains was invisible. Anne and I drove a rental car on this trip, and it died in a little town east of Banff where the nearest well-stocked auto parts store was sixty miles away.

Other unfortunate things happened to Anne and me while we were on vacation. We went horseback riding near Telluride, Colorado, and I got a horse named Gus who would only walk downhill—a disadvantage in mountainous terrain—and even then Gus preferred to walk across people’s lawns and through their flower beds and vegetable gardens, which did not win me any friends in Telluride. I thought the horse was entirely responsible, but Anne chose to put much of the blame on the rider.

Driving to northern California to do some fishing, Anne and I suffered yet another auto breakdown, this time at nine o’clock at night in a tiny town that did have an auto mechanic and a motel, thank god, although Anne and I had already paid in full for a motel room in another town thirty miles up the road. once we got the car repaired and arrived at our fishing spot, a thunderstorm rolled in very suddenly over the mountains and laid down torrential rain on us as we sat in an open boat in the middle of the lake. This led Anne to thank me for again working my personal magic.

Having exhausted many of the possibilities for disaster in the continental United States and southern Canada, Anne and I decided to try vacationing in more out-of-the-way locations. That brings us to this book. For Anne and me, things still go wrong on our vacations, but now at least they go wrong in exotic locales. That has been the evolution of my travels with Anne.

CHAPTER ONE

Zimbabwe and Botswana

IF YOU EVER hear the name Don Mize, turn and run away. Do not take this warning lightly, and do not think I write in jest. Don Mize is evil incarnate. He is agony and suffering. He is all things that make life a sadness and a desolation. He will pluck out the happiness from your present and the possibility of happiness from your future, inflict wounds upon your body and spirit, leave you weak and pitiful and gasping for release from this world of sorrows. Don Mize is a bad dude.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, Who the hell is Don Mize, anyway? I have the answer: He is evil incarnate. He is agony and suffering… .

Actually, Don Mize was the man—if man he be—who led our safari to Zimbabwe and Botswana. According to the literature Anne and I received from an outfit called Explorers International, advertising A Special Safari to Zimbabwe and Botswana, Don Mize was a professional photographer from northern California who specialized in "going out to the truly remote and primitive parts of Africa and Asia. Whether it’s the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the chimps of Gombe

Stream, the gorillas of Rwanda, the Whirling Dervishes of Khartoum or the mystics and magicians of India, Tibet, and Central Asia, he [i.e., Don Mize] has taken his cameras and notebooks wherever adventure calls."

That was Don Mize, evil incarnate.

We bought his trip. We signed up for a safari that was designed by Don Mize, publicized by Don Mize, sold to Explorers International by Don Mize, guided by Don Mize, twisted into something unrecognizable and horrid by Don Mize, led into the Valley of the Shadow of Death by Don Mize. Anne and I had a memorable vacation. If the day ever comes when I have forgotten the other terrible vacations of my life, I will still remember, as if it were yesterday, my trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana with Don Mize.

Let us backtrack slightly and discuss the nature of this trip as it was sold to us. The trip was to take us, in Zimbabwe, to the city of Harare (Zimbabwe’s modern capital) and to Victoria Falls in the western part of the country. Then we would drive into Botswana, for a couple of days watching the game in Chobe National Park, for four or five days traveling by dugout canoe in the great Okavango Delta (one of Africa’s most pristine wild places, where we would camp in style on islands adorned with sausage trees and strangler figs), for a two-day visit to the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert (We know of no one else who offers this unique opportunity), and for bush flights across both delta and desert (allowing an eagle’s-eye panorama of some of Africa’s wildest country). And there was more: three days of neocolonial luxury beside Victoria Falls (the grandest sight in Africa); a float trip on the upper Zambezi River; game-viewing throughout northern Botswana; fishing and bird-watching on the okavango River in northwest Botswana, near the Namibian border; and lots of cold beer and gin-and-tonic to enliven the spirits and make the stories flow easily around the campfire at night.

We were told there would be lots of camping on this trip, but that the camps would be quite luxurious. The tents would be big, two-person, stand-up shelters, with folding beds and chairs and plenty of clean sheets and soft pillows and lantern light. There would also be an assortment of attentive Africans to take care of all our needs (we imagined these men dressed all in white, with maybe a splash of red or gold here and there), to erect our tents, transport our luggage, cook for us, and wash our clothes. There would be a separate dining tent and separate toilet and shower facilities and comfortable vehicles and maybe a tracker or two to find the game for us. The feeling will be exactly that of the Grand Safaris of Teddy Roosevelt’s and Karen Blixen’s day, said the literature. Or, to our minds, the time of Ernest Hemingway, when the green hills of Africa offered perpetual splendor, heartbreaking beauty, just the slightest touch of danger, great quantities of cold drinks after sunset, and lots of Africans to take care of the dirty stuff.

It sounded like a hell of a trip, so we paid our money and signed the papers. And, indeed, it turned out to be a hell of a trip. Clever devil, that Don Mize.

The trip itinerary called for us to meet the rest of the group—Don Mize and four other seekers after luxury—at Gatwick Airport outside London. So off we went to London.

I first began to doubt the luxurious nature of our trip when Anne and I stepped off the plane at Gatwick and took our places in the line of people seeking entry into the United Kingdom. Now, I have stood in lines before. I have stood in lines for getting into Disneyland on a summer weekend, for buying tickets to the Star Wars trilogy, for eating barbecue at Joey’s in Chino, California, on Saturday night, and for voting against that Carter fellow in 1980. But I have never stood in a line like the one at Gatwick airport. This line was about forty abreast and a half-mile long, so for a while I thought maybe the Beatles had reunited (John and all) and I had mistakenly stepped into a ticket queue for the reunion concert. But no. This was just the entry line for England, and a good part of humanity was here, trying to get in to see the Changing of the Guard and Buckingham Palace. Some of these people, surely, had been in line since the days when the sun never set on the British Empire, and it was going to be a terrible disappointment when they finally got to the end, got their passports stamped, and found out that Victoria was dead.

As things turned out, it was probably unfortunate that Anne and I ever did reach the end of the line and get ushered into the United Kingdom, for it was shortly thereafter that we met Don Mize. We did not find him but he found us, half-asleep on the lower floor of the terminal that housed three hundred yards of British Airways counters and about four feet of counter space dedicated to Air Zimbabwe—the chosen airline for our Luxury Safari. Anne and I were not ready for Don Mize. We had not slept since departing Los Angeles, we had recently been exposed to British food, our stomachs were in dangerous straits, and we were facing the prospect of an all-night flight on Air Zimbabwe. And over walked Don Mize.

He recognized us by our big yellow luggage tags—proclaiming to the world that we were here as part of a tour organized by Explorers International, Rochester, New York—and our safari clothes. I was the only guy on the lower floor of this terminal who looked like he was going to a masquerade ball dressed as Jungle Jim. Don Mize introduced himself. Anne and I said hello. Don was wearing a pair of tan cargo pants and a t-shirt proclaiming his membership in the Sierra Club and his interest in something called Mountain Medicine. He was also wearing a squashed and crumpled hat with a drawstring, and he was carrying a backpack. (The backpack was the extent of his luggage for this three-week trip through southern Africa.) Don had reddish hair and beard, was somewhat spindly in appearance, and began to talk about the John Muir Trail as soon as he sat down beside us.

I don’t know what the John Muir Trail is, but it held a remarkable fascination for Don Mize. Within five minutes of his arrival, Anne and I knew about the trail’s length, its bordering vegetation, its geology, its excessive use by hikers during the summer months, and where you were most likely on the trail to find unsightly deposits of human excrement. Anne and I did not have the heart to tell Don that we would rather be asleep than hearing about this trail we had never heard of before.

As a matter of fact, it was always better to be asleep than to be listening to Don Mize talk about anything. We found that out for certain during the next three weeks, but we first began to suspect it during those long minutes—seeming like hours—that Dandy Don told us about the John Muir Trail at Gatwick Airport. (Dandy Don is a name that Howard Cosell, the renowned sportscaster, bestowed upon fellow sportscaster Don Meredith when the two were doing Monday Night Football together. I began applying the name to Don Mize as soon as it became evident that no one could be more dandy than he.) Sometimes Dandy Don would try to make a little joke, but his little jokes were never the least bit funny. Sometimes we would try to make a joke, but Don Mize would never understand that we were trying to make a joke. He did not really understand the concept of joke as something that might be funny. He did not understand funny. For Don Mize, life was to be lived in earnest.

Mercifully, Don left us after a while to go in search of the other members of our group, so he could tell them about the John Muir Trail, too. They were dying to know.

* * *

We are in another line, this one to check in for Air Zimbabwe’s all-night flight to Harare. The line is made up mostly of dozens and dozens of Zimbabweans, fresh from an assault on the department stores of London, where the goods are infinitely more abundant than they are in Harare, and where the prices on most goods are—because of the high duties on manufactured products coming into Zimbabwe—much, much cheaper. On this day, many of the passengers have bought television sets and are seeking to carry them home as hand baggage. Others have purchased refrigerators, electric stoves, or washer/dryers, and all want to carry the merchandise home as hand baggage. It does not disturb any of these people that forty-four pounds is the maximum amount of luggage anyone is allowed to carry on this plane—and that includes checked baggage as well as hand-held pieces. The Zimbabweans do not allow such bureaucratic inflexibilities to deter them in the least. They march up to the counter, plunk down four suitcases and two cargo containers full of recent purchases, and demand to be ticketed. The clerks demur. The clerks try to charge the Zimbabwean passengers extra money for the extra weight, but each Zimbabwean proclaims in his turn that he does not have any money (after all, he has just bought the entire contents of an appliance store), and demands that his goods be allowed on the plane and slipped into whatever overhead compartment might hold them. (Such an overhead compartment would have to be the size of the Space Shuttle.) Arguments ensue. Anne and I stand in line and wait calmly. We watch the appliances and electronic equipment move forward, some to be allowed on the plane, some to be tossed off. Some Zimbabweans march triumphantly through the bureaucracy and head for the gate. others stand disconsolately to the side, arms around their TVs and sewing machines, and wait for some force to intervene and save them and their possessions.

At long last Anne and I arrive at the head of the line. Up here, the microwave ovens, electric stoves, stereo systems, and Mitsubishi big-screens are piled fourteen deep, waiting to be carried aboard the plane. Each item has at least one desperate-looking Zimbabwean clinging tightly to it. But we have reached the head of the line at last, and we hand over our tickets to the agent. Proudly we show that we are carrying only a couple of suitcases and some normal-sized hand luggage. We haven’t a single mid-size automobile, video cassette recorder, or personal computer between us, nor even an aquarium. We should get a seat without any problem at all.

Wrong. As soon as we hand over our tickets, the entire airline terminal begins to throb with sirens and alarms. The agent hands our tickets back to us and asks that we head for the exit immediately. There has been either a bomb threat or a report the building is on fire; the agent isn’t sure which.

Anne and I hurriedly climb over the mountain of nearby appliances and head out the door. The Zimbabweans do not follow, for they cannot abandon their goods; they would rather be incinerated with them. Most of the non-Zimbabweans also ignore the bells and alarms, probably because they don’t want to lose their places in line. Anne and I are obedient travelers, however, and we go outside. No sooner do we get there than there is an announcement that the whole thing has been a false alarm. We can go back in. We do, and find ourselves back at the end of the line.

The next step for us is to go through airport security before boarding the aircraft. The security people do everything except make us strip naked and bend over. They might have done that, too, except they are too busy searching carry-on washing machines and dishwashers for hidden explosives. They do make me take off my hat so they can see that I don’t have a bomb on top of my head. They also make Anne empty out all eighty rolls of our photographic film, and one grim-faced guard methodically picks up every roll and inspects it carefully for anything that might go bang or boom. Once satisfied, and without ever speaking a word, the grim-faced man tells us we can go to our plane.

The plane is an old Boeing 707, the pride of Air Zimbabwe. We are relieved when we see the copilot and he is not wearing bone ornaments in his nose. That we would even think such a thing is evidence of our racist/imperialist upbringing, but we cannot help ourselves. We are relieved, too, when we see that the flight attendants are not bare-breasted. Well, at least Anne is relieved.

On the long flight down the African continent, in darkness, the man next to Anne in the aisle seat is a white Zimbabwean who owns a trucking firm in Harare, running cargoes up from South Africa or southwest into Botswana or north to Zambia and Zaire. He is a former soldier in the Rhodesian army, battling rule by black Africans, and he is very talkative. He is also the Scotch whiskey-drinking champion of all Zimbabwe. No sooner does the plane leave the runway in England than he breaks out his own bottle of Scotch and a large glass tumbler.

He threatens to beat the steward into a bloody pulp if the steward tries to take away his bottle. The steward retires gracefully. By the time we cross the Algerian coastline, the bottle is two-thirds gone and Anne and I have learned more than we ever knew before about the war for Rhodesia, current Zimbabwean politics, the tourist attractions in Malawi, and how fucked up everything is in Zambia. By the time we have crossed the Sahara, the bottle is empty and our friend has fallen into a noisy sleep, his snores competing with the plane’s engines for primacy in the passenger compartment. The plane and the Zimbabwean drinking champion rumble on through the darkness.

*     *     *

I don’t have much to say about Harare, mainly because I was pretty close to unconscious during the twenty-four hours I was there. If you fly on a plane from Los Angeles to Dallas, Texas, then sit around for six hours and board a plane to London, and fly to London without sleeping, then sit around for seven more hours waiting for a flight to Harare, and while you are sitting around you get to hear about the John Muir Trail from Don Mize; and then you get on another plane, beside a hopeless drunkard, and fly for nine hours through darkness down much the length of the African continent; and you do all this without sleeping; then you will be pretty tired when you get to a place like Harare. Harare had some green parks with gravel walkways, some interesting souvenir shops where Anne and I didn’t buy anything, and a good seafood restaurant that was recommended to us by that hopeless drunkard the Zimbabwe champion, and which Anne and I went to and enjoyed quite a lot. Harare also had a pizza restaurant which Don Mize found incredibly appealing (for who would not be enticed by the idea of Zimbabwean pizza?), and which he convinced everyone except Anne and me should be the site of their first dinner in southern Africa. None of them died from it.

Don Mize scored another triumph when he put all of us except Anne in taxis and led us off in search of the National Art Gallery and what his itinerary described as one of Africa’s finest collections of native sculpture. We arrived at the museum, paid about ten cents as the price of admission, and went inside. The museum was not worth ten cents. We searched high and low—which, in this museum, took about a minute and a half—and did not find one of Africa’s finest collections of native sculpture. In fact, we found no native sculpture at all, because this museum didn’t have any of that. It did have a few old rocks (young rocks being not that numerous anywhere, even in Zimbabwe), some crude tools, some stuffed birds, and a few fish. And a couple of stuffed elephants. We saw everything in the museum in a matter of minutes and emerged again out the front door. Then we went back inside to see if we had overlooked something—like all the rest of the museum. No. That was all there was. Nothing more up those stairs, and nothing hidden around there by the public restrooms. We went back outside and stood around on the steps trying to find something to take a picture of. Failing that, we took pictures of each other standing around. Dandy Don emerged and announced that he had told our taxis not to come back for an hour and a half. So we stood around for an hour and a half, very tired and irritable and still perplexed about that missing native sculpture.

It turned out that Dandy Don, our expert guide and itinerary planner, had taken us to the wrong museum.

The next morning, we got up, went back to the airport, and flew off to western Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls.

Before we talk about the wonders of Victoria Falls, let us discuss briefly the personalities of our fellow travelers. Don Mize, of course, hardly had a personality at all, except what can be summed up in the two words buffoon and knucklehead. In the other four members of our group, however, there was personality aplenty. There was, for example, Edie Kinshaw, of Silver City, New Mexico, a badly arthritic old lady in her sixties who was grimly determined to make friends and have fun wherever she went in the world, no matter the circumstances. Edie would enjoy herself, and she would take pleasure from everything that went on about her, and she would proclaim loudly to the world that she was having a great time, no matter what. Edie was the eternal optimist, the perfect Pollyanna, the oldest Little Miss Sunshine ever to come out of the American Southwest. No matter what went wrong on our trip, it was all right with Edie. She didn’t mind. It was okay. It was good, in fact. No, it was great. She loved it when it was freezing, she loved it when it was hot. She liked bad food and she enjoyed water that tasted of gasoline and she didn’t mind a bit if she had to sleep on the ground with an inadequate sleeping bag on a bloody cold night with hyenas sniffing around the tents and hoping to find someone’s face to bite off. This wasn’t so bad. This was good, in fact. It was fun. If only the people in Silver City could see her now.

You could have hit Edie with a hammer and she would have said it felt good. You could drive her across a hundred miles of the most barren desert, at eight miles per hour all the way, and with no protection from the burning sun and with nothing to drink and just Spam to eat and nothing to look at all the way but piles of sand, and no springs in the truck; and Edie would say it was fun.

Anne and I hated Edie quite a lot.

Edie had a few other outstanding personality traits. As I said before, she wanted to make friends. This meant that, whenever she met another human being anywhere on earth, she went up and introduced herself, said she was from Silver City, and took down the person’s name and address for future reference. And, oh yes, she took the person’s picture. And if they had anything they wanted to sell—anything from firewood to World Series tickets to the ragged sneakers off their feet—Edie bought it. That was a good way to make friends. Edie was especially fond of children, who were all beautiful and charming and sweet, even if there was no evidence of any of these characteristics to be found anywhere on the child or in his vicinity. Edie’s address book was probably no less weighty than the phone book for Manhattan, because it contained the address and life history of every person she had ever met, anywhere. And, of course, all the Africans she met had to receive gifts from Silver City, once she got home, so it was important that a gift list be attached to each African name in her address book. Robert Nkuni was to get a chain saw and a bathroom sink. Deirdre Ghanai, one Chevy Corvette, red, and a husband. Mordechai Tisama, a blender, a pencil, and two annual passes to the Universal Studios Tour. All these things, and a thousand others, Edie promised to send from Silver City upon her return to the United States. After all, these people were her new friends.

Another of Edie’s outstanding characteristics was her ability to see New Mexico in all places. If we happened to be driving across desert country, it looked like New Mexico. If we were driving through scrub, it looked like New Mexico. If we were on a hill looking out across a far country, the wide landscape looked like the wide landscapes of New Mexico. Even African villages brought to mind certain small towns in New Mexico. New Mexico was in Zimbabwe, New Mexico was in Botswana. In both places, there were rock formations like those in New Mexico, flights of birds like New Mexico birds, skies like those of New Mexico, stars at night like the stars of New Mexico, temperatures like temperatures in New Mexico, and outhouses that easily could have passed for outhouses in New Mexico. It was uncanny. For a time, I thought some unusually cruel person had stolen Edie’s eyeglasses on the night before her departure for Africa, and had pasted pictures of New Mexico inside the lenses, so she would always be looking at the country outside Albuquerque even when she was riding through the middle of the Kalahari Desert; but that explanation didn’t work, in the end. I finally decided, along with everyone else, that Edie’s real problem was that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

It was perfectly appropriate that Edie’s roommate and tent-mate for the entire trip should be Carol Everett, of Stockton, California. It was appropriate because, if Edie loved everyone and wanted to be a friend to all the world, Carol couldn’t care less about anyone except Carol. And if Edie was determined to exude happiness and delight, Carol was determined to take the most perfectly cynical view of anyone and everyone she met. And if Edie was the soul of generosity, and loudly proclaimed her intention to be generous whenever anyone would listen to her, Carol was the cheapest person ever to walk the sandy soil of Botswana.

Carol liked money. She cherished money. She held money to her heart and would not let it go. To Carol, all things had a price, and the cheaper you could get them, the wiser you were. She happened to be rooming with Edie only because she was too cheap to pay a few hundred extra dollars for private quarters, even though she owned three businesses back in Stockton. One of Carol’s businesses was a delicatessen which a young man had tried to stick up one day. Carol wouldn’t give him any of her money, so he fled empty-handed. The threat of death meant nothing to Carol if money was involved.

Carol would ride all day through the burning heat of the African day, then refuse to drink a Coca-Cola when we reached our destination because a Coca-Cola cost the equivalent of seventy-five cents and that was ridiculous. In little villages a hundred miles from the edge of nowhere, women would approach our vehicle and offer to sell us beautiful handmade baskets for a dollar or two. Carol would look at these women, whose annual family income might be fifty dollars, and would begin bargaining to get the price of the basket down to fifty cents.

When we stayed at places where breakfast was included in the tour cost, Carol would fill her purse with breakfast items and carry these with her to eat for lunch, so she wouldn’t have to pay for an afternoon meal. If we were visiting a park or museum or other facility where there was an entrance fee, Carol would declare at the door that she hadn’t any cash on her, so someone else would have to pay for her. Once, when Dandy Don thought he might have to go without lunch because he didn’t have time to order food and wait for it to be delivered, Carol offered to sell Don half the lunch that had already been delivered to her; not to let Don have some of her lunch, mind you, as an act of human kindness, but to sell it to him.

Carol always looked after Carol. If we had a line to stand in, Carol would push her way to the front, right through the rest of us. If one seat in the vehicle was thought to be more comfortable than the other seats, Carol would take that seat and keep it the entire trip. If we came into a camp where shower facilities were shared, Carol would be the first one to the shower, and would use all the hot water before anyone else could get there. If there was just one Coke left in the camp cooler, and twelve bottles of some awful thing like tonic water, Carol would always get to the one Coke before anyone else. If some colorful African character said he did not want his picture taken and the rest of us complied with his wishes, Carol would go ahead and take the picture anyway, while the rest of us watched, aghast. If Edie and Carol got just one towel apiece in the room they were sharing, Carol would take her shower first and use both towels.

Edie and Carol hated each other.

They were perfect roommates.

Rounding out our adventuresome group was the beautiful couple from Pittsboro, North Carolina. Representing the male of the species in this beautiful couple was Havner Parish, Jr., MD, retired urologist and tireless teller of urology jokes. Representing the female of the species was Havner’s lovely wife, Isabel, the most elegant woman ever to appear anyplace outside the cover of Vogue. Havner (known more commonly as Have, rhyming with cave) was a Carolina gentleman, cultured, worldly, well-spoken, funny, and fun. Isabel was a lady. A Southern lady. A character conjured up by Margaret Mitchell. A woman whose every habit and mannerism had been inculcated in her by her mama, who was a great lady, and who knew how to live a life properly. Mama had raised her daughter right.

Isabel dressed well. Isabel wore makeup well. Isabel wore jewelry well. Isabel carried herself well. No matter the circumstances, Isabel was polished, courtly, and perfectly mannered. You could throw Isabel out of a raft in the rapids of the Zambezi, and she would emerge from the boiling waters all aglow with good cheer, warmth, and charm. You could drive Isabel for hours in the back of a beat-up truck through the thorny scrub of the Kalahari edges, and Isabel would find a way to look lovely all during the ordeal, and even lovelier when it was over. Isabel and her clothes did not know the meaning of wrinkle,