By Barry Lee Brisco     C O N T E N T S  

In 1959, my Uncle Robert (my mother's only brother, now passed away) along with his wife Barbra and their two young children, transplanted themselves from America to what was then Northern Rhodesia. Near the small town of Broken Hill they established a tobacco farm. Later my mother's parents went to visit them. They toured the Zambezi Valley region where Rosemary and I went in November 1997.

As a young boy, I remember thinking this was the height of adventure. I imagined that they had to fend off lions and elephants, and wondered if where they lived was anything like the landscape shown in National Geographic stories about Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, where Leakey was making his path-breaking discoveries about the history of early man.

Another memory of Africa comes from my paternal grandfather's journey to Kenya over 40 years ago (he did no hunting, though some of his companions did). At that time, the number of Western tourists to that part of the world was a fraction of what it is today. My grandfather took a 16mm Bolex movie camera with him, the kind with multiple lenses on a moveable turret. It had to be wound with a spring mechanism to run the film. My father remembers him showing a scene of a charging elephant that looked quite dangerous, and suddenly the scene changed to something else before it was clear just how close the elephant came. His explanation: "I ran out of spring." He forgot to wind the camera before starting to shoot. Apparently the elephants' charge did not impact my grandfather.

My first opportunity to see sub-Saharan Africa was when I accompanied my father on a 12-day trip to Kenya and Tanzania in 1990, just before I moved to Toronto. It was a wonderful experience, and I knew I wanted to return someday.

When my wife Rosemary and I decided to leave Singapore in late 1997 after three and a half years there and return to the United States, we talked about having one last "over-the-top" vacation. I had been interested in the idea of an African "walking safari" since meeting a Swiss fellow who worked in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia, independent since 1980). He said that there were many operators in Zimbabwe who offered walking safaris, whereas in Kenya and Tanzania I had never heard of it. This type of trip, also known as "bushwalking", means simply walking with a guide and seeing the wildlife from a different perspective than the conventional way of being driven around in a vehicle. I was intrigued.

Two years after that conversation, a Web search for "walking safari Zimbabwe" led me to The Zambezi Safari and Travel Co. at www.zambezi.com, a travel agent located in the small town of Kariba, on the northern border of Zimbabwe. Their excellent and informative site resulted in an extensive email correspondence with co-owner John Berry, who was extremely helpful in organising our trip and a professional in every way.

Kariba is not far from Broken Hill (now known as Kabwe) where my aunt and uncle used to live. Although we did not plan on spending time in Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), I knew that I would be seeing country similar to where they used to live. Only a month after contacting John, we departed Singapore late in the evening on 4 October 1997, bound for Harare via Johannesberg.