6:45 a.m., Friday, Feb. 29

My first dispatch from Africa: I did it! I took the leap in leap year.

So this morning I am in Audi Camp on the Thamalakane River outside Maun, Botswana, sitting in my meru tent, listening to the sounds of doves and birds I don’t know yet that zip about in the shady mopane trees and sipping my instant Nescafe classic coffee. (Goodbye, lattes. Goodbye, Dean and DeLuca coffee in the publisher’s suite during my happy afternoon chats with Debbie Ventura.) I haven’t had any major crying bouts as I did last summer when I was deep in the Okavango Delta and every baby elephant that trotted by or the sight of the southern cross or the stillness at sunset tugged at my heart. I did tear up when I neared our landing in Maun. I was seeing the landscape again, finally, but this time instead of brown shades of camouflage color, it was green. The green of the bush this time of year is soft green, gauzy, not at all like you imagine the green of lush jungles and rain forests. It’s a smudged earthy, mossy green captured perfectly by my new friend in Gainesville, Florida, a landscape painter named Mary Jane Volkmann who lived in Africa for 28 years and is married to Walter, a Namibian who grew up on a vast cattle ranch. She gave me a book of her paintings of Namibian landscapes. Her portraits of Africans have appeared on Namibia’s postage stamps. She gets the colors of this region spot-on, and you can see them on Mary Jane’s Web site.

This has been a good year for rain (which in the Setswana language is “pula,” which also means money and cheers. Sounds about right to me.) The waters are teeming, and so the animals are spread throughout the bush. As winter nears – June, July and August here – and boreholes dry up, the animals will make their way to the remaining waters, in the rivers such as Okavango and Chobe, near where I am.

I’ve got much to tell but I won’t go into it all today. The highlights so far are that I was met at the airport by Cathy Wanzala, a Kenyan, who has lived here over a decade with her husband, Joe, an accountant from Uganda and new owner of the College of Business Management/internet café in Maun. They agreed to my request to stay with them; the Quakers founded SERVAS, a network of international travelers and hosts interested in cultural exchange and world peace. I joined, so I got a list of people in Africa and the U.S. who welcome guests for up to two nights. I’ll be staying with Cathy and Joe tonight and Saturday night. And in the list of many synchronicities about my journey, I found out in e-mailing Cathy and Joe two months ago that they have a daughter, Winnie Wanzala, who works in Sacramento for the state of California. She lives in Stockton. You can imagine how surprised I was by that bit of news, and I jumped on the phone to introduce myself to Winnie before I left California.

Cathy insisted on meeting me at the Maun airport on Tuesday. It’s not unlike Sacramento’s executive airport in size. It’s the hub of safari tourism in the famous Okavango; Maun is the gateway town to the delta. Think of it as a tiny, dusty Estes Park before you get to the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado but without the famous Herzog’s Gift Corral of my past with its unfortunate supply of pewter peewees that I sold as a clerk in 1982. I wandered into the lobby area with a clump of tourists, almost all of whom were heading off toward safari hosts holding sign boards with their names on it.

After a while, after most people had gone off to their bush planes for the trip into the delta camps, I was one of only a few people hanging around. I looked over at a black African woman, about 65 years old, dressed in a hot pink ensemble and sitting right by the door that we travelers had exited after picking up our luggage.
“Cathy?”
“Maria?”
She couldn’t believe it. “I saw you come in but I thought that couldn’t be you because you looked like you knew what you were doing!” she said.
We gave each other big hugs, and I took her words as a major compliment, because the last thing I know after all these months of preparation, bureaucracy, hassles with Larry’s Moving Helpers, a desperate search for a home for my “special needs kitty,” and packing for a year for city/summer/winter/safari wear is what I’m doing. But I do know a couple of things. All of you who sent me on my way with so many good wishes and encouragement are fueling my journey, and I carry you with me. And while I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t expect to. I am, as my friend Stephen in Colfax says, “living the question.” That’s the point of this journey – to be wide awake, to pay attention, to be eternally grateful and let the journey unfold as it will.