“There is much to do and see in the city of Cape Town, with its gorgeous beaches, scenic natural settings, impressive architecture, and booming nightlife. Outdoor enthusiasts can hike up the rugged trails of Table Mountain. For the less adventurous, there is the Table Mountain Cableway. The beaches are favoured by residents and visitors alike, and the historical Cape Dutch buildings are worth visiting…” – Tripadvisor.

To explore this stunning city please visit our South African webpage, and feel free to ask me anything you want to know about Cape Town!

Happy Travels~

chris@travelboecker.com

… when we were confronted with the safari camp closures due to the severe storms and flooding, you arranged for alternate accommodation which was exceptional. In all aspects, your recommendations were spot on.

We have already detailed your special services to friends who have African envy from our many tales of adventure in the very deep south.

We already look forward to our next African excursion with your direction.

Sincerely, R and W Cannon

Your partner in Nairobi is an excellent company.  Everything ran smoothly and according to plan. Both our drivers, especially Ahmed in Kenya who we enjoyed immensely, were excellent drivers, explained so many things to us, and as witnessed by the number of animals we saw, were excellent at guiding throughout the various parks.  We saw over 50 lions in various situations, hundreds of elephants and zebras, giraffes, close-up of both cheetahs and leopards,etc.

… We travelled to the local fishing village the next day and spent an amazing two hours walking around the village, which still has a witch doctor.  We gave a group of teenage boys [one of your Spread the Smile] soccer ball and the look on their faces is something I will never forget. We were not allowed to take pictures in the village so am not able to supply you with that one. My only suggestion would be for clients who are more frail would be to fly from the Masai Mara to the Serengeti, but they would miss out on the village which was a big highlight for us.  Other than that the trip could not have been better planned.

Spreading the Smile, one Soccer Ball at a time!

The Safari journal book you gave us was an invaluable tool as we recorded everything we saw in each park and I wrote a daily journal.

I would definitely recommend your services to anyone I know planning on going to Africa…

Thanks Christine and I do have a desire to return to Africa some day.  J Grant

Having heard rumours of its existence, Guy spent days combing the savannah by car and even enlisted the help of a pilot and spotter plane. No sign of the cheetah, however, was to be had. Then, on the very last day of the quest, and just as Guy was about to give up, the pilot circling above reported a sighting. Rushing to the scene, Guy found the young adult male with his mother, who did have spots.

Speaking of his find, Guy said: “He had a plain sandy coat of fur with hundreds of small freckles on his back and no sign of black spots: it was one of the biggest rushes I’ve ever had in my life. Not only was he a staggeringly beautiful animal but also I knew that this was a privilege very few other people would ever have.”

The theory is that the recessive gene that causes the markings, or lack of them, is similar to the phenomenon that causes the markings on the ‘King’ cheetah of South Africa and Zimbabwe’. Experts have expressed the theory that this cheetah’s spotless condition is probably the result of a genetic throwback, and that it might actually help the creature thrive in the wild since he may often be mistaken for a lion.

The Spotless Cheetah – Image © Guy Combes/BNPS.co.uk

Cheetah fact file

Cheetahs are resident throughout Africa and in parts of the Middle East. Capable of achieving the fastest land speed of any animal, cheetahs can reach speeds of up to 75mph over short bursts, and can accelerate from 0 to 60mph in just 3 seconds. Officially classified as vulnerable, there are an estimated 12,400 cheetahs remaining in the wild. Namibia hosts the largest numbers, having around 2,500, while there are thought to be just 50 or 60 rare Asiatic cheetahs remaining in Iran.

The Common Cheetah

]]> http://travelboeckeradventures.com/africa/leopard-cheetah-kenya-travelboecker/feed 0 http://travelboeckeradventures.com/africa/botswana-chobe-river-safari-travelboecker http://travelboeckeradventures.com/africa/botswana-chobe-river-safari-travelboecker#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 05:03:30 +0000 TravelBoecker http://travelboeckeradventures.com/?p=672

The remarkably low Chobe River flood levels has resulted in Chobe Savanna Lodge opening a month earlier than usual and welcoming guests at HALF the usual rate during the month of June!

Only accessible by boat, Chobe Savanna Lodge has arguably the best location in the Chobe region. Overlooking the stunning Puku Flats, this lodge has uninterrupted 270 degree views of the Chobe River, famous for game safari experiences by boat. View enormous herds of elephants coming to the water to drink during the day joined by a variety of other animals, over 450 bird species and some of the best sunsets Africa has to offer!!

About Chobe Savanna Lodge:
This Namibian hideaway offers guests a private and secluded water –based safari experience in an area renowned for its diverse and prolific wildlife.
Chobe Savanna Lodge accommodates only 24 guests in spacious thatched chalets, all with private decks, an integrated bedroom and lounge area plus en-suite facilities.

 *The rate includes all meals, drinks (excl. premium brands), transfers from Kasane, game cruises & laundry. Valid for stays 1 June – 30 June 2012 ONLY. Minimum 2 nights required.

For bookings and information contact Africa Travel Expert - Christine Boecker

When it comes to packing my suitcase, I would consider myself a pro. After all, I’ve done it often enough!  Packing on the morning of a 12 day trip without leaving essentials behind is part luck, and mostly planning ahead. This is when making a list is invaluable to me.

Here are 5 items that are in my carry-on each and every time.

1.       Smartphone. This gadget has helped me stay in touch with everyone, and eased the countless hours of waiting in planes and at airports. Having access to my favourite music is a great, but where it really shines is with its e-mail capabilities!  So I make sure I have arranged for the appropriate travel package with my service provider before I leave.

2.     Laptop. Being mobile allows me the scout out various locations, and still be accessible to my clients.  I also get to play around with all of my photos before I arrive home, because then there’s little time for that.

3.     Change of clothes. A change of clothes (and essential toiletries) is always recommended.  You just never know when your suitcase pulls a disappearing act.

4.     Local currency.  When possible, I like to have a small amount of local currency when I arrive in a new country.  That way I can bypass the foreign exchange counter in the airport and it comes in handy when I get hungry or thirsty before I have reached my local hotel.

5.      Insurance. As a travel professional, I understand the importance of insurance.  For me, I always go with at least the full medical coverage as well as trip cancellation. I keep the insurance card in my wallet and the number in my smartphone.

Having the above five items with me always makes my flight and first 24 hours in a new place much more comfortable.  And remember to ensure that your carry-on suitcase is small, light and has good wheels. Your back will thank you for it.

Happy travels,
Christine TravelBoecker

The Land Rover bumped along a riverbed, passing scraggly trees and splashing through occasional pools that soon would be dry. I was on a safari tour in the Damaraland region of Namibia in southwest Africa. Since leaving camp, we had passed through a parched, barren, rocky landscape. But the wildlife was like Alice in Wonderland.

Photo by Hans Tammemagi

A row of oryx trotted along a ridge, baboons scampered on a cliffside, orange and green parakeets squawked in a bush. We turned a corner and, suddenly, four elephants were coming right at us, massive, immense, powerful. Luckily, the elephants ambled ponderously past, ignoring us. This was more than just an African game experience. This was a very successful ecotourism operation in which the local natives are partners.

Later, we visited Fonteine, one of twenty villages in the region. A dozen ramshackle one-story houses were clustered together. Seven families lived here, much as people lived thousands of years ago. They had dogs to ward off cheetahs, goats for food and milk and donkeys and horses for travel. Hidden in this scene, however, is a heart-warming story.

During the early 1980s there was a major drought throughout northwest Namibia. With an abundance of weak livestock, predation by lions increased, causing farmers to shoot them. At the same time, poaching for ivory, rhino horn and meat became rampant. Game numbers declined drastically. And the drought deepened.

Finally, action was taken and wardens were hired to monitor game and resist poaching. Another blessing was the return of rain. By the early 1990s the drought had broken and game was recovering. In the mid-1990s, studies indicated a luxury lodge would draw tourists and benefit the region. In the late 1990s a southern African tourism company was chosen to develop Damaraland Camp — where I was staying.

[Our local touring partner ...] is unusual in today’s corporate world: it has the goals of conserving nature and helping local communities. Thus, it built an elegant lodge and ten permanent tents with a small ecofootprint using local construction materials, solar panels, etc. It pays the community for use of the land, hires local people for the lodge and trains them to managerial levels. Most importantly, the ownership and management of Damaraland Camp is shared with the local people, who inject their own distinctive character and cheerful nature. Total ownership will be transferred to the region over 20 years.

The combination of luxury lodge and big-game safaris has been successful at drawing tourists. Wildlife has more than doubled because villagers have become partners in the ecotourism venture and now value and protect their habitat. Best of all, the lodge creates jobs, encourages education and brings funding into the community. Young locals, who previously would have been goat herders, now can pursue jobs and careers in the hospitality industry.

[They] have taken this model to numerous other camps and regions in southern Africa…

Click here to visit this intriguing country with its many facets and peace-loving population and contact Christine TravelBoecker for first-hand Namibia experience.

Anchored at the head of Jakobshavn Fjord off the west coast of Greenland, the MS Hanseatic is practically bow-to-berg with the four-story facade of the Jakobshavn Glacier. This region is one of the Arctic’s great iceberg nurseries. Here, massive blocks calve off the glacier face with a rifle-crack, detonate soaring rooster tails of spray, then bob around until nudged by wind and current down-fjord and out into Baffin Bay, bound for who knows where.

Jacobshaven, Greenland

We are on the first leg of a 24-day voyage from Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, to Nome, Alaska (that’s 4,000 nautical miles and seven time zones’ worth). The Hanseatic is retracing the Northwest Passage, the trans-Arctic sea route that was the grail quest of explorers from the 17th to the 19th century. They were looking for fortune–a commercial shortcut to Asia–whereas we are after polar bears, icebergs, and bragging rights.

The Hanseatic is the only five-star expedition cruise ship plying this route, and will be, at the end of our voyage, only the 139th vessel to have sailed the Northwest Passage in the past decade. The passengers are mostly German (the ship belongs to Hapag-Lloyd, Germany’s premier passenger line), but this cruise usually draws a clutch of English speakers. Everyone aboard is a cruise veteran, with a good yarn or two, but Malcolm George, a semiprofessional jazz musician from London who once tried to woo whales in the Antarctic from a Zodiac by playing the clarinet, gets my Oscar.

On Devon Island we walk a landscape that NASA uses to test vehicles bound for Mars. We see five polar bears during the cruise, notably a mother and cub hopscotching ice floes in the Bellot Strait, and the occasional whale and walrus. We never tire of crowding the bridge to observe Captain Thilo Natke thread the pack ice: “The technique is not to ram the ice but to use the space between the floes.” (The Hanseatic‘s reinforced bow allows it to give them a slap, too.)

Anchored overnight in Cambridge Bay, we shiver while watching the northern lights slither across the sky at 1 a.m., and one morning on Beechey Island we feel chills of compassion as Captain Natke pays homage to 19th-century passage-seeker Captain John Franklin. We are standing on a barren berm of stones, the site of Franklin’s last known encampment–canned food tins from the expedition still litter the ground. Franklin and his party left here in the spring of 1846 and were never heard from again. (In the frenzied search that followed, the British navy lost more ships than it did at Trafalgar.)

Franklin Expedition Grave

But it’s the bleak majesty north of 66 degrees, 33 minutes, 44 seconds, a.k.a. the Arctic Circle, that provides our daily ration of wonder. Sailing down Sondre Stromfjord the first night, we pass battlements of three-billion-year-old, cadaver-gray gneiss, the world’s oldest rocks. On a perfect late-August morning–the thermometer at 52 degrees and the sky a wash of bleached-denim blue–Captain Natke shoehorns the ship into Jesse Bay on Banks Island, and we run the Zodiacs beneath a natural arc de triomphe of red rock. A few days later we go to bed under a blue sky tattooed with finely combed cirrus clouds, and awake in an Ancient Mariner realm of silvery fog and forbidding floes. Two days out from disembarkation in Nome, we cruise along the Smoking Hills, so named by Franklin because the oil shale deposits within them have been on fire for centuries. For some 25 miles this coastal palisade is barred with plumes of smoke, and the cliff face is both wildly colored (like the paint pots in Yellowstone) and charred jet-black from the heat.

The cruise is also a primer on global warming. “Ice isn’t an impediment to life in the Arctic,” says one of our lecturers, Susan Adie. “It makes life possible.” But to the captain, a veteran of the Arctic, it’s clear that there’s a lot less of it. “In 1994 we spent days in dense pack ice in Peel Sound,” Captain Natke tells me, referring to the strait between Somerset and Prince of Wales islands that is open water when we traverse it. In his farewell speech, Natke is even more direct: “Global warming cannot be doubted.”

Service on board the Hanseatic is superb and the food excellent, with plenty of choices for non-German palates. The ship tries to accommodate non-German speakers, too, and announcements are delivered in English, as are some lectures. (But early on, the English speakers on my cruise staged a mini-revolt to increase the number.) The lecturers were by and large stellar, especially Adie. I had only one complaint about the ship (smoking is allowed in the lounges) and one about the itinerary (too many stops at Canadian Arctic towns, which were uniformly dreary).

This year the Hanseatic sails only portions of the Northwest Passage, using the rest of the time to explore the more northerly Arctic islands, which should yield more icebergs, more polar bears, more scenic grandeur, and an ever greater feeling of wonder at the immense solitude–in short, the siren song of the Arctic as an aria.  –Gary Walther, ForbesLife Magazine dated May 23, 2011

The MS Hanseatic will cruise the Northwest Passage from August 14–September 8, 2012.  Cabins are $18,580–$38,600.  For more information contact chris@travelboecker.com