An African Safari - Wildebeests, Prospective Husbands, And Communing With The Original Black People

Marjorie Vickers’ husband, Michael, had just died and left her well looked after.  The behest was generous enough so that in the relatively few years left to her, she would never have to worry. 

Marjorie loved her husband very much, but fifty plus years of marriage can take their toll on anybody, and if she was being completely honest, she would have to admit that a decade or two without him was just what the doctor ordered.  She was in good health, still cut a fine figure, was energetic, and longing for adventure. 

He was not cold in the ground before she called Carlton Tours for a consultation.  They were particularly well known for matching personal preference with specialized group tours, and the counselor, experienced both in tour management and marketing, quickly realized who was sitting in the chair before her.  

She had seen and provided for many such women - new widows flush with inheritance and insurance money, old but not too old for sexual adventure, and willing to risk all for an out-of-the-ordinary experience. 

The counselor didn't even bother to mention the Rhine and Danube tours - too predictable, genteel, and ordinary.  She thought about Morocco and its romantic souks and bazaars, but dismissed them as too travalogy - spices, nuts, and Persian carpets but no real romance. She considered India but the heat, dust, and filth threw off even the most seasoned traveler. China and the Great Wall? Bali and its shadow plays? 

 

She finally, although hesitatingly considered an African safari which had romance, the thrill of the Dark Continent, the ecstatic encounter with animals in the wild, and the romance of an old English, Downton Abbey-type resort amidst the banyan trees of Tanzania and the perfect setting-off place for the veldt.  

'Perfect', said Marjorie. 'Sign me up', and so it was that 'Marjorie's Marvelous African Adventure' began.  She excitedly told her friends who shared her enthusiasm, all but an old World Bank colleague for whom Africa was nothing more than a series of malarial, corrupt failed states where Presidents-for-Life ruled with an iron hand and another in the till. 

'Why on earth would you want to go there?', he asked, but Marjorie had her mind already made up.  This was the trip she had always dreamed of, the one in which her husband had no interest, but for her the one which promised everything, the perfect storm of satisfied desires. 

She would see nature as it had originally been created.  She would see and mingle with the immediate descendants of Lucy, the first homo sapiens. 

Now, as savvy and sophisticated as Marjorie considered herself to be, she never looked beneath the glossy ads in Travel & Leisure. The tour company was by no means disreputable, passed the magazine's muster and was certainly not the scam of the defrocked minister Shannon's tour portrayed in Night of the Iguana, but it did cut corners, and in Africa every cut corner lets in malarial mosquitos, rats, beggars, and thieves - the real Africa.

The owner did all the right things.  He was sure to include the right number of attractive, sixty-something men as lures to the predominantly female travelers, to hire well-trained congenial Africans who suggested African forest 'sentience', and secured lodging at reasonable but far from luxurious dwellings, enough comfort plus the sense of 'living like the people'. 

Of course such fly-by-night tours, for all their careful if transparent arrangements, are too flimsy to withstand the rigors of fifty middle-aged American women looking for romance, love, and adventure; and it was on the very first stop on the journey - an unplanned, emergency stopover in Angola - made only because of engine trouble and and 'irregularities' with onward reservations - that the tour first began coming apart. 

Now, Luanda International Airport is exactly where you would send an American tour group looking for the real Africa - a pestilential hellhole of a place; as hot, mosquito-infested, tout-ridden, and corrupt as any on the continent.  Shakedowns at immigration, customs, health, and security.  The rudest, most dismissive, most callous and indifferent treatment anywhere in Africa; and by the time Marjorie and her tourmates had made it out into the steamy Luanda night, she had already had enough of the real Africa. 

She did share a seat on the old school bus that the tour company had hastily arranged with the kind of gentleman she had hoped to meet, patrician, well-heeled, and with money; but the circumstances were such - so miserable, threatening, and ugly than any personal engagement let alone a romantic one, was impossible. 

'Sorry for the unexpected stopover and unfortunate disruption of our program', said the tour guide, and then without a trace of irony he continued, 'but we hope that it will give you a feel for what you all have come looking for, the real Africa', and with that the bus made it through military checkpoints, detours around washed-out bridges, two flat tires and a cracked axel to the Hotel Good Luck. 

No sooner had Marjorie gotten settled in her airless, roach-filled room, than room service came to her door - not with canapes, daiquiris, or cheese toast, but with a bottle of siphoned cognac and an offer to spend the night with Joao, the best looking boy on the peninsula. 

Loaded on the tour bus, rancid and irritable after a miserable sleepless night at the Good Luck, Marjorie and her compatriots headed back to the airport where, true to form, they were shaken down for invalid exit visas, improper government authority and excessive foreign currency.  They were able to board their Air Afrique flight only after they had 'settled their accounts'. 

Carlton Tours soon went out of business, accused of fraud, financial mismanagement, and deceptive advertising, but not before the awful 'romantic' safari had been completed and all fees and expenses either returned or deposited in Swiss bank accounts. 

For a committed, devout political progressive like Marjorie Vickers, the aborted, horrific tour was a wake-up call long in coming.  The African was not 'the sentient, primal forest dweller, the descendant of Lucy, and the legatee of jungle wisdom ready to take his place atop the human pyramid', but a renegade savage, an innate, irreconcilable moral thief. 

It only took a visit to Luanda to disabuse her of her Utopian visions, her febrile fantasies of an African Eden, and her conviction that it was to Africa, not Asia or Europe to which humanity must turn for social renewal.  How credulously stupid she had been to swallow the bill of New Age nonsense she had been fed.

Once back home with the Carlton Tour expedition in her rear view mirror, she had to thank them for her awakening. True, she had found no man with whom to share her senior years, had never even gotten within a long shot of a wildebeest, but she had become a new woman, sentient in her own right, militantly conservative, champion of intelligence, talent, and creativity, and once and for all finished with her progressive African fantasy.