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Yep, everybody got COVID. Well, 12 out of 15 of us. That's a pretty good purple line, huh? None of us get very sick during the trip, so it seemed like just a nuisance -- but what a nuisance! (Afterwards we found out that one of our quarantine buddies had landed at the airport back in the States, after having been fully recovered and enjoying the rest of the trip, and was suddenly too winded to walk. She ended up in the hospital with multiple pulmonary embolisms. She's now recovered.)

We've been hermits all pandemic; this trip to Africa was pretty much our first time out with people in 2.5 years. We thought it would be all outdoors and we'd be in our own little tour-group pod of fully vaccinated and boosted people out in the wilderness and would be safe enough. Nope! Patient zero got it on one of the internal commercial flights (from Hoedspruit to Johannesburg or Johannesburg to Victoria Falls). He gave it to the rest of us on the minibus 3 days later, on our trip to visit the rural village in Zimbabwe. The driver must have had the A/C on recirc. If we'd known that, we would have masked up, but hindsight is always 20/20. Now that I think about it, I can't blame him: the minibus was passing through Zimbabwe's coal country, and the air there was a choking miasma that would make a smog alert in Los Angeles look like a walk in the park.

Rick & I had brought Paxlovid with us (our doctor was kind enough to prescribe it just in case), so that undoubtedly helped. But then we both got rebound and were sick again on the flight back home. Fortunately we didn't have anybody sitting next to us. We got super-lucky: the plane flew with a few empty seats for weight reasons -- apparently a 15-hour flight is at the upper end of even a 787's range -- & we had one in our row. And we did keep our masks on (even though, being ignorant of Paxlovid rebound, we thought it couldn't possibly be COVID again). Nevertheless, I expect we gave it to some fellow passengers. This BA5 is godawful contagious.

We've generally been very happy with Overseas Adventure Travel; and that's saying something, coming from people who are used to traveling independently. This was our third trip with them. However, they failed at Job 0 this time around: keeping us safe. And I do fault them: the guide didn't even ask people to mask up in the bus. It's a whole different world in Africa -- everybody has had COVID, so nobody is afraid of it. And it's also a young society, so they're not as used to worrying about people like the 83-year-olds we had in our group.

OAT was also underprepared for the logistics, which were apparently left to a single hapless young worker in the Victoria Falls office with 3 whole months on the job. They sent us off to our bush camp without any home tests, even after somebody in the group had already tested positive. (Fortunately -- or unfortunately for OAT's seeming ostrich strategy -- we had brought our own with us.) And they wasted a whole day getting us back to the tour after we tested negative. We were furious about that.

So they quarantined us in camp for the last day in Kafue (except they did arrange for a river cruise on our own little boat for the 5 of us pariahs who tested positive there). Then they flew us by bush plane to a quarantine site, the Baobab Camp and Cottages outside Livingstone. There were hiking trails and a pond and birds and hilltopping butterflies and good company with our fellow plague victims, so we enjoyed our stay there. The owners also arranged a couple of activities -- a safari drive in the nearby national park, which was pretty special because we were walked in by a ranger to see the rhinos, and a flightseeing tour of Victoria Falls. (Yes, the driver and helicopter pilot and bush plane pilot all knew we were sick. Did I mention -- everybody there has had it already and isn't afraid of it?)

Huge (> 3 cm long); found while excavating ant nest in sand of vegetated red dune. Field number NAM2011-296. See also https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/142126927, found at the same site and smaller than this individual. Photographed by Duncan Robertson.