Yes, I am opinionated but that’s why you are here, right? I have the same general tip for safaris as I do for cruises: get off the reserve! Go to a town where actual people live! Talk to them! Eat there!

As a general rule, safari guides are an incredible lot. They are experienced naturalists who can spot a praying mantis on a branch of a 40 foot acacia tree. At night aided by the beam of a flashlight (a “torch” outside North America). And then every once in a while, you get a lemon. If a guide says it’s fine to get out of your vehicle and walk, then ask some questions. Is there an electrified fence between me and that calm-looking rhino? What time of day is it? What type of animals hang out around here? Is it breeding or baby season? Stay within 50 feet of the jeep and ask if the driver is armed.

Let’s be clear, I am a pacifist. But a friend of mine nearly got trampled by hippos who panicked a couple hundred yards from the watering hole where they normally seek shelter. Fact: Hippos are cute (ok, opinion). Another fact: Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal. They were on a walking safari. Why? That shouldn’t be a thing, i.e. into the bush. If something sounds stupid, it probably is. Listen to your guides, but ASK QUESTIONS. My friends had traveled to dozens of countries all over the world. They have money to afford the best travel “experience” (more on that elsewhere on the blog). They have never been frightened anywhere until the hippos noticed the strolling humans and an observant tourist (NOT the guide I will note) yelled “RUN!!” An adult hippo weighs between 1.5 and 4 tons. Also, hippos hang out in herds. The humans ran and were fortunate they had a head start. This was my friends’ first safari and they never should have been placed into that situation, but they were.

Alaska

I’ll get straight to the point: I am not a fan. If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably realize that being trapped anywhere with 3 thousand something Americans with no escape route is not my thing. I also have issues with 24-hour buffets, pools filled day and night with kids, casinos as a form of entertainment, and polluting, self-contained cities on water, but each of these features merits its own separate blog post. If that, however, is your thing, you will not have any trouble finding information on the internet on how to do that. I forgot to mention hospitable conditions (pun intended) for germ incubation in a massive floating petri dish. As I said, I have some issues with cruise ships. I enjoy local people, local food, local experiences, etc.

Now that that’s out of the way, there are some conditions under which I will do a cruise in a different form. Here are a few:

• Alaska. I took a “small ship” cruise (= 90 passengers) on a sadly now-defunct cruise line. It allowed us to cruise into smaller, shallower inlets where the big ships could not and we didn’t have to wait on long lines to board zodiacs to bring us to shore. These small ships can be super expensive and I’m not sure why, but this line was not. Perhaps that’s why it is no longer. Here is how close in we got to view a glacier:

• The Galapagos Islands – well duh, there is really no other way to see the diversity they have to offer, and that’s why you are there. There is a wide array of prices and we took about the cheapest on offer. It took 19 passengers, so they said, but there were only 13 of us, which was lucky as I had a total claustrophobic attack in my room and they moved me – alone – to a triple. Even that was tight for one. I’ll say no more, but something to think about it you have claustrophobia problems. Needless to say, this was not a luxury experience.

• Cape Horn – this was one of those “experiences” I just had to have. It was an experience. Ushuaia, the city where we boarded, was a beautiful, windswept, western frontier-type outpost. There were about 30 people on our ship. I got seasick for the only time in my life, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Albatrosses followed our ship around the horn, and people write poems about that shit.

Our ship, docked in beautiful Ushuaia. They cleared us for smooth weather and we sailed around Cape Horn. I got a little seasick.

The themes: small, no long lines, no casinos, not luxury, still some really good food, bring Dramamine.