Welcome to the Adventure

Welcome old friends and new to the new Vagabond Farmers blog. The original Vagabond Farmers blog chronicled our three month journey across North America in 2010. The record of that trip lives on in cyberspace at vagabondfarmers.blogspot.com. We have had many travels before and since that trip, and this blog will serve as a home to remember and record those journeys.

The reviving of the travel blog was prompted by our plans to travel to Africa in November of 2013. This trip has been in the planning for quite some time. Africa has been on our list of places we want to visit ever since Peace Corps days. With our high school language studies in French and German, we pretty much figured that is where we would be sent back in 1987, but no ... Peace Corps decided we were a better match for Ecuador, with our zero knowledge of Spanish. Of course, looking back we would not have traded our Ecuador experiences for anything, but we were always disappointed that we didn't get to go to Africa.

So, Tammara had a big decade birthday this September (I won't say which one, but you can do the math), and it seemed like the right time to plan an Africa trip. We both wanted to see Africa from a different angle than the typical tourist bit, so we opted for the World Watch research volunteer route. World Watch is a non-profit organization that works with scientific researchers around the world and facilitates volunteers to help out on all different types of projects. "Volunteer" is a little misleading, since you pay dearly to be a participant, but you get the gist. We will spend the first part of the trip in Malawi at the Majete Wildlife Reserve helping researchers track wildlife populations and study behavior.

From there we plan to spend a week or so exploring other parts of Malawi. There are so many options, we are not exactly sure what we will do, but most likely we will spend a chunk of time around Lake Malawi, the third largest lake in Africa. There are some beautiful beaches, remote lodges, and opportunities for sea kayaking - just our style. There is also all kinds of mountain hiking we could do, but without our camping gear or the desire to rent a car, these options are a bit limited.

From Malawi we will fly home through South Africa, so why not get off the plane and spend some time there? We plan to spend our last week of the trip exploring Cape Town and the surrounding area.

So, that is the plan. We leave on Thursday. Everything is set - cat sitters, plane tickets, passports. Now comes the hard part...packing. We're trying to go as light as possible, but I keep thinking of things I have to have. It's best not to start packing too early, or you just end up with too much crap.

My hope is too make some posts from the field, but we will have to see how accessible the technology is once we get there. I am planning to use the Blogger App on my iPod, so given how long it takes me to type on that thing, text may be brief.. So, check back here regularly and we'll try to keep you posted.