Bom voo

Good flight.

I needed to leave the hotel at 7.30 and at 6.15am someone called to ask whether I’d be needing a receipt for the taxi ride to the airport. So this is how we’re going to roll, is it. At 7.30 when I arrived at reception, the taxi driver was standing there clutching a receipt book that we filled in together.

I find in the more collective and less individualistic societies there is much less of a Holy Grail around disturbing someone or waking them up with a noise or phone call at the crack of dawn. In the societies where peace and quiet are highly desirable states, it is deemed a major sin to crash around and disturb someone whilst they are resting. In societies less accustomed to personal privacy, being woken up is not anger-inducing.

As I flew in I was greeted by the gorgeous greens of the Lugenda River in the late dry season. As I arrived, a cameraman and director were wrapping up a visit with one of our high profile ambassadors, securing footage for a public appeal. The timing was very fortuitous as they were heading off to a spot in the even more remote north of the Conservancy, on the river border with Tanzania. I was able to sit in the shade under a tree next to the dramatic Ruvuma River, and then join them as they became acquainted with operations in this part of the landscape. It was an unexpected, stress-buster of a day.

Back at the nerve centre of the Conservancy, after seeing a civet waddling in the brush in twilight, we had an evening meal on the deck by the Lugenda River. The team here take such good care of guests, in a place where logistics are tough and even buying in a bag of filter coffee requires extreme planning. As we ate, lions boomed and elephants trumpeted upriver in some sort of stand-off. I could feel the stresses of constant connectivity and the never-ending barrage of requests and chasers starting to drift away.