On 21 April 2009, as our group sat around the dinner table in the Hotel l’Anapurna in Kathmandu on our first night together, we discovered that every person had a unique reason for visiting Everest Base Camp (EBC). We were twenty people who paid good money to visit the largest and highest rock in the world – Mount Everest, or Sagarmatha as it is known to the locals, official summit height 8,848m.
Petronella said that she came along to look after Hugo, because his mother would never forgive her if something had to happen to him. Gideon said there was no sinister reason why his wife did not come along, but that reaching Everest Base Camp was in his destiny. Henning, at 64 the oldest member of our group, came along because Gideon was his Fish River trekking buddy. Dirk said that EBC was on his bucket list, and Madaleen confessed she came along even though she wasn’t sure where EBC was. Despite the banter and laughter, there was a noticeable tension – we were going to walk from Lukla, at altitude 2,770m, all the way to EBC at 5,330m and back – a distance of over 170km. Some in the group were experienced trekkers and three had climbed Kilimanjaro, but most of us had never ascended to that altitude before.
Serengeti National Park and its surrounding Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in Northern Tanzania is quite possibly the greatest wildlife area on the continent! One of the world’s last terrestrial mammal migrations is housed on these great plains, stretching over an area of 15 000 square kilometers and forming the bulk of a larger ecosystem covering 25 000 square kilometers in size. With so much on the hoof, there are plenty of predators in attendance, but the Serengeti and NCA offers far more than just prolific wildlife! There is also plenty of wilderness on offer and a mosaic of habitats, including beautiful Acacia woodland, not to mention an infamous caldera going by the name Ngorongoro Crater.
Globalization, urbanization and modernization continue to sweep the globe as we soon journey into the 2nd decade of our new millennium. The formation of a global community seems imminent and few traditional cultures have been unaffected. The magnetic pull towards westernization seems stronger than ever and we must remind ourselves, that a loss of traditional culture amounts to nothing less than a loss in global biodiversity...
