2005 - A New Home; A New School and Alia Finding Footing; Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro & Serengeti
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With her share of the Conifer home, Linda became able to buy her beautiful home in Morrison where she gazed at red rocks and hoodoos across a golf course, making the place her sanctuary, her refuge, her home. Hers.
It did what they hoped. It relieved much of the relationship angst and frustration. The change allowed their inherent love and co-parenting to grow back, such that they traveled – to Tanzania, climbing Kilimanjaro, doing what they always did with joy and interacting with ease. There was hope.
Tanzania, a place neither of them heard much about until their best friends’ daughter went there on a volunteer mission. Going there Paul met a Tanzanian guide and former Park Ranger, Alex, who took him to places and in ways tourists never did, utilizing his contacts with the Safari companies in the parks to visit and stay in closeted locations, sometimes in expedition Safari tents that were more luxurious than most hotel rooms.
Paul knew it – he must bring his family. Grandma watched Jared, and Alia, Linda, and Paul adventured to Tanzania.
A laborious multi-day ascent, at times they wondered if it was worth it. They neared the final climb in rarefied air. Wisely protective due to her medical stuff, Alia stayed below the summit. Linda and Paul set out in a midnight ascent up the ash cone, at 18,000 feet Linda turning back worried for Alia. She did exclaim later how not completing the ascent was something regretted and that she wished to do again, but still felt she’d had herself a true “peak experience”.
Paul with Alex set up a medical-education safari company, bought two vehicles, designed a web site, and explored the wilds of the country locating the best locations for hoped-for clients. Six one-month journeys and explorations over three years. Then the 2008 recession hit, and it all collapsed. It got Linda and Alia, there, though, and never did they regret it.
They continued west to Mount Hanang in the Tanzanian Serengeti, then to the Ruaha river where the Great Migration crosses each year. Meeting up with their friends and flying south, in Udzungwa they backpacked and sweated to the summits of the oldest mountains on Earth. In Katavi game walks, they tiptoed on small stream banks above the wild buffalo and hippos.
In one heart-stopping moment at Katavi, the guide-driver pulled their open-sided Land Cruiser next to a bachelor elephant. The elephant was grumpy and did not take kindly to their presence, making what turned out to be (but they didn’t know!) mock charges, stopping in a flurry of dust and gravel 10 feet from the vehicle. The driver remained relatively sanguine until the third charge did not stop and he hurriedly kicked the ignition and raced them out of there.
Tempting fate, but oh so incredible, and together.
In Mahale on Lake Tanganyika, they trekked through dense brush on steep mountain slopes to encounter and get physically knocked aside by a troop of wild chimpanzees. There Linda enchanted the staff, treating the guides and managers with acupuncture and getting rave reviews.
For a while, they fantasized about getting a boat with Tom’s daughter when she finished medical school and motoring along the Lake, the worlds’ deepest body of fresh water, as an itinerant clinical traveling medicine show
Great fantasy, but it is not sure it would have exceeded what they experienced.
