The Africa adventure is over. After 24+ hours of travel home (Johannesburg to Lagos to Dulles to Rochester) and ~9,000 miles driven, I'm on the road again from NY to OR then CA. We are racing to Napa to meet our soon-to-come new grandson and will only have a very brief stop in the Portland area this time around.

1. What I've Been Reading

Articles

1. A Tiny eReader — Jim is trying out an alternate eInk reader that fits behind his phone.
2. How Flight Attendants Get Their Assigned Schedules — More good stuff from Maigen.
3. What Will Happen to Indian IT? — Related to a conversation and open question Ken and I had running throughout the final month of the Africa trip: how will sub-Saharan Africa adapt to be economically viable in the coming 50 years given the impact of AI? Outsourcing call centers or software development is likely a losing strategy.
4. The African jobs most exposed to AI do not exist yet — Related to the above.
5. Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later — Jacob and I have had multiple conversations about Georgism, and it's good to see some follow-up from one of its advocates. If you're interested in equitable tax policy, don't dismiss this out of hand — it's worth some time for a deeper dive.
6. Write Things Down — I journal every day (digitally) and am a seasoned fan of ubiquitous capture. I teach my students this approach in my project management class. The linkage between these concepts and AI agents collaborating for good or evil is a nice leap.
7. The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations — Related to the above.
8. Building without predicting — I probably wouldn't take a home construction project to this extreme, but he makes good points and his feelings on incremental iteration closely match mine.

Books

1. Still reading The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré — started 28 August, still going. Overlanding doesn't leave as much reading time as I'd hoped, but it's good enough to keep picking back up.

2. What I've Been Watching

Two months of overlanding meant evenings at the fire rather than a screen, but the long flights home made up for it:

1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — the 1979 BBC serial, Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Guinness made this between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. This is serialized TV at its best and holds up very well nearly 50 years later.
2. Disclosure Day — Steven Spielberg's sci-fi thriller about revealing evidence of alien life on Earth. Very average.
3. Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare — Julie recommended Megumi Inman's 2026 documentary on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident to me. The disaster lives in a distant corner of my mind and it was worthwhile to revisit and learn more.
4. Pressure — With Andrew Scott as meteorologist James Stagg and Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower, this movie sounded too silly to me when I first saw the preview. It is well worth a watch, though I didn't love Fraser as Eisenhower.

Once home I also finished Widow's Bay, Katie Dippold's comedy-horror series on Apple TV, with Matthew Rhys as the skeptical mayor of a cursed New England island town. I honestly wish this had been a one-shot series that resolved. Not sure we'll watch future seasons, but it did have some laugh-out-loud moments.

3. What I've Been Listening To

Guitar's still paused for the trip, but the playlist's been going:

1. Mutiny After Midnight — Johnny Blue Skies (Sturgill Simpson's recording alias). Also our next album club pick.
2. Second Song — Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts. His 50th studio album.
3. Exile in Guyville — Liz Phair, one of my top 10 albums of the '90s.
4. Sanctuary Park — The Jayhawks' 12th studio album, out this August as the band hits 40 years together. Considering seeing them in San Fran in December.

4. Dispatches from Africa

Return to Chobe and Moremi — Back into Botswana after Victoria Falls. A river cruise out of Chobe Safari Lodge turned up an elephant family playing in the mud, one youngster comically stuck getting out of a hole. Savuti brought wild dog pups and a small lion pride at golden hour; Moremi topped it with a lioness climbing a tree to survey the surroundings — genuinely rare behavior for this region — plus a greater kudu male with an impressive beard.

Antelope of Southern Africa — A photo-essay catalog, roughly 20 species deep, from dik-diks ("only 15 inches tall") up to eland and sable. Includes "Bucky" the camp bushbuck and a nyala male that helped himself to the bath water at one stop. I still have a few more to add.

Central Kalahari Game Reserve — Seven days in one of Africa's largest, most remote reserves: 110 Kori bustards counted in a single day, a lion pride at a waterhole, bat-eared foxes and jackals. Also the hard parts — windstorms, unexpected rain that mired the vehicle in mud, and a genuinely rough Xade campsite that "wouldn't have been a great fit for the bigger group."

Swamp Stop and Riverdance — Hundreds of sharptooth catfish group-feeding on baitfish in the reeds, a new bird (Little Bittern), and then the find of the trip: guide Austin, after a joking request for an African Finfoot, actually produced one on the riverbank — a bird with no recorded sighting at that spot since 2017, now logged in eBird.

Etosha National Park — Three nights, gemsbok and springbok herds mixing at the waterholes, and an elephant arriving to claim the best spot while "everybody made room." A lioness and two males at another waterhole, an eland taking a cautious 30-minute think before finally drinking, and Pale Chanting-Goshawks mobbing a honey badger on the way out.

Damaraland, Spitzkoppe, and Walvis Bay — A 70-mile dry-riverbed drive hunting desert-adapted elephants (smaller, and in smaller herds, than their savanna cousins). Spitzkoppe's granite gave up mountain chats and pale-winged starlings but not the hoped-for Herero Chat. Walvis Bay's lagoon delivered thousands of greater and lesser flamingos mixed together; the Sandwich Harbour dune drive was thrilling but got clouded out right at sunset.

Sossusvlei, Klein Aus, and Fish River Canyon — Early to Deadvlei for the dead camel thorn trees, plus Red-necked Falcons working over a freshly killed Speckled Pigeon near the dunes. The D707 to Klein Aus Vista rivaled Utah for scenery and produced our first Cape Fox. Fish River Canyon brought striped-legged Hartmann's mountain zebras and a growing fixation on finding one really good quiver tree.

Namaqualand and Lambert's Bay — Back into South Africa. Namaqua NP delivered tortoises and Gazania wildflowers, though a tight schedule meant skipping the coastal section in favor of dinner at Rooi Spinnekop in Hondeklip Bay. Bird Island at Lambert's Bay made up for it — a packed Cape Gannet colony, cormorants and gulls, gannets circling and plunging for fish.

Cape Town — Two nights in Sea Point, walking to groceries and the seaside promenade. Table Mountain was windy and very cold (thanks for the rain jacket, Ken). At Kirstenbosch a Sombre Greenbul called from the canopy for half an hour before we finally spotted it, Southern Double-collared Sunbirds turned up everywhere once we'd seen the first, and a female Swee Waxbill held still at eye level after I nearly stepped on her. Prix fixe dinner at Belly of the Beast to close it out.

Southern Tip of Africa — The Cape Rockjumper hunt at Rooi-Els paid off with a male and female about 2 km down a boulder-strewn gravel path, plus a Ground Woodpecker and a humpback whale rolling and flipper-slapping in the bay. African penguins at Stony Point, pelicans, flamingos, and Caspian terns on the salt pans at Agulhas, the continent's southernmost point, and a first official Blue Crane in a grain field. Cranes are magnificent!

The Karoo of South Africa — Bontebok at Bontebok National Park, descended from just 61 relocated animals; a lifer Namaqua Warbler along the Buffels River; and Swartberg Pass rock strata "curved like serpents," the most contorted I've ever seen. When flood damage closed the usual exit from Baviaanskloof, a farmer's advice to "skip the gate and just drive through the meadow" got us to the coast.

Addo Elephant and Mountain Zebra National Parks — A permit-only, one-way 4x4 trail at Addo that had us building a rock ramp to climb out of a riverbed ledge: "probably the toughest single day of driving we'd done so far." A Narina Trogon called but never showed itself. At Mountain Zebra, a bonus night drive turned up two caracals, and the Cape mountain zebras were even more boldly striped than the Hartmann's at Fish River Canyon.

Into the Drakensberg — A farm stay at Pitlochrie with Long-tailed Widowbirds displaying, then the Drakensberg Rockjumper turned up quickly on the rocky slopes near Lundean's Nek. Spotted eagle-owls at Khotso, then up Sani Pass to about 9,400 ft for Southern Bald Ibis at Sani Top ("definitely the coolest-looking ibises around") and across Lesotho to Butha-Buthe.

Golden Gate Highlands and the End — The last park: skittish black wildebeest, blesbok at sunset, and maybe the most massive eland bull of the trip. The bustards and korhaans stayed hidden for the whole final week. The trip's only injury came at a Nando's on the way back to Joburg, where I took a fall on the stairs carrying a Coke Zero from my first bottomless soda fountain in southern Africa and splashed three tables. Then White Lion went back to Bushlore, "just five miles short of 9,000 miles driven." Stats and vehicle details are coming in a future post.

5. What I'm Attempting

The trip is done. We closed it out through Pitlochrie, the Lesotho border passes, Sani Pass, and Golden Gate, then returned the Land Cruiser in Midrand and flew home on 18 October, just short of 9,000 miles driven.

Both rockjumpers are on the life list now — Cape Rockjumper at Rooi-Els and Drakensberg Rockjumper near Lundean's Nek. Chaetops is a two-species family found nowhere else on earth, so that's the whole family in one trip.

I scored 191 new birding lifers on the trip, adding to the 200 found on my first five-week visit two years ago. Covering so much territory helped so much, along with doing deep research ahead of time to identify targets along the way.

By the end of the day Jacob and Kaitlin should have their second son introduced to the world. I wonder what his name will be. So excited to land in Napa on November 1 to be reunited with Rory and family and his new little brother.

-Chris