Day 6

Sunday, June 28, 2026

Sandton — the free day, and the group

Daytime	A free day. Shopping, for warmth.
Evening	The group assembles. Dinner, and a briefing.

The tour did not start until the next day, which left us a free day in Sandton with the whole of Sandton City underneath the hotel — one of the largest malls in Africa, attached to the Garden Court by a walkway, so that you can go from bed to a hundred shops without stepping outside. We had one job, and Kruger had assigned it.

Sweaters and Stocking Caps

Two mornings in an open vehicle had taught us the thing the brochures do not: Africa in June is cold, and we had packed like people who had heard the word “Africa” and stopped thinking. So we spent the free day buying warmth — sweaters, stocking caps, the layers we should have brought and had not — against the mornings we now knew were coming in Botswana.

Sandton City. The iStore, which is an Apple Store, which looks exactly like every Apple Store you have ever stood in. The same white tables, the same lighting, the same hush. Nine thousand miles from home and I could have found the charging cables blindfolded.

There is something both reassuring and slightly disappointing about that. You cross the entire planet, and the mall has the same shop in it, arranged the same way, selling the same phone. Globalization has made the whole world legible and taken some of the strangeness out of travel in the same motion. I bought a warm hat two doors down from a store I could have been standing in at home.

The Group

And then, in the evening, the trip's other half arrived: the people. Up to now this had been a book about two of us. From here it is a book about ten. That evening we finally sat down with the rest of them — Natasha; Debra and Bill; Tara, Meredith, Kirsten, and Kathryn; Paul — and Dylan, our EF guide, who gathered everyone together and talked us through what was coming.

The whole cast, more or less, around one long table. Everyone still politely arranged. Nobody yet knew who snored on a bus, who was always first to the vehicle, who would become the one you sat with. That comes later. This is the before. (The woman throwing the peace sign is Jen, who was not on our tour at all — she had tagged along with some of the group on an outing to a nearby town that afternoon, sat with us for one dinner, and then went wherever the rest of her own trip was going. We never saw her again. Every group trip has one of these: a person who is briefly, warmly, completely part of the evening, and then is not.)

It is a strange thing, the first night of a group tour. You are looking around a table at eight strangers and a guide, and you know — statistically, from the sheer arithmetic of three weeks in each other's pockets — that some of these people will matter to you by the end, and you have no way of guessing which. You just make polite conversation and wait to find out.

Dylan gave the talk. The plan, the border crossings, the flights, the lodges, the rhythm of the days ahead. And Bonnie and I sat there having already flown to Cape Town, walked ten miles across it, flown to Johannesburg, and seen four of the Big Five — nodding along to the briefing for a trip we felt, quietly and probably insufferably, we had already started. Tomorrow it started for real.