And then there is Kenya....

While all my mental energies have been focused on thinking about and worrying about Peru, there's the promise of Kenya still 6+ months off.  Everything is booked but for the airfare to JFK to catch the flight to Nairobi from there.  I was waiting for JetBlue to open up their dates that far out as my preference is always to go with them. 

When JetBlue finally opened the dates, I was faced with a conundrum. With a noontime departure out of JFK, is it possible/smart/risky to fly down that morning from Boston? Sure, in November, we shouldn't have to think about weather or other seasonal delays.  But this being New England and me being me, I worried.  And then I started to feel like I really ought to go down the day before and be there, building in a buffer that would allow me to get there some other way if I had to (train, bus, drive myself).  So that's when I realized the smart thing is to fly down the night before and get a hotel room at JFK.  Sure this is an added expense of an essentially lost vacation day and a $200 room that eats into my savings on the incredible Kenya Airways fare, but I've spent the last 4 days-of-departure for safari literally refreshing the Logan Airport webpage for blizzard-related delays and cancellations.  It's intestinal distress I don't need.  So I'm doing it.  I just hate to burn that day off...

Everything else is pretty much in order for that.  It's old hat now, with a packing list and standard routines and rituals.  I'll just need to re-fill my anti-malarial and off I go.  My camps are booked (and they are STELLAR, I'm so excited) and my private visit to the Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage is reserved.  Now it's just the waiting.

As the journey to Peru approaches

As the days tick off and I get closer to leaving for Peru, there's a fair amount of anxiety slipping in.  It take a certain amount of willpower to talk myself through it, because "it", I remind myself, is purely fear of the unknown, or rather, fear of what I'm reading that I cannot confirm or deny for myself.  I remind myself that I felt this way before China, before Russia, before Africa.  And all of those ended up being completely innocuous for the most part.  Heck, Africa now is second nature to me.  Who'd have thought that?

Part of what contributes to the anxiety is due to my hunger for information and reading everything I can get my hands on.  Where this gets me into trouble is when I read too much on internet forums.  Just in the last week I've read about:

• Pirates on the Amazon.  I kid you not.  They board boats and rob people.  My immediate thought is about my little canoe excursions, upwards of 24 hours of them over 5 days.  Pirates?  Ahoy matey?
• Snakes.  I mean I kind of sort of expect them in the Amazon, but they're in Africa too and I haven't seen one yet (knock wood).  That Hiram Bingham himself saw them, and "chasing" snakes too, is concerning.
• Midges or no-see-ums in Cusco and Machu Picchu.  The stories about people being nastily attacked by these "worse than 'squitos" bugs is horrifying.  Months of itching and scars, no repellent is good enough, no anti-itch treatment works.  ARGH!
• The "is there or isn't there" argument about a upcharge for non-Peruvian citizens that you're surprised by when you get to the airport for a domestic flight.  Argh again.
• Altitude sickness.  Sure I have been prescribed Diamox by my travel clinic but what if I'm one of the ones it doesn't work for, or it makes me sick?  Dang.

Now it could be that all that is a lot of bluster and perhaps good things to know but that I'll never have to act on.  Maybe I can better focus my attention on other things.  To wit:

I bought a life preserver for my iPhone.  No, seriously.  If I drop it in the river, it'll float on the surface in all its fluorescent orange glory.  I wish I could find similar for my new camera, but I'll just have to be super smart about it.

I also bought a packable backpack to downsize my already small carry-on-sized luggage into.  Apparently on these little canoes and even the train to Machu Picchu you can't take anything even close to full-sized luggage.  And here I thought I was doing well going all carry-on.

Seriously contemplating my wardrobe for this trip and it looks like I need to plan for at least two.  Six days will be spent in the Sacred Valley, which has a low average temp of 30 and high of 50, the last five days in the Amazon with a low of 75 and high in the 90s, but for the occasional "Arctic blast" that blows through this time of year and drops everything to the 50s.  Really.  Now that's a challenge.  Layers I guess?

Looking at all that, I suppose you could say that I'm trying to control what I can control.  And what I can't will just be part of the adventure.