[00:00:00] Speaker A: We turn a corner and we're coming up and there's a male rhino standing beside the road, a huge male rhino. And the driver, instead of driving up and stopping like away from it, he kind of pulled up in front of it and stopped. And it was just enough to trigger the rhino. You could see the rhino's ears went up and his head went down and then he turns and he pivots and he just starts running and, and so we take off and we, we literally drove for 15 minutes maybe with this rhino chasing us.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Welcome back everybody to this week's live episode of the DCL Duo podcast brought to you by. Nope, nope, we're not revealing it yet. We got one more week. One more week.
Y We're not going to do it.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Brought to you by the DCL Magazine
[00:00:57] Speaker B: BR Brought to you by our friends over at the DSCL magazine. That's right, they sponsor our bonus bonus and live shows. So do you want to send some love over to DCL magazine if you have not subscribed already? Truly, truly, truly. Head over to dcl-magazine.com that's DCL Duo sign up for one of their great subscriptions. You can get magazines about Disney Cruise Line, Disneyland Disney World. Disney Cruise Line Mag is of course so near and dear to our heart. And yes, we've had articles in each edition thus far and we've got one coming in the next edition that will come out. You can get a calendar over there. Just go over there, show them some love. Showing our sponsors some love shows the show a little bit of love. And if you use code dclduo, all caps DCLDUO, you'll get 10% off anything in their store over there. So head over there, check them out, show them some love. Sam, before you bring our guests in for the evening, I think we had some news and then a quick podcast piece PSA announcement. So go for it.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: I'll start with the news. So there's a couple of items, nothing huge but the adventurous by Disney Rhone River Cruise departures for 2027. There are several that went on sort of a, we'll call it a sale, but basically $400 discount per person savings. That was about a week ago or just under a week ago. Additionally, earlier this week it was announced that Disney Cruise Line had reached an agreement with the Hunan, or is it Huna Totem Corporation, which is the company and tribe that owns Icy Straight Point essentially. And so they have reached an agreement, a long term agreement for 15 years securing preferential access for Disney Cruise Line at Icy Straight Point, which I think confirms to us that Disney is still committed to going to Alaska and potentially committed to sending two ships to Alaska because its itineraries on the Wonder go to Kacha Can Skagway in Juneau. It's only its itineraries on the Magic right now that go to Icy Straight Point instead of going to Juneau.
Another thing that happened just today is there are more things on sale, more cruises on sale, both in terms of special, you know, all kinds of special offers as well as Florida resident rates. More stuff dropped onto those kinds of savings. So we are seeing Disney drop an unprecedented number of discounts on sailings. We, we've never seen this before and we're sure it has to do with the increased capacity given that there are eight ships right now and soon to be nine ships.
There was something else that I noticed from the Disney Cruise Line blog reported that Disney Cruise Line the Play project was investing more in youth sports in Eleuthera. So they've already previously invested in the Bahamas on youth sports facilities and also youth music programs and whatnot.
There is an increased investment there in Eleuthera that was just reported today by the Disney Cruise Line blog. So those are all the news items. The other thing that I will tell folks is we continue to have too many people reaching out to us for the show.
I want to say too many is I want to say we're blessed. We have so many people that have been contacting us to record episodes with us that we don't have enough time to actually record with everyone who reaches out to us. So. So our best recommendation is if you're interested in recording with us, you want to reach out as close to about 90 days in advance of when you would disembark from your sailing. Because our schedule for booking a recording opens up in a 90 day rolling basis and we tend to be booking up in that time between sort of 90 days before or 60 days before. Like in that sort of window is our recording slots are booking up. So I just want to tell people I'm so sorry if I end up declin your recording or telling you we just don't have room in our schedule available.
It's not you, it's just a matter of we would love to record with everyone who reaches out to us. It's just a matter of our schedules.
And we also really try to not have too much on just one itinerary. So for example, if we've got 12 episodes all about Disney Wonder in Alaska, that's too many episodes. If we've got four or five, that's perfect. But so if I turn down the recording based on the itinerary or the timing, I just want to apologize in
[00:05:48] Speaker B: advance, sorry give people a little color here about why because there are lots of shows that record and then release, record and release. We have gotten to the point where our show we record today.
So next month because of the amount of recording we have, we are going to be releasing episodes every other day throughout the month of August. And that still has us with episodes recording now that won't go out until September.
We're booking out recordings into late September, October now. So like our shows, if, if we record with you now and they doesn't go out for a month and a half, two months, sometimes even three months based on our recording schedule, then recording with you after you get off the sailing means people are experiencing the cruise like six months later. And, and that just that scheduling. Yeah yeah we, we just want to, we want to make sure that we're bringing as fresh a content as we can on the ship. So, so that's why we ask people to reach out early. So you know when you're up online booking your activities for your cruise, just head over to dclduo.youcanbookme.com and grab your recording slot and we will go from there. But yeah, so sorry to, sorry to play into that but just want to let you know it's. It's not because we don't like your topic, don't think you'd be a good guest, anything like that. It's just about trying to keep the show kind of content as fresh as we can given all of the volume of recording that we are actually doing. So anyway with that I think and
[00:07:08] Speaker C: it is a great problem to have as Wesley version 50 somebody puts in the in the comments like we are not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Like this is an amazing problem to have but I just want to be transparent with people.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: If you have something unique, a unique angle on air cruise, a unique sailing whatever it is, don't hesitate to. We do sometimes try to special set shows for really timely topics. So like next month I. Well maybe later this week we don't know. We're going to have to find a way to do an itinerary release episode. If Disney ever gives them to us, we'll figure it out. Right. But we just can't accommodate every everyone doing that. So if you have something unique, do reach out. If you're taking the ABD private jet tour Call me. And we will. We will try to figure something out for you.
[00:07:55] Speaker C: All right?
[00:07:56] Speaker D: Right.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: Right. Absolutely. Or if something you didn't reach out before your cruise and something really unique happened on your sailing, we do want to talk to you, so don't hesitate to reach out, but just don't. Please don't be offended if I say I'm sorry, I can't fit you in the schedule. And to Ed's point, yes, people are lining up to get shut by me in my rapid fire. It's crazy. It's crazy.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: We could do some sort of job, share program. Maybe those people can just come live with you for a week and then you can, you know, they can experience the same thing just in a different setting. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
All right, let's adopt me.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: If you're doing the private jet tour, just like Nathan Novak says in the comments, if you're doing the private jet tour, feel free to adopt me and bring me along.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Yes. All right, Sam, let's introduce our guests. We are bringing in the full Norton clan this evening to start the show. So we've got Ashley, Daniel, Katherine. Welcome back, guys. It's so great to see you all. And we are so excited to talk about South Africa.
I think we're kicking off the show tonight. So Daniel and Katherine are going to be with us for a little bit, and then we're going to get the full lowdown from. From Ashley. She has a presentation. But while we have Danielle and Katherine here, we want to hear some of their favorites off of the trip. So as we go through the trip, you can keep those in mind.
So, Ashley, is there, like, a specific question we should ask to tee this up on your end or just give us your top three? What's the protocol here for you?
[00:09:22] Speaker E: Yeah, Catherine, I think you should go first. What was your favorite part of the trip and the game drives?
[00:09:31] Speaker D: My favorite. One of my favorite part of the trips was during our first two game drives, we saw the big five, which is the hardest to kill animals.
The lion, elephant, rhino, leopard, and cape buffalo.
And then on our last nighttime game drive, we saw a pack of wild painted dogs, and they were hunting for something.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: Oh, my goodness. I gotta say, I love these stuffy friends you brought to the show. Katherine, tell the audience what they are. Which animals? Animals they are. I mean, one of them you held up very prominently, but tell us what they are.
[00:10:17] Speaker D: This is Sparkle. She's a painted dog.
And then this is Lily, and she's a leopard. And I got them at Kapama.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: Amazing. Amazing.
That's fantastic. All right, what were the other highlights from this trip, Katherine?
[00:10:38] Speaker D: I really liked the Cape of Good Hope hike, which was like a 10 minute hike up a mountain to like a lighthouse.
And that was really fun.
And I loved me and my friend at the first hotel. We played hide and seek a lot, which was really fun.
It was great way the hotel was like made
[00:11:10] Speaker C: and can I ask you another question? Do you think was like, was this strenuous, like on your body? Did you feel like you had enough stamina to keep up in terms of like the hike and then the hours that you had to be awake, or was this, was this a difficult trip for you? Because it's different than like a vacation on Disney cruise, right? Was this a harder vacation or was this manageable? Would you say for somebody your age actually tell people your age?
[00:11:41] Speaker D: I am 11, almost 12, and I think I was fine the whole trip. It was a lot of fun. They give you at least an hour of rest time in the afternoon and I would put my feet up and that gave me enough energy to continue.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Some of those 4am Wake ups were not, not fun for anyone. It's not just Catherine.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Catherine, I hope your dad gave you the best piece of advice. When you're out on like a wild game drive, you know, seeing bears, remember you don't have to run faster than the animal that's chasing. You just have to run faster than the person ahead of you. All right,
[00:12:24] Speaker C: Gavin, what do you think in terms of is the right age, like minimum age for, for a kid to be on a trip like this?
[00:12:32] Speaker D: I would say late 10 to late 11 and older.
I wouldn't be younger than 10 because you don't get the best experience.
You're still young enough to do like the junior adventure night, which was really fun, but you're old enough to remember it later.
[00:12:57] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Daniel, what were the highlights for you?
And I hope the treadmill didn't come in handy. That's in the background there for you. You left behind by the jeep.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: I actually wanted to say that I know that there are DCL Duo fans who are type two fun people.
And I put together a list of all the places that are great for running. First, Cape Town is. Cape Town is a very urban city. It's very cosmopolitan.
It's got great running routes. So the morning after we got there, I walk up to the doorman and I was like, where should I go running? He goes, just turn, turn right. And I turn right and there Were thousands of runners out for their Saturday morning run clubs.
Cape Town. Cape Town was. Cape Town had lots and lots of fun places to run.
We were in, you know, we were in several different places on this trip. Right. So Cape Town's where we started.
We then went to Nysna, which is on the Indian Ocean.
It's less. Yeah. Where Ashley's background is. It's less of a big city.
It's a resort. There was a little bit of running you could do. There was some good hiking.
Kapama, where the drives were.
Forget it. There's one treadmill, like an outdoor treadmill by pool.
And then there's the. It's set out with different buildings, and I kind of ran between them. So I did like a two mile route where I was just running around vehicles. I was running backstage, like back where all the game drive people were hanging out and just trying to find places to run.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: I figured you would have used it as, like a pace improvement exercise. Just leave me by the jeep and I'll make it back to camp. You know, they said, yeah, you can
[00:14:45] Speaker A: run anywhere on property. You can't cross the gate. I was like, okay, that's fine.
[00:14:50] Speaker C: Hey, Catherine, they don't want you to be chased by a leopard or something.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: That's the pace improvement exercise right there.
Catherine, there was a question that was directed for you at the chat. And so I want to. I want to give it to you, which is Tracy, our good friend and picky eater, says, I'm sure you're a better foodie than I am, but how was the food, Catherine? Did you find things you like to eat?
[00:15:16] Speaker D: I am a very picky eater and my allergy did not help that much. But every place we went, there was food I liked, like, really good breads, and for me, egg free breads. And you could always ask the people and the waiters, like, what is what they think is good?
There's always food that is delicious.
[00:15:47] Speaker E: And Catherine, what was the new food? You tried the new animal?
[00:15:52] Speaker D: Oh, gazelle.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:15:57] Speaker D: It is.
Where was it?
[00:16:01] Speaker E: We were in Kapamas or.
Yeah, I think it was in Kapama. I don't know.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: How is gazelle? How is gazelle? Is it a gazelle steak? Is it like, what. How do you.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Yeah, like barbecue?
[00:16:11] Speaker D: Yeah, it was in, like, a really good sauce, and then it kind of looked like steak, and it was delicious. I love it.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: A South African barbecue is called a braai, and it's. It's basically like all you would feel at home in North Carolina, like It's, it was very good, Very, very good sauces, really good meats like, like pulled pulled pork, venison. If you are pulled venison, just always
[00:16:37] Speaker D: check your meat before you eat it. Because I had undercooked chicken and that did not.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's not good. That is not good at all.
What other highlights, what other highlights are we missing before we just, we rewind and get into the details here?
[00:16:51] Speaker E: Well, speaking of running, Daniel, there's a really funny story about running with an animal, an animal running after us.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: So it did happen.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. On our last drive. So we were leaving the resort to go to the airport and it's about a 15 minute drive between the, between where the resort is and the gate to get to the airport.
We had scheduled an hour, so we were, they were going to let us drive around for a while.
And it was a pretty boring drive. Like, we, we had not seen a lot of animals. It was, it was a little bit hotter during the day. So the animals tend to be out early in the morning and they tend to be out late toward, toward evening, toward evenings when you see things like the lions come out and the hyenas and leopards.
So it was later in the day, most of the animals are bedded down. And we've been driving around and we're like, we've probably got 10 minutes to go.
We turn a corner and we're coming up and there's a male rhino standing beside the road, a huge male rhino. And the driver, instead of driving up and stopping away from it, he kind of pulled up in front of it and stopped. And it was just enough to trigger the rhino. You could see the rhino's ears went up and his head went down.
And then he turns and he pivots and he just starts running. And so we take off and we, we literally drove for 15 minutes maybe with this rhino chasing us. And the guide even said if he caught us, it would be really bad. Like he would, he would, like he could lift this vehicle off the ground.
But he, but he, at the same time, he knew how to stay far enough ahead. And we're taking, we're filming, we're turning around, filming, and we're like, there's a rhino behind us. But the rhino was not playing and he. So we went about 15 minutes and he finally tired out and then he marked his territory. Like, okay, this is as far as, this is as far as you go. You don't pass this line. And that was the last thing we did before we got to the Airport. So it was a great, great. I said we got chased off, so we got chased out of South Africa.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: I'm thankful you did not end up on America's Funniest Home Videos with that.
So.
[00:18:58] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yes. Yes.
[00:19:00] Speaker C: That is terrifying. That's terrifying.
Anything else in terms of highlights for you, Katherine?
[00:19:08] Speaker D: In Cape Town, we took this big coach bus, and on most of the rides, one of our guides would read who was Nelson Mandela, and they would always introduce it in funny ways and then read a chapter or two. So it was a fun way about learning South Africa's history and how it became the new South Africa.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: That's awesome. I love. I always. I think Adventures by Disney is unique in that it gives you that educational side of things, plus a lot of fun, and try to, you know, integrate the two, especially with kids. I gotta ask Ashley one more question.
Maybe Daniel can answer this. Like, how big was your group and how many kids were in the group?
[00:20:00] Speaker A: You know, go ahead.
[00:20:01] Speaker D: I know how many kids were in.
There were two boys, two. Me and a girl were about the same age and then a few teens.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: All right.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Yeah. I think in total it's 28 people, right?
[00:20:22] Speaker B: No, actually, yeah.
[00:20:23] Speaker E: We had 28 adventures and 14 of which were kids. And that went up through college age.
And then we had. Among seven families and we had no grandparents. This was not a three generation trip, which they said was pretty unique, which meant we were really active and we could do multiple hikes and we efficiently got through adventures.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: And so two adventure guides, right?
[00:20:51] Speaker E: Do you have two or more plus two adventure guides?
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Okay. And. And do they. Is 28 like a full capacity tour or did they say it was.
[00:21:00] Speaker E: Yeah, no, I think so. They actually, I was talking to one of the guests and it was locked down, I think around at 25 people. And then somebody dropped out and she was able to add her family of three.
So that's about the size of the trip, give or take a few people based on family size.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Well, Daniel, Cath. Oh, Catherine, you want to go ahead. You got one more thing to say. You can close this out here
[00:21:28] Speaker D: and at Knysna and at Kapama, they. At the spas, they. There's like a time day where I got my nail like a mani pedi. At Kapama I got light pink glitter and purple.
And then at the other.
No, at Kapama I got a massage, which felt great.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Oh, my God. So you get to get pampered too. I know you've got downtime in the middle of the day. That's Awesome. I love that. That's. What a great way to spend your downtime. Well, Daniel, Kathryn, we're gonna say thank you to the two of you and say goodbye.
And we're gonna do this presentation that your mom put together because Ashley is the queen of.
[00:22:22] Speaker E: Yep.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Sam, you're breaking up on us a little bit, so I'm gonna shift us over to the presentation.
Thank you, Daniel and Catherine, we'll talk to you again soon, we hope. And Ashley, as we switch views over here, you have titled this, interestingly, is this the ultimate Disney adventure or a logistics marathon?
Interested to hear how that plays out?
But why don't you start by telling our audience sort of, you know, we've gotten into a little bit of the detail with. With Katherine and Daniel in terms of their favorites. But why don't you tell us, like, why did you pick this? Like, I know you'd been. I know, I know somewhere in here or in your email, you'd mentioned you'd saved up for this for a while and you really wanted to do it. So, like, what about this trip really drew you in?
[00:23:05] Speaker E: Yes.
So Daniel has been wanting to go to Africa for over 20 years, and he likes to remind that. Remind of that. And so during the pandemic days, we sat down and really decided a bucket list of places to visit in the world. And Alaska was on there, a couple different European cities, and Africa. And I had family that lived. Has lived in multiple countries in Africa. And so I was very familiar with the concept of that travel. But being on a plane for that long, mentally and being that remote mentally, was a really big hurdle for me personally to overcome.
So it took a lot of work, therapy, and planning to get to the place where I felt comfortable doing this trip. And about 10 years ago, I learned about Adventures by Disney through Karen at mypath Unwinding. And I thought, okay, if I'm gonna do something that out of my comfort zone, I'm going to do it with the mouse. And so we started saving many years of Delta points because we wanted to fly direct or as. As few connections as possible. So we flew from Atlanta direct to Cape Town and Johannesburg, back to Atlanta. We're in Charlotte, North Carolina. So that was an easy flight there and really planning out in terms of when was the good time for us to go and wanting to be able to go. And we tried to invite lots of friends with us, y' all included. And it just turned out that we met a bunch of new friends down in Cape Town.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: My shoulder is still sore from the Arm twisting. I would have loved to have made it happen, but yes.
Well, so walk us through. So, you know, this is a big trip.
You talked about having to save for this is a big trip.
What were some of the logistics that you encountered heading into the trip?
You've got shots, I assume. I don't know if visas were required.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: Brian, we've got a whole.
Okay, we've got a whole present on this, Brian.
[00:25:07] Speaker E: Okay, I have a slide, a photo of all the prep you have to do.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Yes, let's head there. And Sam, your mic is cutting in and out badly, so I'm going to try to take over the show because you are just cutting in and out. Your wi fi is not good right now. All right, so let's head there. Is that the next slide? Ashley, you've got game drive logistics. We can go through this in the order you've got them. So why don't we go back?
[00:25:29] Speaker D: I don't care.
[00:25:29] Speaker E: Whatever you want to do.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Let's go through. So let's start with. You saw the big Five. We heard that from Katherine and Daniel. So for anyone who doesn't know, we've got a presentation up on the screen. It's got photos of all the big five.
So they did see them all, and they saw them all relatively quickly. Katherine already explained that one, but talk
[00:25:46] Speaker E: about actually flip back. Yeah, flip back one. I just want to point out to me, seeing is believing. And this picture in the bottom with the elephants, how you can see two different jeeps. And this is our guide Mike, in front of us taking a photo. And the elephant herd just walks through the jeeps. It doesn't care. They are so used to seeing. This is a private game reserve. It's, I think, 30,000 acres or some crazy large amount next to Kruger National Park. And animals love walking on these paths that the jeeps have created. And you'll see the. The lions there, the Cape buffalo. And so it was just amazing that you would be driving for an hour and see nothing, and then, bam.
30 hit 30. 30. Cape Town Buffalo or Cape buffalo or an entire group of baby elephants walking by. So it was just magical in that way.
[00:26:37] Speaker D: The.
[00:26:37] Speaker E: The hippos are hard to see. They're always in the water. And it's really hard to tell what's in one of these top photos, which is a leopard eating an impala. It was a fresh kill. We came up around the corner and you could hear the bones crunching of this leopard eating this impala. It was.
It was literally wild and very. Just wild.
We did not see. Yeah.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Who is sitting on the front of the Jeep because I don't want their job. Like, for those that. For those listening to you after the fact, there was actually like a seat bolted, what looks to be like where a headlight with the left headlight would be. And there's someone sitting in that seat on the hood of the Jeep. So who is that?
[00:27:16] Speaker E: Well, her name's Bianca and she is the tracker. And so she is looking literally at the footprints to find the animals, how fresh those prints are, the poop. We learn a lot about poop and track and poop.
And then she also will use the light at night. And so one of these photos is a. It's actually a mama rhino and the baby's on the other side of it. And we needed those headlights and the spotting light to make sure we didn't run over animals that were sleeping in the past when we were doing. We were driving back to the resort at night and that's. We hit those brakes hard when we came around that corner and saw that rhino sleeping.
And then that big rhino is the one that chased us, and that's him running after us.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: He looks fairly not happy.
Ed's asking in the chat. This is a great question because you're going on this experience for a game drive. You're going to take lots of photos. So did you drag along a special camera? Did you just use your phones? And I'm curious, ABD is always running around taking photos, too. So did you, at the end of the trip, maybe not to spoil it, did you get access to a bunch of game photos and stuff?
[00:28:21] Speaker E: Yeah, actually. And so this mic is taking photos and videos as well. And everything you'll see in this presentation is from our iPhones.
It was great.
You did not have to zoom in. Let me tell you. None of this is zoomed. Well, maybe the water. The water photo, but not very much.
And we had some people that had the really fancy DSLRs. One guy had a drone. He did not use it at Kapama, but he had a drone to film things on the hike. And so we all put our best photos. And not only did ABD take a ton of photos and give us access to those to download, but then the adventures, we had a Google Drive and we put our best photos there. And so we have photos of the male lion and the hyenas with blood on their face and the.
Yeah, and we have the baby lion cubs. We didn't personally see those, but others on our trip did.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: Oh, and there's here so we've shifted slides over to the game drive logistics. And now I can see the function of the person sitting on the hood with the spotlight.
But walk us through. So you call this game drive logistics. So what were some of the logistics involved here, Ashley?
[00:29:30] Speaker E: Yes. And so this is the Jeep that you ride in. And so it's just a Toyota Jeep. And then it's stadium seating. So it's three rows of seating, three seats a piece. And your game drives are typically around four to eight people. And they want to keep the families together. So we rode with the same family the whole time because if we didn't see elephants and we didn't for a couple of days, they would take us to really go find where the elephants like to hang out. So that way everybody got to experience, hopefully all of the animals.
The guy in the. That's standing there with Daniel, Daniel looks like he now works at Kapama because he bought so much of the gear and he loved. This is our driver. His name is Respect, and he has been working there for over 15 years and just knew a wealth of knowledge about all the animals.
And during the game drives, there is an evening and a morning one. You're waking up at about 5 o' clock for the morning drive, depending on sunrise, and you're out from about 4 to 6:30 for the evening drive at sunset. Pretty early in their summer, and you had a break about halfway through.
And the guides would set up a little table and you would have coffee and hot chocolate in the morning with some snacks. And then this is a photo of the wine. There's so much wine in South Africa and waters and sodas. And this is what they call.
There's dried mango. But the middle picture is baboon fingers. And I'm using air quotes here because it's just jerky, but they called it baboon fingers. And always something salty like a popcorn.
And so.
Yeah, but you're so close to the animals. That is what I did not comprehend until I went on this trip. So you have Catherine just sitting in the Jeep and there's a zebra, you know, kind of next to her.
And especially with the wild dogs, when they were running around, there's a pack of maybe five to seven of them. And they don't live in Kapama in that game drive. They come in and out because the animals, in theory, can come in and out. And they were looking for something and just running right through the Jeep.
It was. It was really neat. And then the last photo is a buff.
And I have My ABD buff that they gave us because it gets really dusty. So even if it's hot, cold, freezing, or just feeling great, you're gonna need to cover up from the dust because you come back and you're just kind of covered. And that last male giraffe that you see there, he welcomed us to the resort. Essentially. We came around, we're about to enter the resort and he's just standing there basically saying, welcome, come on in and
[00:32:08] Speaker B: remind the folks out there. How long was this trip? How many days was it?
[00:32:13] Speaker E: Yeah, this trip is 10 days, nine nights. And you spend five days in Cape Town? Well, we spent almost a week because we went early.
Two nights in Knysna, which is the second city, and then four days, three nights in Kapama.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Okay. I will reserve my other logistics questions until we get to that slide in case they're not answered. But just wanted to set the table that. Okay, so pre abd. So this is what we were talking about a second ago.
So walk us through what you had to do to get ready to go and I'll preview for you. My one logistics question is how did you pack for this trip? Did you pack with the intention of finding a place to do some laundry along the way? Especially now, knowing that you were getting dusty every day, or did you just, you know, we're packing what we need and no laundry being done? So walk us through the logistics.
[00:33:03] Speaker E: Yeah, all of the above. So this slide is really to let you know you need to arrive early. We came in three nights early, so we actually left on July 2nd, arrived July 3rd, and so three nights early. And it was important because there were a bunch of storms, it's the summer and the folks coming from Newark, because Newark also has a direct flight from the States, were all delayed over a day.
Some people flew through London, some through Amsterdam. But you really need to come in early because it's a long flight to recover from.
And then when you get to the airport, customs is about two hours and that seems pretty typical.
[00:33:39] Speaker D: We heard.
[00:33:40] Speaker E: Yeah. So it's a very long light. You've been on a 14 hour flight and it is. You arrive about 8 o' clock at night there time. And that's a really long line. So seeing that ABD sign to welcome you and drive you to your hotel was wonderful.
We also, because we got there a few days early, like I said, Daniel goes for runs. We went to several different markets. At the V and A waterfront, we went to the. This Kieran Bosch, I think it's called the National Botanical Gardens, the Aquarium So we just really hung out with a couple of the families that it's very obvious when you're at the hotel who's on an adventures by Disney, because we are raring to go and everybody has probably some Disney thing on. Like I had a cruise shirt.
[00:34:28] Speaker D: Right.
[00:34:28] Speaker E: Catherine's got her ears on.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: So did you book the ABD provided or not? The ABD provided. Did you book the ABD hotel for your pre stay and how was it it?
[00:34:37] Speaker E: Yes, yes. Kaylee, our travel agent booked that for us. They. They say that you're guaranteed two nights before if you're in the same hotel and same room. But I think with Africa, because this trip runs so frequently and they have two trips running at the same time, just a couple days staggered. So I felt like a good third of this hotel is just devoted to abd and it's the Cape Town Radisson. And it was fine. It was good.
[00:35:03] Speaker D: Good.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And, and just there's a question in the chat I wanted to be sure to answer. Ed's asking, did they pick you up from the airport and drive to the hotel, even though ABD excursion starts three days later? And I was just going to say, as long as you book at your hotel through abd, then when you arrive at the airport, they will provide the transfer to your hotel. If you book the same hotel as abd, but not through abd, no transfer. And if you book a different hotel than one of the ABD hotels, no transfer. So we just, just experienced that as well. About river cruise. Yeah.
[00:35:33] Speaker C: And you have to give them all of your flight details and that way they know where to pick you up and when to pick you up and you might get information as to where the meeting point is, if it's not otherwise obvious.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Yep. Yep.
Oh, go ahead, Ashley.
[00:35:47] Speaker E: Sorry, we did not get texted from our driver. I was a little concerned. I was actually texting Kayleigh in line saying, we haven't heard from our driver, but he was there. So just trust the process. The orange sign will be there.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Sorry, for those of you watching home, I was waving goodbye. I can see Daniel and Catherine and they were hanging up. They were watching in the green room area. And so I was waving to them. I wasn't trying to. Trying to wave frantically for an emergency.
Were there any visas that you needed to get to South Africa or was it all just pretty seamless from that standpoint?
[00:36:19] Speaker E: So it's kind of like flying to the UK now. You need to have.
You need to tell the country you're coming. Basically they call it a visa, the South African something.
And Delta Airlines Wouldn't let you check in without completing that. It required 24 hours in advance and that's new as of this summer. So you needed to fill that information out. But you didn't need a separate visa. You did if you went to other countries. But we stayed in South Africa. We did not add on other countries like some people did. Like June did for example, when she was on your show.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
Anything else from did? Sorry, I might have missed the packing question as I was monitoring the chat. So how did you pack for this trip?
[00:37:01] Speaker C: We've got. There's a slide for.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: There's a small slide for packing.
[00:37:04] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a slide for. There's a slide for. And then Karen is helpfully noting in the chat that it's different for land versus river for pickup. So if your land, even if you booked the hotel independently, they will do the transfer, which we didn't know because we've only done a river cruise. So for river cruise, if you've booked the ABD hotel through abd, then they will do the transfer for land. It sounds like they will do the transfer either way as long as they have all your information.
All right.
Ashley Logistics.
[00:37:36] Speaker E: Yes, that's my middle name.
While you're on this trip, you're going to be in jeeps, planes, boats and buses. And so talking about packing, you need to pack as light as possible, which was a real challenge for me.
And so I love the picture here with the Jeep on the lower left at Kapama Airport because that's baggage claim and ground transportation. It's just a bunch of luggage on a sidewalk and they throw it into a jeep and you are on your way. Very small airport.
We talked about a coach bus. Catherine mentioned that. And you can see the junior adventurers playing on the coach bus. A game on an iPad or we had a big flight delay, one of the three internal flights that you take and this is one that we had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning for the flight and they're playing Uno. We had a great driver named Naveen and he drives the coach bus for practically all of the ABDs we heard. And he spotted baboons on the side of the road during one of the drives. And so we stopped and looked at the family of baboons hanging out. So the planes are really small.
And then the last point on airports and logistics is just that you fly into Cape Town, you fly out of Johannesburg and the Johannesburg airport is madness and very poor signage. And Craig, our, one of the guides, the local guide actually walked everyone through where their gate is, where their check in is, how early you can check in. This is the restaurant to eat in beforehand. I mean, it was, it really was a white glove service.
And one of the ABD differences, I think it was very, very helpful. So I just wanted to point that out. And now, Brian, we can get to pack.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: All right.
I really want to know inquiring minds.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: I mean, it is a question that everybody asks. It's a really important part of the whole process.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: So is the bottom, middle photo here all of your luggage?
[00:39:31] Speaker E: Yes. Okay. So if you are allowed vital checked bag. It's a great question. So, and I scoured the Internet looking for the luggage that would fit because we just saw that tiny plane that we fly on, right. It's like four steps and you're just in the plane. And so some of the planes are commercial and one of them is private or chartered, I should say.
And you're going to dress just like an Alaskan cruise, like an onion in layers, right? And so you have, I have my notes. It was. We had sunny 60 degrees and we had chilly 40 degrees. We had rain on a hike up to Table Mountain and this hike at Good Hope. And then we were in Kapama. And the photo here is a dry riverbed because it stops raining in April and doesn't start again until late October. So you are dressing for everything and you are allowed one checked bag, 44 pounds max. So we had the away large and medium checked bags and then you can have one carry on and the, you know, your typical away carry on bag that everybody I think has these days, that is too big, that cannot be your carry on. It is too big. And so we had the smaller versions of those. So two small rollers and we each had a bag and then we had our book bags. So your touring style book bags that you would just regular book bags that you would have and that is it. And we had to fit it all the carry ons, by the way, had to be less than 15 pounds. And sometimes they weigh the luggage and you pay extra.
That's nothing pound carry on. No, it is nothing.
And then £44 for your checked bag. Now, they did not weigh any of our luggage. We were prepared for it. And yes, I brought back wine, so mine was more than 15 pounds on that last flight.
But they didn't charge anybody extra on our adventure. And I think that was because the flight itself was not, not full.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: Wait, my mind is racing a little bit here. From the standpoint of how did you fit all of your clothes for this trip and still bring back. Because I'm looking at this going, there's, there's like zero room for souvenirs.
[00:41:48] Speaker C: You're, you're rewearing everything is what you're saying, except underwear.
[00:41:52] Speaker E: Everything is athleisure you're wearing because you don't need anything nice. You need two pairs of shoes, sneakers and hiking shoes, and that is it. I mean, flip flops for the spa, I guess, but that is it. You don't need dresses, button downs.
Everything is athleisure. So we wore all those long sleeve Disney shirts that you never get to wear.
And we had things that could.
We did do laundry once in Cape Town and every hotel does laundry, but it's going to be hundreds of dollars to get a few things sent out. And we knew that. So we asked our guide where we should do laundry in Cape Town, because again, you're there for about four or five days. And we did it at what, the fluff in the Victoria V and a waterfront.
Walked our laundry bag down. I mean it just looked like a duffel. And they did two loads of laundry for 30 bucks and delivered it back to the hotel.
So we, we had that laundry, that laundry done. And so we took about nine or 10 days worth of clothes. Really thin hiking pants, long socks. But look, you guys need puffy jackets, hats, scarves, long pants, long socks. Daniel forgot a jacket one day and so they gave him a bl blanket at the winery because it was chilly. We had multiple shoppertunities, so it was fun to buy local or South African brand clothes. I've got that in my photo. But it's really tricky because £44 for checked, 15 for carry on, plus a very small book bag.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: I don't think I could do it. Yeah, I don't think.
[00:43:32] Speaker E: Well, I mean, I didn't think I could either.
[00:43:34] Speaker B: I could do it. But no podcasting gear. Nothing's coming with us for.
[00:43:38] Speaker E: So we had some bird enthusiasts with us on the trip and his they were carry on only they washed things in the sink on a regular basis. And he had so much gear to look at birds and, and far away zooms and tripods and everything. And that was all he, that was all he brought. But we had to bring us, you know, five. We limited ourselves to five many ears and yeah, so it was crazy.
[00:44:05] Speaker C: So I mean, I mean, yeah, people saw Katherine, you know, on video just a little bit ago, she was wearing her mini ears. She wears them every single day, like to school, to everything. The only time she's not wearing them is when she's doing ballet or horseback riding because you obviously can't for those activities. Right. So that's incredible that she only had five pairs of ears for the whole basically 13 days.
I love that.
[00:44:32] Speaker E: Yeah, for like two weeks. And so this is how we prepped. And it was a moment logistics marathon to prep for this.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: For those listening after the fact, we have switched slides now to what appears to be a sequence of laundry photos. But go to YouTube and watch. And yeah, this is really great stuff though.
[00:44:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:54] Speaker E: So we went to a travel vaccine clinic or travel clinic. Right. And so this started 14 months out. 14, 16 months out. Because while we're up to date with all of our vaccines and healthy people here, we needed to get two rounds of hepatitis A six months in advance and typhoid.
And then we got a little closer to our trip and she called us up and said, hey, there's been an outbreak or an increase of polio and measles. So we recommend getting those boosters when you come in to get your malaria meds. And yes, even though it was the winter and a lower risk, we took the malaria meds. And it's all based on the calculation of where you're staying, what month you're going, how long you're in different areas. So we had 13 days of malaria pills and Catherine learned on the fly how to swallow that pill.
So it was an adventure. And it was fine.
It was fine. And not everybody on our trip did that. I can tell from just chatting. But we had to decide months in advance what we were going to wear and the number of outfits to make sure we could we had the right combination of clothes for the weather.
Then the travel clinic gave us, we purchased four bottles of this spray that you can see in the photo. And it's Promethean. I think I'm saying that correctly. And we sprayed all of our clothes, everything except for pajamas and underwear.
Every single piece of our clothes had to be sprayed and dried outside. And so we had to do this on non rainy days and it's humid in the south. And so we had to spray all our clothes, all of our socks. You can see all these long pairs of socks here, our luggage, all of our outerwear. And it had to dry and then we packed, so we sprayed it with that. And let me tell you folks, this stuff's amazing. I'm spraying all of Catherine's sleepaway camp with this bug spray. It lasts for six weeks or about a dozen washes. And we used it at horse when she did horse camp. Not a single mosquito bite. So this stuff is magic, Sam.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: I hope you're taking notes. I hope you're taking notes.
[00:46:58] Speaker C: I. I already got the name of this. I have to buy it. I know it's more expensive on Amazon, though, than if you get it through one of these travel, you know, doctor clinics.
But I. So I need to find where to get it locally. But I know that's what I'm gonna. I'm gonna do that from now on whenever we're traveling anywhere where I know there's a lot of mosquitoes.
[00:47:20] Speaker E: And it works for flies, these tsetse flies that eat through your clothes in Africa and ticks as well. So I think this is just gonna become a normal summer thing for us, especially when we go hiking.
But it was a process. It took. Took three weekends to get through our clothes, and once we decided what to wear, that was it. There was a cutoff on what we were packing.
Also in this photo, you're going to see the travel meds that we received from the Travel clinic.
Everything that you would need in single packages for any sort of GI issues or your common problems. Some people on the trip brought antibiotics in case they got sick. All sorts of medicine.
We took four bottles, but did not need four bottles of bug spray because anytime we were outside this. Your skin needed to be sprayed when. When you were outside, especially in Kapama.
But because it was so cool, we just were covered up a lot, so we didn't need as much. But it's not DEET. The mosquitoes there are resistant to DEET. So again, it's something else. It's called Dr. Ben's or something. It's this orange stuff. I don't know. Smelled fine.
So we used that because I went one day, we were in tank tops doing yoga in Kapama. And so we did use the bug spray. We also took these capsules. It's called GI Assist or Assure GI that we got from the Travel Clinic. And it's something like a prebiotic. Anytime we ate meat, we took one of those capsules first. Or any food that wasn't, say, bread and cheese, we would eat these capsules. Because everything is very different there in terms of the microbiome. Apparently, everyone on our trip had a day of GI distress. Katherine, you heard, got hers from some chicken. Daniel got hers from some spare rib. But luckily it was at the beginning of the trip. And so our core memory is going to be watching livestream Magic Kingdom fireworks on July 4, which would have been 3am Our time and because we were all having some fun in the middle of the night at the hotel. And so that's why I have a photo of applesauce and rice cakes and ginger ale. Because that's.
Everybody was eating that at some point during the trip. Because the water, you can't, you can't drink the water because it has. Not that the water's dirty, but because apparently it takes about six months for the gut to just get used to the water.
The.
Some hotels, some of the hotels we stayed at had filters. The water in Cape Town all comes from a single source and so it's cleaner. But after we got sick, we didn't. I shouldn't say sick. We didn't have fevers or anything. But after we had our night of fun, we did not.
[00:50:11] Speaker C: Your GI issues.
[00:50:12] Speaker E: Yeah, our GI issues, yeah. And so we brushed our teeth with some of the water.
But even one of the resorts, it was clearly discolored coming out. I mean, it was really weird not using water bottles because you're just drinking all.
Not using our refillable water bottles, I should say. Everywhere has water, just water bottles. And then we didn't use drink ice except for two different places where the guide said the ice was okay. And we used cheap vodka to disinfect, like our toothbrush and after we got sick and our refillable water bottle bottles. So cheap vodka for the win.
[00:50:51] Speaker B: So I need Sam to earmuff it up for a second because it needs to know what the last photo on this page is. But I'm worried that it will completely deter Sam from ever visiting South Africa. So what is that, Ashley? It looks like a scary spider of some sort.
[00:51:07] Speaker E: It's a huntsman spider that was in a bathroom. Not the hotel bathroom, but when you're just out and about exploring in South Africa.
So you're in the wild. And you'll see at the summary at the end, this was just much more remote than I was used to. Oh, and Rand on that middle picture is a bunch of local currency. We went with about $100 US in local currency and used hardly, basically none of it.
Everything was Apple Pay. All over the country was Apple Pay.
And so we ended up giving our Rand as part of the tip to the local guy.
[00:51:45] Speaker C: Nice.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: How expensive were things for you in South Africa? Like, you know, did it feel like.
Yeah, go ahead.
[00:51:52] Speaker E: That 44 pound check bag limit was a real problem, Brian, because we went to some awesome shop opportunities on that wine.
That wine day. Yep. So it's. It was, it was rough. It was I would say I think I got a 90 minute massage, deep tissue massage at the first hotel with tip was $90. You know us something about that. Yes.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: All right, so we got some photos up now. The hotels, the Radisson and Pula Nature retreat. And so I'm assuming these are the spots you stayed.
[00:52:23] Speaker E: Yeah, the first two hotels and we'll move faster for sure. All the hotels were great. But I will say, and what I want people to be aware of is these are places set up for two people.
And I think if you travel with a family of four, you're also going to be fine because you're going to have two rooms but as a family of three. And Catherine was technically a child, a Disney child here.
So she stayed with us and at the first hotel it was a pull out couch. Now you can see her stuffy Winnie the Pooh was fine and it was okay, but a full size adult could not sleep on that couch. And we traveled with one family and it was two college sons and their mom. So three people. And that was considered the same, same human configuration as two adults and their 11 year old child. And so my advice to people if you're a family of three is to advocate, especially if your kid is 12, which is a Disney adult, advocate for rooms that fit and work for your family.
The double bed situation was tricky to find, but we heard there were a few in the hotel room. Some families were moved.
So make sure you're discussing with your travel agent and, and the moment you walk into that hotel room, if that sleeping situation is not going to work for you, then contact the guides because you can see in one of the photos that Pzooler Nature Retreat was the most Instagram beautiful hotel ever. And it's the background here of my shot. Great king size bed. But then this tiny little, little bitty chaise lounge that Catherine was supposed to sleep on and she couldn't fit. So she's left an arcing bed bed one night and then slept with the friend she made who had a 12 year old had their own room.
So she slept with her friend the other night.
So it's, it just heads up for people of families of three.
[00:54:15] Speaker B: All right, good tip.
[00:54:17] Speaker E: But yeah, there was always, always a spa day. Oh and the Radisson at the beginning is right on the waterfront. That is our, that was our view off of our balcony.
The pools, none of them were heated even though apparently they were supposed to be. And they were under renovation at two places so you don't have time to go swimming anyway.
But yeah. Oh, and there was a game room. There's a the. For the junior Advent adventures at one place.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: Well, the Kapama.
This Kapama hotel looks nice. It's at least set up better. Yeah.
[00:54:44] Speaker E: Yes, definitely set up better. So we had a king bed and a full real twin bed for Katherine. So fantastic for a family of three. Plenty of space. And this is that hotel that June mentioned on the your May podcast that it was maybe the second nice place she's ever stayed at. Second to four seasons in an island somewhere.
And y', all, it was Animal Kingdom Lodge. Like, I mean, it was.
There's a Cape buffalo right outside our window. We had. We had giraffe walking up right outside our window. The entire design.
We were at Animal Kingdom Lodge, y'. All. It was ridiculous. And so gorgeous bathrooms, but. And we had to open the screens and just listen to the animals on night. Excuse me. Open the windows. Kept the screens closed.
Sorry for that correction.
And so it was.
It was.
Animal Kingdom Lodge was designed after this place. It was great. Everything's open air except for the room. So again, back to that mosquito. If you were going. When it was not there, winter, you're going to be hot, sweaty, and covered in bug spray everywhere. So this was part of the dining. Photo of the dining.
You can see there was a. There was a.
That wooden kind of platform for yoga that we did.
We had buffalo in the background.
[00:56:04] Speaker C: This is their winter, right? Our summer is their winter. So this is really the time to go.
[00:56:10] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because the weather was fantastic.
I'm in a tank top in one photo, and I've got my aperol spritz because they had the filtered water at this one particular bar for the ice. All drinks are included at Kapama. So this is one of those land adventures where pretty much all your food and beverages, beverages are included. So it's a great value for abd.
[00:56:31] Speaker B: Nice. Nice. All right.
[00:56:33] Speaker E: Yep.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: All right. So Cape Town and wine region. I. I will echo what you said earlier in the show, Ashley. Some fabulous wines coming out of South Africa. I was going to interject my one tip, which is, while you're there, if you get a chance to try the local liqueurs, they've got one down there called Amarula that is made from the berries of the tree that the elephants eat.
But it tastes like Bailey's is kind of the best way I can describe it.
[00:57:00] Speaker E: Brian. It's in your coffee every morning on the game drive.
[00:57:03] Speaker B: Oh. Oh, I would die. I would love that so much. I would love that.
[00:57:07] Speaker C: So much. Brian loved Amarillo.
[00:57:09] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah.
[00:57:11] Speaker E: I could not fit it. I brought three bottles of wine back instead.
And so we do. You do go to a winery.
You know, it felt like being in Napa. And the kids did a game of the Junior Adventurers, did a game of pick up Frisbee. There's a photo of that. And of course, Daniel and I joined in after our wine because we love Frisbee.
We went up Table Mountain. So Table Mountain's a really big natural wonder of the world.
And that's one of the photos. And so you take a cable car up, we went to a District 5 museum and where we learned about apartheid.
And this gentleman in the photo grew up and was relocated during apartheid. And he talked from that firsthand perspective about what it was like in meeting Nelson Mandela and how the city is still dealing with that messy part of history.
We also met when we were at the winery. We had.
And I have the book here that's in the photo. It's called Doing Life with Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend. And that was actually Nelson Mandela jailer Christo Brand. And so he came in and gave a talk to all of us. And we were in tears just listening to how he was able to bring in Nelson Mandela's grandchild to meet them once and how he was there for 26 years. It was just incredibly moving to hear and to learn all this information.
And then Boulder beach is where the penguins are, and they live there naturally. And this is what got me to book this trip, was the fact that I was going to see penguins in the wild.
And the guides, Mike, said, hey, you only need about 20 minutes to watch penguins. And then you've seen them. It's like, guy, you're crazy. I could have stayed there all day just watching these penguins. The little babies nesting, the moms feeding them, like regurgitating the food. The ones that are. The teenagers that are blue and losing their feathers. And you're up on platforms, so it's all natural.
They're not caged or restricted or anything. And they just. They march out of the water just like that movie March of Penguins. So, yeah, it was great.
[00:59:20] Speaker B: Nice. All right, let's keep going.
We've got.
Wait, how do we say that word?
[00:59:28] Speaker E: The K is silent.
[00:59:30] Speaker D: It's silent.
[00:59:30] Speaker B: So
[00:59:34] Speaker C: these are.
[00:59:34] Speaker E: After you leave Cape Town, you get remote.
And so when it comes to. Back to that packing tip, if you. We took absolutely every Medican medicine over the counter that you could possibly need.
And because you're not finding them after you leave Cape Town. So that's if you need it, you need to have it with you.
And this is where we went to Monkey Land, which was a bunch of swinging bridges and lemurs and monkeys. And we went to Birds of Eden, which is a sanctuary for bir that have been caught up in the trade or house pets. And there's a bird eating Daniel's ear he thought was weird. I'm just really not a bird and poop person, because that was probably my least favorite part of the trade.
[01:00:22] Speaker B: I just love that these photos are Daniel with a snake, Daniel with a beard, Ashley with an axe.
[01:00:30] Speaker E: Usually it's Ashley with a glass of wine, but yes. And so we learned archery. We had an afternoon of archery. These are those breaks. I use air quotes again for breaks. During your day with abd, you didn't have to come to the archery lesson, but then you were going to miss out on holding a snake. And so, yeah, I was much better at ax throwing, but there was spear throwing and blowtorches. Like, blow.
[01:00:53] Speaker B: Oh, blow darts.
[01:00:54] Speaker E: Spear thing.
[01:00:55] Speaker B: Thank you.
[01:00:55] Speaker C: Yes.
[01:00:56] Speaker B: Blowtorches, Barbecue. Your own gazelle, I guess. Yeah.
[01:01:04] Speaker E: And this is. There's two pictures from the hike that we did. So we took a boat across this bay, and that's where the Indian Ocean comes in. And so we got to touch the Indian Ocean, which was really special.
And then there's this hike. And you didn't have to do the hike. Of course. All of us did. But usually if there's some people with limited mobility, they won't do the hike. Y', all, we have hiking sticks for a reason.
It was two miles.
It was. I am at a loss for words. And we are quite athletic people. And it was up and down and. And on rocks.
And so anyway, it was a very aggressive hike. You cannot have neck problems on this trip.
You can. You've got to be in good shape, good knees to do a lot of these hikes, which is great. I mean, that's why you're there.
But really, really neat things. And then a picture of the junior adventurers because they walk, watched. They made pizza one night and watched the Lion King, of course. Yeah.
[01:02:06] Speaker B: Ed is asking a question. In the chat. Did the guests trade medications with each other if someone was missing something?
[01:02:12] Speaker E: I heard people offering.
[01:02:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:16] Speaker E: Yes. Yeah. Because one of our guests went shark cage diving and had a scrape and needed some extra bandages and stuff. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:28] Speaker B: All right. So we've got photos of pudding. Malva pudding, it looks like, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
But yes.
[01:02:36] Speaker E: Y' all love food. I'm coming with the food.
[01:02:38] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:02:38] Speaker E: And so, Tracy, this is for you as well. We ate lots of Malva pudding. It apparently is the dessert that you eat everywhere.
Eight different photos here and it tasted different every time. And you're required to eat it.
[01:02:50] Speaker B: What is it?
[01:02:51] Speaker C: And it's like a cake, right?
[01:02:53] Speaker A: Right.
[01:02:55] Speaker E: Usually it's like a bread pudding and a vanilla custard pastry cream thing. Usually. Sometimes ice cream, sometimes fried dough balls, and then it's some sort of cake. Sometimes it was chocolate or caramel or spiced.
Sometimes it was dry and not very good, but sometimes it was amazing and delicious. So it came eight different ways and we had it everywhere.
[01:03:21] Speaker C: For folks who've been on Disney Cruise Line, like the word pudding typically means not. It doesn't mean like jello pudding, like we think about in the States. It means more of like a cake type thing. So if you have like sticky date pudding, if you've had that on dcl, that's what we're talking about in terms of like texture.
[01:03:39] Speaker B: We're talking about texture. June saying Malva pudding is like sticky toffee pudding. Yeah. Putting pudding is a generic term for dessert in the uk. Pretty much.
[01:03:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Okay, let's keep going. I still, I'm waiting on.
I'm waiting on the Gazelle barbecue pictures here.
[01:03:56] Speaker C: All right.
[01:03:57] Speaker E: I didn't know until the next day that she ate Gazelle because you get divided up. Like, we didn't always eat together, even at the same tables. And so there are a lot of neat food experiences. And this is where you really get to interact with the people of South Africa. So this is going to be my favorite part other than the pink ones.
And so a lot of drumming experiences. There's a dinner at this gold called the Gold Restaurant, where it's family style food with plates from all over the continent of Africa.
And by the way, if anyone wants menus or more photos of food, I have a photo of everything. So just find me in the Facebook group.
But we practice drumming. We had the. This woman's barbecuing chicken and we had bonfires. And so that's that brie that we talked about.
We did face painting, like indigenous style face painting in that photo.
Dancing. This is the farewell dinner. We had a performance of singing and dancing. It was fantastic. And then this woman, Teal, she was in Cape Town and this used to be her home.
And Craig, our guide, he was the original cast member on this trip 15, 16 years ago for Abd, and he knew about this restaurant and it's Cape Malay food, which is a lot of African flavors meeting with curry Indian foods. And so you're basically eating in our home and which is great. And then Brian, this guy's poured me some, some local Baileys in my coffee here.
[01:05:33] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:05:34] Speaker E: In the game drive photo. And then there's snacks. You are not ever going to be hungry on this entire trip. Are those like cheese doodles snacks?
[01:05:43] Speaker B: Cheese doodles. Knickknacks are like, they look like cheese.
[01:05:45] Speaker E: Yeah, they're kind of like Cheetos. So it's a lot of local fun brands. And so you would think you were going to eat, eat say a lay's potato chip. And it was kind of, it was always slightly different or a cheese puff and but they're always snacks. And even if you mentioned, Catherine mentioned she's egg free and we had a meal on one of the flights and Craig, our guide comes up and hands me a prepared thing from the hotel that morning that said no egg.
And so it's. They're always going to be feeding you.
They had gluten free snacks for the gluten free folks on the trip. And then one thing about that from allergies and actually you can flip to the next photo because I have a lot of food photos to rep. Yeah, sure.
[01:06:32] Speaker B: I just want to ask one question while we're here because you're talking a lot about sort of the cultural experiences that you got to have. And so I would think about this in terms of you can visit a place and you can see the culture, you can learn about the culture, but experiencing the culture is kind of a different, different thing. Did you feel like clearly you saw the culture and you learned about the culture. Did you feel like you actually got the. I got to experience some of that culture.
[01:06:56] Speaker E: Thank you for making me talk about how immersive this is. Yes, it is very immersive because Craig, the local guide grew up and knows so many of the people that we met and you spend so much time with your game drive folks at Kapama and so you start to build relationship. Very similar. The same three servers the entire four days at Kapa. So very similar to the cruise line where you get to meet and talk to your servers and learn about where they grew up and the. They work very similar to cruise in terms of three weeks on, one week off at, at these, at the resorts. So it was very immersive. Lots of one on one conversations with people.
[01:07:38] Speaker B: Oh, great. All right, so we're on to more food slide here. Tracy. I really Hope you spot something that you, you think you could enjoy. Because I'm seeing so much on this slide that I would be like, yes, please, I want to try that. So talk us through the food.
[01:07:49] Speaker E: This is for you. Yes. You can have adventurous food like the gazelle and beautiful food like you're eating at say, I would say even Remy. Some of this food was so beautifully prepared to.
One kid on our trip ate chicken fingers 10 days straight at every meal.
So you will find something to eat. And so a very common meal is the top right hand side where you're going to find chicken, chicken, some sort of game meat and white fish. You're always going to find that you're always going to have a lot of cooked vegetables and rice. And so as long as you're good with that, you'll be fine.
There were a caprese salad. We went to a steakhouse just because it could be a steakhouse in any city. We went to seafood restaurants where you're having fish and chips. So a lot of familiar food.
The bottom left corner is your typical breakfast. So every single breakfast, except for one, which is that lovely boxed lunch there at 4:30 in the morning.
Every breakfast is your typical international hotel buffet of literally everything, plus hot food to order. So all of that's included. Coffee machine shop. Like being in concierge.
You're gonna find a lot of pizzas. We had pizza, a good bit at Kapama, so that was a really relatable food. Burgers, you wanna make sure everything's cooked well done and cut this beautifully prepared two dishes. Daniel and I did not eat because it was.
We did not want to be risk it, let's just say.
So salads as well, beautiful salads. We at the advice of our travel nurse, did not eat leafy greens or berries. So kind of like a lot of us in the States right now, you're going to have a lot of soups, breads, cheeses, a couple of things on the allergies because I know this is something that I researched in advance.
There's always going to be something to eat, but it might be one thing.
And so you won't have a variety. And so we had gluten, nut and egg allergies on this trip. And so as long as it was one thing. And we really had to leverage Craig, the local guide who would speak, he speaks five different local African languages. And he would speak to the people preparing the dishes because. Because we would say no egg and then they would turn around and serve Catherine that malva pudding. Which has egg in the brownie and in the custard.
And because that was an ingredient. And so it was no whatever your item was, plus none in the ingredients.
And we needed Craig to navigate that in the local languages. And so we were.
[01:10:38] Speaker C: And there are people who have allergies to eclear to just eggs, like eating scrambled eggs, but can eat it if it's in like a baked good, for example, but ca.
Someone who can't eat it even if it's just an ingredient in a baked good. And so those are the kind of things that I think having somebody, you know, local having adventures by Disney, those kinds of things are what's going to help you navigate those situations when you might. Otherwise something might get lost in translation.
[01:11:10] Speaker B: Hey, Ashley, so Ed's asking in the chat, like, when do you think the best time to visit is? I don't think ABD offers this trip year round, so I suspect they're putting it in the months that they think are best. But I don't, I don't know what your thought is there.
[01:11:22] Speaker E: So it's. We asked that. And so it's almost always visitors from the US and it aligns with your typical school schedule. So they do run them over Christmas and holiday breaks, Thanksgiving break. So you will find the trips in the heat of the summer as well as our traditionally our summers. So their winters. And they run. Craig has done. It's great that we're talking about the guides here on this slide. Craig again, opening cast member. He designed this tour. A good bit of this tour and the changes. And this was his 97th tour.
So they do a. He does about a dozen a year. Plus they have a second guide now, Jamal, who. So they can run more than one at a time on the, on the trips. So yeah.
[01:12:08] Speaker B: So it's really pick your. Pick your poison in terms of do you want really hot weather, really cool weather. Weather, rainy weather. So I would say to your point, look at when your breaks are. But also I would do my research on like when is it rainy season? And do you want to be there during rainy season versus being there? Right.
[01:12:26] Speaker E: We wanted to avoid rainy and hot weather, especially because of those mosquitoes. And we wanted to go at the least risky time for that, which would definitely be the. The winter months.
[01:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. All right, so tell us about the guy. Like I. Your title says it all. I think the guides make or break these trips to be the. You know, and most of the time it's. They make the trip. So. But. But tell us about your guides.
[01:12:50] Speaker E: Yeah, so We've talked a lot about Craig, and you'll see him reading a book here on the bus. Because we would start out these bus drives, and he would give his firsthand account of wherever we were in Cape Town with personal stories. And he would say, that's where I went to high school, and this is where I went to college. College. And then he would read us a book about Nelson Mandela so that we could really learn who this.
This really important man was who changed South Africa.
And so it was. It was great. Just, he would read these stories to us. And then we had Mike, who is the life of any party. And Mike is a Hopper guide. So when somebody needs to come home for a quick break, he just flies in for that one trip, whether it's that one river cruise, he actually was on y', boat. By the way, you could have met Mike because he was delayed and hung out with your river guides in Amsterdam on his.
On his delay and then flew down to South Africa.
So he is also one of the original ABD guys. He goes back decades.
And so he was a wealth of knowledge when learning about what our next ABD is going to be.
So he had a lot of information. And the guides are just. They're just amazing. Human beings are the best of the Disney employees. Every. Everybody says that on these shows. And these guys, just the relationship they built with each person and the joy that they brought to this vacation. I mean, I would go anywhere in the world if Mike was going to plan that adventure and be my guide. So it's. They. I feel like they are family after just spending 10 days with them.
[01:14:28] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[01:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:14:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:14:31] Speaker B: All right, well, wrap us up, Ashley.
[01:14:35] Speaker C: And we have. We have to ask, like, what is, like, the one thing takeaway that you would say, you know, you wish you knew, and then the one thing you would say as to why somebody should book this trip if they're at all interested in traveling to Africa.
[01:14:53] Speaker E: Yes. So Africa is.
I know. It's just amazing. Lots of different cultures. ABD has a Morocco trip and an Egypt trip. We heard a lot about that.
The families on. On this trip had been on nine, eight, almost 10 adventures. So we got to learn about a lot of different ABDs.
And so I would say whatever ABD fits into your budget and your calendar, you must take it, because I did the SoCal adventure, and that was great.
But now I really understand why people are die hard ABD fans going on a land adventure, especially something as.
As bubbled as this trip is, because there's not a lot of downtime. You are eating every meal with these people and everything is so close together, you're so close knit that it's, it's life changing.
[01:15:52] Speaker B: Was it? So I'm going to ask this question because we were. My other arm is really sore from the twisting that the guides gave us on our river cruise that we had to do a land based abd. We just had to go, do we? You know, and I'm a big fan of cruising and river cruising because I unpack once I get to see a bunch of places that we pack at the end and we leave. And so I get a little. The one time that Sam and I took one of these whirlwind journeys on our own was in Italy. And it was like constant unpacking and packing and unpacking and packing. And I guess is that, is that annoying throughout the trip or is it. Does it feel like, oh, whatever. I mean, I guess with the amount of luggage you were limited to, maybe it wasn't that big deal.
[01:16:31] Speaker E: But I mean, I think that's one reason we lived out of packing cubes. It was very.
We had to be very organized and regimented so that. Because a lot of times the luggage would be set out the night before.
And so we had to pick the three things we needed that night and our toothbrush. All the luggage goes out at say 9 o' clock at night and shows up at your next hotel that you don't see until after dinner time the next day. And so you had to be incredibly strategic about what you packed. And I think we did a pretty good job. We could have packed a bit less, but it was also cold and we needed a lot of layers and layers and layers. And we knew that because June told us. So thank you, June, for going before us.
But. So yes, we were moving a lot.
It was only three hotels, but I think that was necessary. And it was exhausting. And you Woke up at 5 in the morning and then you didn't have dinner and until 7 or 8 at night. And then we had to do it all again for the next four days straight. It was exhausting. This was not a vacation, it was a trip. And you have maybe one or two hours in the afternoon as your downtime, but that's also your spa time. And so, you know, oh, by the way, Catherine and I had a couple's massage because she didn't know what to expect. And I thought this was a great way for her to experience her first massage because it's kind of weird.
So it, yes, you have to do it, but you have to go into it knowing that you are going to be spending the next 10 days with these 30 people and you better hope that you like them and that they're interesting and you better like being in tight quarters and.
Yeah, yeah, all of the above. Brian, you have to go. And yet it is. It is tricky.
[01:18:18] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. All right, well, I'm going to ask the question Brian usually asks since my Internet seems to be not as hinky as it was earlier in the show. But I'm going to ask you what's next? And I mean, what's next in terms of travel for you guys? Are you considering another ABD or are you back to Disney Cruise Line after this?
[01:18:40] Speaker E: Yeah. So I would say Daniel wants to go back and do something even more remote in Africa.
And I feel like I'm good. Check the box and put me on the cruise.
And so we do have the Destiny booked one of the rare seven night sailings next summer on the Destiny to try her out. We will for sure be going on another abd. I need to see more of Europe and the UK and Iceland and so I want to do that. The Scotland, the Iceland, the Norway is supposed to be magical. For after our guides got to know us, Mike could really tell us which trips he thought our family would enjoy the most.
And so we are for sure going to be doing another abd. Just need to save up a bit for it, but mostly probably going back there. Peru and Costa Rica were really popular ones. Catherine wants to get on a plane tomorrow and go to Australia after learning about Australia abd.
By the way, she's holding a machete and an ABD pin because yes, you do. That's the one part of Disney that's on these trips. So those pins is that was hidden in animal poop that she had to use a machete to open and reveal to everyone.
That's crazy experiences to have these adventures to see the Indian Ocean, which I'm probably never going to see again. And to Daniel's photography skills with his iPhone on his runs every morning and getting to experience these adventures and then seeing those night stars, seeing the Milky Way from the southern hemisphere like it's. Yes, yes, I need to recover from it and so does my bank account.
[01:20:21] Speaker D: But yes,
[01:20:24] Speaker E: all of it.
That's us.
[01:20:27] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:20:28] Speaker C: Well, it sounds amazing, Ashley, despite that scary looking bug, I still want to do this at some point. I just don't. We just have to figure out when
[01:20:39] Speaker E: you can get over your fears by holding a tarantula and a no thank you.
[01:20:45] Speaker C: No thank you. And I won't I won't hold that snake either.
[01:20:49] Speaker B: So that's I want to do Morocco. I want to do Egypt. Like I want to go see those places.
[01:20:55] Speaker C: Yeah, there's so many places to go. All right. Well, we'll, we'll say thank you to Ashley.
We've got to tell our audience what is coming next because we actually have another show already scheduled, a live show scheduled for this Friday. So we will be back on Friday live. It will be an hour earlier. So we will be be at 7:30pm Eastern, 4:30pm Pacific with Kevin from Dads Love Disney. We're going to talk to him about dadding on Disney Cruise Line. He's an amazing content creator and of course a dad. And we're going to talk just all things Disney Cruise Line, what he loves about it and the best things for dads on Disney Cruise Line.
We will be back.
[01:21:39] Speaker B: Go ahead. See, I'm sorry.
[01:21:40] Speaker C: We'll be back again on Monday. Next Monday at our normal time. For our normal live show. We'll be there at 8.30pm Eastern, 5.30pm Pacific. We are going to have with us Emily and Scott from We Do Travel. Right. And we will be talking about their vow renewal on the Disney Wish, which is happening later this week. There are going to be, I think it's on Wednesday, their vow renewal ceremony. But yeah, they're sailing the Disney Wish and they're celebrating a vow renewal. So we're going to be talking about getting married or remarried, you know, to your already spouse on board a Disney cruise. It'll be a fun let's get together type episode.
[01:22:20] Speaker B: Yes. And some surprises along the way, we promise.
So with that, Ashley, thank you for joining us. Catherine, Daniel, if you're out there still watching, I don't know if it's past Catherine's bedtime yet, but if you're out there still watching, thanks for joining us. Thank you to all of you out there for hanging in with us on this sort of more extended episode.
And we will be back. We will see you soon. But we will just say thank you for now. See you later.
[01:22:48] Speaker C: See you Friday.
[01:22:49] Speaker E: Thanks.
[01:22:55] Speaker B: Well, thanks everyone out there for listening this week. We really, really appreciate it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast. You can keep getting great content from us every week. In fact, twice a week we publish shows. So be sure to hit the subscribe button to get all of those great episodes. And if you want to watch us alive, we have a live show now every week, Monday night nights, 5:30pm Pacific, 8:30pm Eastern over on YouTube.com DCLDUO, so be sure to head over and check that out. If you want help support the show, be sure to hit those five stars on Apple Podcasts and if you leave us a written review, a five star written review, we will read it at the top of one of our main episodes. So please head over there and hit those five stars. If you've got questions or you'd like to connect with us, the best way to do that is to head over to DCLDuo.com it's got links to all of our things. Full catalog of the podcast episodes including a searchable catalog for the podcast links off to our vlog A link to our Etsy store where we sell some fun fan inspired magnets. Link to our Patreon if you'd like to help directly support the show each and every month, just head over to the website or patreon.com DCLDUO also has a way for you to sign up for our substack newsletter that we're hoping to start really pumping out monthly here, at least on a few blog articles that we've written. So DCLDUO.com is the best way to connect with us. You can also of course email
[email protected] or reach out to us on our voicemail line at 402-413-5590. That's 402-413-5590. The DCL Dual Podcast is not affiliated with Disney Cruise Line, the Disney Company or the Disney family of theme parks. The views expressed on the show are solely those of the individuals on the podcast and in no way reflective. Use the Disney Company or Disney Cruise Line. If you have questions about a Disney cruise or a Disney vacation, please contact the great folks over at My Path Unwinding Travel or Disney directly or your own travel agent. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time for another fabulous adventure with the DCL Duo. Good night.
