Specializing in the Safari Sundowner
As an Africa sundowner specialist, I am here to tell you there are many ways to celebrate the sunset in Africa. First of all, “what is a sundowner,” did I hear you say? It’s happy hour in Africa when you are served your favorite cocktail and watch the sunset over the savannah. How did I become an expert? Practice, of course.
Let’s start with the Basic Sundowner.
You and your family are jostling along during your game drive when your trusted guide determines you have just enough time to stop, snap open a folding chair, mix up a gin and tonic, and catch the last streams of light leaving the vast African skies. Care for a warm sausage puff? Yes, please. Some heated nuts? Perhaps just a few…
Let’s move on to the Riverside Sundowner.
Your game driver meanders along a swift-moving waterway by Land Rover, when you find the perfect spot to stop and witness the sunset show. As you throw a supplied wool blanket over your shoulders to keep off the early evening chill the hippos snort happily in the shallows in front of you. You try to get that optical illusion photo of your kid balancing the huge uprising moon on their fingertip. One onion or two in your gimlet…
You get the idea. Let’s continue on the “pièce de résistance:” The Surprise and Delight. There are plenty of categories here, but l will attempt to illustrate with two.
Round The Bend
Again, you are enjoying a late afternoon game drive, in search of lions preparing to hunt or hyenas emerging from their den. Binoculars are in hand and you are gazing off into the distance when your game vehicle comes around a bend, and there, right in front of you, is a scene from “Out of Africa.” Grass mats are arranged in front of a fully-loaded table bar, complete with bartender. Chairs are arranged in a casual semi-circle with a view straight into a gorge, and the campfire is snapping at full flame. Your game driver laughs gleefully as you all squeal with anticipation and delight.
Stop Paddling
You and your canoeing partner are propelling yourself along in your panga on the Okavango Delta. It is late afternoon and a glorious day. The guide in the panga ahead of you has just snapped off a papyrus frond and made it into a necklace. He hands it to your 9-year-old daughter as she glides by him in her canoe powered by her and her cousin, and she slips it over her head. (that dried necklace hangs from her bathroom mirror still…). It is my sister’s birthday, and she is letting her husband paddle so she can enjoy the glass of champagne she is drinking. She has a really dopey grin on her face. It gets worse. We round a bend in the river and there on the bank ahead of us is a full-tilt birthday spread, complete with sparklers aglow atop a birthday cake. It’s a jaw-dropper even if we’ve already had several spectacular sundowners this trip. We slip onto the sandy bank, are helped from our tipsy panga canoes, and proceed to sundown. This particular sundowner is completed with an impromptu baseball game: coconut game ball and palm frond bats. Baboons in the surrounding date palm trees scream in delight at our antics.
As you can tell, there are many variations on the perfect sundowner. Insert your own interpretation here. I could go on but it is not good for my work schedule: my thoughts keep returning to the next trip I should plan to Africa.
Article by Ellyn Ludwig
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