Dream Trip 2009

Great Travel Moment

An elephant in the distance, cranes perched in an acacia tree: this is what I always imagined. When I was 5 years old, I fell in love with Africa thanks to Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street. They traveled through an unnamed jungle: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Ernie asked everyone they encountered along the way. I thought this was very funny. But my mother explained that Dr. Livingstone had been a real person and the jungle Bert and Ernie were traversing was somewhere in Africa. That was it. I wanted to go. My mother brought me books from the library. I pored over the photos and maps, unable to read the dense paragraphs of writing, and dreamed of going there. When I finally made it to Tanzania 25 years later, this image from Ngorongoro Crater was exactly what I had pictured all those years ago. It was the Africa I dreamed of as a child, a dream literally come true. The child in me is still giddy, especially when I remember my first sight of that elephant in the distance.