Plan, Prepare, Beware — How This Celiac-Veganish Pescatarian Travels

Sunset on the Okavango delta which has nothing to do with celiac but I love this photo

I find when I travel or even when I’m planning a trip, people are curious as to how I manage as a veganish-pescatarian celiac. Actually, folks seem particularly interested in how I manage celiac since gluten – wheat, oats, barley, and rye are in foods everywhere.
When I was first diagnosed with celiac, I thought my traveling days were over. How could I travel, eat, enjoy myself, and not end up sick? Turned out, I found ways. When two years ago for health reasons, I embraced a veganish-pescatarian diet (in addition to the gluten free diet), I knew traveling and eating and staying well would be tough. The vegan part of my diet complicates travel because much of the world consumes lots of dairy in the forms of cheese, cream, and milk.
How have I managed?
By planning, preparing, and being super aware.
On our recent trip to Africa, we visited South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. We booked this trip through Africa-Adventure Company (www.africaadventure.com) so much of the food worries were handled by them. The company not only booked the trip but alerted every hotel and safari camp regarding my dietary needs. The chef at the Residence in Johannesburg was ready for me with gluten free bread and crackers and wonderful food.

Grilled salmon on a puree of beetroot. Delicious and safe.

At Ngala safari camp in SA, a place known for excellent service and extraordinarily large food portions, the chef and management staff met with me, reviewed my food preferences (no dairy, meat, or gluten and fish only, lots of vegetables) and set about delivering delicious meals, complete with freshly baked gluten free breakfast rolls. While I stayed at the camp, the chef prepared all the soups without dairy. He made the creamy, yummy dairy-free pumpkin soup pictured below and everyone at camp benefited from my diet. I experienced the same attention to detail and care with food at Kanana in Botswana.

Healthy, dairy-free pumpkin soup at Ngala

A dinner of vegetables, rice, and grilled fish in Botswana

But beware — when traveling and always!

With that said and with all that went so right, I’m a vigilant traveler where food is concerned. For example, on our American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to London, I’d ordered gluten free meals. One meal arrived clearly labeled GF and included a roll packaged in plastic with the ingredients listed. First ingredient — wheat!
This doesn’t just occur on AA. A gluten free vegan meal on Virgin Atlantic was covered in cheese while another came with a cookie made with wheat flour. I travel with vigilance and strong reading glasses for decoding the tiny print on food packages because I’m concerned about hidden gluten, even if the airlines are not.
While my food concerns on the Africa trip were mainly handled by others that isn’t always the case when I travel. Frequently, R and I do lots of research using
excellent gluten free travel sites that make traveling with celiac so much easier. My favorite is glutenfreetravelblog on typepad (www.glutenfreetravelblog). The site offers reviews of restaurants, travel locales, and a link to Gluten Free Travel-US (glutenfreetravel-us.com) a travel agency focused on helping those with dietary restrictions enjoy travel.

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

Traveling is challenging for anyone with dietary restrictions but is doable and so worth the extra effort.

 

At Safari Camps, Things That Go Bump in the Night Could Eat You

Leopards belong in trees and not roaming through safari camps, hunting.

I’m not a complete scaredy cat. At certain times in my life, I’ve acted bravely. But when wild animals are involved, I’m far from brave.

Safari camps operate with a few rules and two of them are for safety — no leaving your tented cabin before day light, no walking around unescorted after sunset — because wild animals could be anywhere and they could mistake you for dinner. These are good rules.

Around midnight on our first night at the South African camp Ngala, we heard terrifying growls, grunts, and loud moanings. Up we jumped, frightened from sleep, R springing toward our tent’s latched door, which was covered with heavy canvas blinds.

“Don’t. Don’t open the blinds. We don’t want them to know we are alive,” I screamed.
I tend toward the irrational when I think something might eat me.

I retreated to bed where I laid corpse-like, figuring only hyenas and other scavengers would eat something presumably dead. I reminded myself that hippos, leopards, lions lack the dexterity to unlatch a door as well as the necessary fingers and hands required for the task.

The groaning, grunting, moaning, and growling continued for about 30 minutes and then suddenly stopped, replaced by more typical early morning camp sounds like birds chirping and small animals foraging.

At the 6:15 am game drive, our ranger Jason told us that a leopard wandered through the camp overnight. The racket we heard was a combination of leopard calls and the baboon alarm system, distress sounds alerting animals that a predator was actively hunting.
The next night, the baboon alarm system was triggered by a hungry lion strolling through camp. One of our land cruiser mates, a young woman from London, terrified by the early morning animal raucous outside her tent considered locking herself in the bathroom, the only room with “proper walls” as she said, a kind of safe room against animal attack. I think she was on to something.

This big kitty wouldn’t be so tired if he wasn’t up all night stalking prey in the safari camp

Animals at the Botswana Kanana camp, not to be outdone by their relatives to the south, put on an equally loud and terrifying middle of the night performance. At Kanana, the enormous, grumpy hippos were most disruptive at night. All tented cabins face the Okavango Delta where the hippos submerge themselves during the day, resting, sleeping, goofing around and at night, the behemoths lumber to shore seeking tasty vegetation. Outside our cabin each night we heard the rustling of leaves, crunching of earth, heavy footsteps, the huffs, grunts, and low guttural sounds of hippos.

Hippo goofing off in Botswana

One night, a hippo, who we all know kill more humans than any other animal, lingered outside our tent’s wall, apparently lazily chewing leaves and grass. He rummaged around outside so long that I thought he was contemplating entering our cabin.

As I laid in bed, frozen, listening to his sounds, I reminded myself that hippos can’t really climb the four steps to our tent’s door and even if he could master that task, he lacks hands with fingers that would allow him to unlatch the door. I finally drifted back to sleep, refusing to consider that the hippo could simply plow through the door if he wanted.

Mama hippo looks kinda cute and harmless, especially with her baby

The next morning as we walked to breakfast, we and all the other guests, discovered that a hippo stepped on the wooden walk way (intended for humans) breaking the walk in several places. A maintenance worker replacing the crushed slats smiled at us and said “Hippos.” Yes, I thought, hippos and apparently they can step up. But they still don’t have hands.

Africa is Magical; Africa is far

Captain Steve, South African bush pilot and his scary little plane.

Africa is a magical, far-away place that takes focused effort and a fair amount of money to visit. With that in mind, I’ve decided I’ll write several shortish posts about aspects of our recent experiences.

As I’ve established, Africa is far from the states.
It is possible to fly direct to Africa from the US east coast. Such a flight takes 16 hours, but because we live on the west coast, we’d first need to fly east, adding more hours to the flight. Instead, we chose to fly to London, stay a couple of nights, and then fly over night to Johannesburg.

Here are some of our trip stats —

14 flights

3 Overnight flights
1 daytime overseas flight
3 small plane (9 seater or less) flights
6 region jet flights, 1 long US flight

Four countries in Africa — Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Botswana (plus UK & Ireland)

21 days of malarone, anti-malaria medicine
10 days of cipro (for me) to kill off whatever flu-type ailment I’d contracted
16 safari outings, including two on water
Five different guides
and more drivers/shuttles than either one of us could count.

With that said, I’m not a fan of flying, though over the last five years I’ve taken lots of long haul flights. In the air, my mind busily calculates all the various things that could go wrong at any given moment. Knowing this, R and I never really discussed how many flights the Africa trip included. He allowed me the comforting delusion that we were being driven from some places even though he knew we were flying on small planes. We’ve been married a long time and the man understands me.

The first small plane flight on a four seater, counting the pilot’s seat, was the worst, as we flew from Ngala’s airstrip to Kruger International Airport.
My sweaty, sticky right hand was stiffly glued to the airplane seat while my sweaty left hand was death-grip locked with R’s right hand. He knew his job was to steady me through a much unwanted though necessary flight on the four seater. It was a long 30 minute flight.

Captain Steve, our confident bush pilot, cheerily told us we were his first flight of the day that included a total of 12 flights. I thought to myself, “At least he isn’t tired.”

During most of the flight, I used meditative breathing to calm myself, breathing in through my nose and exhaling through my mouth.
In brief moments of brave curiosity when I forced my eyes open to glance out the window at the scenery below, I’d catch Captain Steve looking out the window or fiddling with the controls, leading me to wonder why he wasn’t paying closer attention to air traffic (there wasn’t any) before I’d tighten my eyes, wipe the sweat off my hands, and return to rhythmic breathing.

14 flights — that’s a lot of breathing.

The much larger nine-seater bush plane. Flights on this one were longer. And I opened my eyes long enough to see elephants and other animals on the ground.