The Trip Two Old Friends Kept Promising Each Other for Thirty Years

Thembi and I made the promise in 1994, in a tiny flat with a leaking geyser, over a bottle of cheap wine we could barely afford, both of us convinced our real lives were about to begin. One day, we said, when there is money and time, we will go somewhere wild together. It took us thirty years to keep that promise.

Two lives that filled up

Life, as it does, filled up the space where the trip was supposed to go. Thembi married a good man and raised three children and then, for the last eight years, nursed her mother through a long illness with a patience I do not think I possess. I went the other way, no children, a career I poured myself into, and then a decade caring for my father after his stroke, learning how to lift a grown man and how to be cheerful at three in the morning.

We stayed friends through all of it, the way you do with the people who knew you before you became whoever you are now. Birthday phone calls. The occasional coffee snatched between obligations. And always, at the end, the same tired joke. One day, hey. One day we will actually go. Neither of us believed it anymore. It had become a thing we said the way you touch a lucky charm, not because it works but because stopping feels like giving up.

Then, within the same year, her mother passed away and my father passed away, six months apart. We were both suddenly, shockingly free, and both far too exhausted to feel it. At the second funeral Thembi took my hand and said, very quietly, We are the ones left now. If we do not go, nobody is going to make us. And that was that.

Planning it properly for once in our lives

Here is the thing about two women who have spent their whole adult lives looking after other people. We are catastrophically bad at looking after ourselves. Left to our own devices we would have booked the cheapest possible flights, felt guilty about the expense, and half-ruined the trip with worry.

So we made a decision that felt almost rebellious. We were going to do this properly, one time, without cutting corners out of a guilt that no longer had anyone to serve. We wanted two things that seemed like opposites. Thembi wanted the wild, the real Africa she had grown up hearing about but never seen. I wanted to lie on a beach and not move for a week, to feel warm sand instead of hospital linoleum. We had spent thirty years being sensible and self-denying, and we were, for once, going to have both.

We found a company that put the whole thing together for us, a proper Botswana safari followed by a stretch of coast, so that we did not have to become experts in border crossings and transfers at our age. That mattered more than I expected. Neither of us wanted to spend our long-awaited freedom stressing over logistics. We wanted to arrive, and be looked after for a change.

The first night in the delta

I will never forget the first evening. We flew in on a tiny plane that banked over water threaded through the land like silver ribbons, and Thembi, who is afraid of flying, forgot to be afraid because she was pressed against the window with her mouth open.

Our Botswana safari lodge sat on the edge of the water, all raised wooden walkways and canvas and lamplight, and that first night we sat on the deck with a glass of wine, thirty years after the flat with the leaking geyser, and neither of us could speak for a while. The sounds came up out of the dark, the deep cough of a hippo, something calling far off, the enormous living silence underneath it all. Thembi started to cry, and then I did, and we were not entirely sure whether it was for our parents, or for the thirty lost years, or simply because we were finally, actually there.

The days that followed unspooled slowly. We watched a leopard drape itself over a branch in the last gold light. We sat while a family of elephants drank a few metres from the vehicle, close enough to hear them breathe. One morning we came upon wild dogs, which our guide told us was a rare thing to see, and I watched my exhausted, grieving friend laugh with pure childlike delight in a way I had not seen since we were young. That laugh alone was worth every rand.

When the bush let us go and the sea took over

After the delta we flew to the coast, and this is where the trip did the thing I had secretly needed most. The Mozambique beach resorts we ended up at were nothing like the frantic package places I had feared. Ours was quiet, low and white against the water, the kind of place where the loudest sound is the sea and the occasional creak of a dhow.

For the first three days I genuinely did not do anything. I want to be honest about that, because I had spent a decade unable to sit still without a guilty conscience. Here, finally, I let go of it. I lay under a palm and read half a novel and fell asleep and woke up and did not feel like a bad person for it. Thembi swam every morning at dawn, further out each day, and I would watch her from the sand, this woman who had spent eight years inside a sickroom, moving through clear warm water like she was being given her body back.

We talked more in that week than we had in years. Not the snatched-coffee talk of busy lives, but the long, meandering, unhurried talk we used to have at twenty-five, when we had time. We talked about our parents, and forgave them a few things, and forgave ourselves a few more. We planned foolish futures. We were, for a week, entirely ourselves.

What the trip actually gave us

People ask me about the animals, and I tell them about the leopard and the wild dogs, and their eyes light up. But the animals, magnificent as they were, are not really what I brought home.

What I brought home was the knowledge that the promises we make when we are young are not automatically lies just because they take thirty years to keep. We very nearly did not go. We very nearly let one day quietly become never, the way most people do. And if we had, we would have carried that small unkept promise to our own graves, one more thing that life filled up and squeezed out.

Thembi phoned me last week. We are already, absurdly, talking about the next one. Neither of us fully believes it will happen, and both of us know now that believing was never the point. The point is to actually go, while you still can, with the person who knew you before your life filled up. We waited thirty years and almost missed it. Do not wait as long as we did.