We Nearly Skipped Africa Over the Food, and I Am So Glad We Did Not

The first time my husband suggested Africa, I said no almost before he finished the sentence. Not because I did not want to see it, I have wanted to see it my whole life, but because in my head a kosher trip that far from home meant one thing: a suitcase packed with tins, a cooler bag we would guard like a newborn, and two weeks of eating things out of packets while everyone else ate properly. We had done a version of that once, years earlier, on a trip where the kashrut planning swallowed the whole holiday, and I had quietly promised myself never again. So when the word safari came up, my brain went straight to the logistics and shut the idea down.

What I had wrong, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it, was the assumption that observance and comfort could not sit in the same trip. I thought you got one or the other. You could keep everything properly and suffer through the food, or you could travel easily and compromise. It did not occur to me that someone had built the whole thing so you did not have to choose.

What changed my mind was a conversation with another family at our shul who had actually gone. They came back not with the usual war stories about smuggling salami through customs, but talking about the animals, the landscape, the quiet. When I finally asked, warily, about the food, they laughed and told me they had eaten three proper hot meals a day, in the bush and in the cities, all of it handled. That was the first time the wall in my head cracked.

So we booked a Kosher Safari for the middle of the year, which I learned is winter down there and, counterintuitively, the best time to go. Everyone had told me summer, green and warm, but the guide explained it the other way round. In the dry winter months the grass dies back and the water dries up, so the animals gather at the few remaining waterholes and you can actually see them, out in the open, instead of hunting for a tail in a green wall. The days were mild, the evenings cold and clear, and there were barely any mosquitoes. For a first safari it turned out to be exactly the right window, and I would never have known to ask.

The part that genuinely undid my old anxiety was the catering. The operator provides three kosher le'mehadrin meals a day, prepared by a proper chef and team with a mashgiach travelling along, all under the approval of the Badatz Cape Town. I kept waiting for the catch, the moment where it quietly became a cold sandwich and an apology, and it never came. A full day out watching elephants ended not with me rationing crackers but with a real hot dinner. They have a line on their website about exploring Africa like a mensch, with no compromise, and I rolled my eyes at it before the trip and completely surrendered to it by the third day. Forgetting to worry about the food was such a foreign feeling that it took me a while to relax into it.

And it was not only the kitchen. The thing I had never dared hope for was the davening. The trip made provision for minyanim, for a proper Shabbat atmosphere, for kiddush wine, so that being far from home did not mean leaving our routine behind. Keeping a normal Shabbat in the middle of a game reserve is not something I had ever pictured, and the fact that a Kosher Tour could hold that together, the catering and the davening and the Shabbat planning all at once, was the difference between a trip that worked for us and one we simply could not have taken.

The itinerary itself was more varied than I expected. The operator runs a few tracks, and we looked at all of them. There is a Gold track that is frankly a once in a lifetime thing, with helicopter flights over Victoria Falls and elephant encounters and Table Mountain and time in the Kruger. There is a Silver track built around the Kruger and its big five together with the Cape, taking in the wine route, Table Mountain, whale watching, the African penguins, and the Cape of Good Hope. And for families who want the whole thing shaped around them there is a private track, designed from the ground up. We went somewhere in the middle, and even that moved us from the savannah of the Kruger to the coastline and mountains around Cape Town inside one organised programme, without me ever having to work out a border crossing or a transfer. The name of the company is Glatt Safaris, and what I keep telling people is that they simply took care of everything, which is a phrase I usually distrust and in this case found to be plainly true.

The accommodation surprised me too. I had braced for roughing it and instead we stayed in genuinely lovely four and five star hotels in the cities and private properties out in the bush, and the standard never really dropped between them. Everything was priced all-inclusive, so the meals and the lodging and the guiding and the transfers all sat inside one arrangement rather than a dozen separate bills I would have been anxiously adding up.

What stays with me, more than any single sighting, is a quieter thing. I had spent years believing that a certain kind of travel was simply not for people like us, that the world beyond the familiar destinations came with an asterisk we could not get around. That was not true. The obstacles I had built the whole refusal on, the kashrut, the supervision, the Shabbat, can be handled end to end when someone has made it their actual specialty. I almost let the food talk me out of the trip of a lifetime. The lesson I came home with is that I had been solving a problem that somebody had already solved, and all I had needed to do was ask.