The question carries an assumption: flights, Africa, long stays abroad — this must require wealth, luck, inheritance, some invisible cushion.

The truth is less cinematic.

I am not traveling as a consumer. I am relocating into systems.

There is a fundamental anthropological difference between tourism and immersion. Tourism compresses experience. It is engineered density — curated hotels, organized transport, scheduled wildlife sightings, restaurant reservations, and departure dates fixed in advance. It maximizes stimulation per day. It is efficient, often luxurious, and usually expensive.

This is not a moral critique on any tourist. It is simply a structural distinction. One approach is designed for comfort and concentration of experience; the other more closely resembles fieldwork — slower, less insulated, sometimes inconvenient, and often requiring trade-offs that are invisible from the outside.

Immersion stretches time.

Instead of sampling a place, you submit to it. You rent where residents rent. You shop where they shop. You learn which grocery stores carry decent produce and which days the eggs arrive. You figure out traffic rhythms rather than cursing them. You adjust to the voltage fluctuations. You wait for water pressure. You cook. You walk. You return.

You become predictable.

Behavioral economics calls this reference dependence: we evaluate comfort relative to prior conditions. The brain does not measure absolute luxury; it measures contrast. After years living across Southeast Asia, India, Nepal, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa, my baseline recalibrated.

I typically sit beside women washing laundry in plastic buckets, communicating (to me) through gesture and shared laughter. I feel good when they approve of my methods as if they expected I wouldn’t know. Their hands moving with speed and confidence — muscle memory built over years. Asian hands, Eastern European hands, African hands… They are not much different. Over time, my own hands changed. They stopped being careful Western hands, protected by appliances and infrastructure. They became working hands. I have also been in wealthy homes where they insist cleaning laundry this way is better and they buy washing machines only to spin the laundry AFTER they’ve done it by hand. This will forever make me smile.

Not heroic. Not performative. Just adapted.

There is a dignity in learning the mechanics of survival rather than outsourcing them.

I have walked through hospitals where supplies are sparse and triage feels intimate. I have stood in traffic systems where pedestrians are not shielded by right-of-way but by timing and eye contact. I have lived in places where electricity disappears without announcement, where WiFi collapses mid-sentence, where heat lingers and dust coats everything including my brain and temper. I have heard endless logical analyses from Westerners on this as they also smile through and ultimately feel grateful for experiencing it as we complain to ourselves trying to compare a thing we cannot compare because we will never really know, we can’t know. Yet we still prefer this reality.

When you live inside that long enough, you stop expecting insulation.

So when I say Nairobi feels “easy,” it is comparative.

It is quiet compared to cities where horns create a constant auditory assault. You can walk calmly if your body language signals belonging rather than extraction. Grocery stores are abundant and well-stocked. You can flush toilet paper. The climate is cool and dry at elevation. There are gyms, parks, café culture, reliable ride-share, and functioning public transport if you are willing to share space.

It is possible to be in the city in the morning and on the coast or near wildlife within hours. It is a regional aviation hub — an infrastructural node connecting continents.

These are not exotic observations. They are infrastructural ones.

If you stay long enough and live locally — cooking, walking, renting modestly, minimizing imported expectation — the cost structure shifts dramatically. Our ceiling budget while traveling is around $35 per night (that’s, $17.50 per person and we usually sit considerably below that) and in Nairobi, for that budget we got a safe apartment in a walkable, upscale neighborhood with a gym and pool. Not because we were wealthy. Because we were not purchasing novelty. We were absorbing routine and local living.

All of this makes me think about how perception forms — and how it shifts. I watch children playing and laughing in vastly different environments. In rural villages, play emerges from what is available — sticks become tools, tires become vehicles, open land becomes a field of imagination. In dense European cities, children move through plazas and public transport with early autonomy. In American suburbs, children navigate digital spaces with fluency and social complexity.

None of these expressions are moral statements. They are environmental adaptations.

Children everywhere become competent in the systems that surround them. Material culture, infrastructure, parental norms, and media environments shape what feels normal, safe, or possible. What one culture interprets as freedom, another may interpret as risk. What one sees as protection, another may see as limitation.

Every society calibrates childhood differently. Each produces its own strengths, anxieties, capacities, and blind spots.

What changes when you move between systems is not morality. It is perception.

Comfort becomes contextual. Complaint becomes relative. Luxury becomes infrastructural.

And time — time is the quiet differentiator.

Tourism runs on speed. Speed preserves performance. When you move quickly, you remain a category: foreigner, customer, walking currency. Interaction is front-stage — calibrated, polite, transactional. Stories are optimized. Smiles are strategic. It isn’t deception, rather it is rational adaptation to global inequality.

Time erodes performance.

Stay past the tourist half-life — a week, then two, then a month — and the tone shifts. The vendor no longer calls theatrically. The security guard nods in recognition. The neighbor’s assessment softens into familiarity.

You are no longer an event. You are part of the landscape.

Predictability lowers threat.

Lower threat allows authenticity.

The smile that comes after familiarity carries more weight than the smile that greets a wallet.

You begin to see people not as representatives of a culture but as individuals with tempers, humor, fatigue, ambition, boredom. You see how they treat each other when you are not the center of the exchange. You feel your own posture change. You stop photographing everything. You learn the cadence of traffic, the timing of markets, the informal rules of space.

The relationship shifts from extractive to reciprocal.

I am not wealthier than those who wonder how I afford this life. In many ways, I have less financial buffer than most. What I have done is reduce overhead and increase tolerance for uncertainty. I chose mobility over accumulation. Adaptation over predictability. Exposure over insulation.

This choice is not glamorous. It does not photograph as a perfect life. It is sometimes exhausting. It strains relationships. It reveals personality under stress. It can be quietly lonely.

But it is instructive.

When your reference points expand across systems — economic, infrastructural, cultural — they do not easily contract. You cannot unknow how most of the world manages water, power, illness, childhood, traffic, space.

Luxury begins to look different.

Sometimes it is silence instead of horns.
Sometimes it is steady electricity.
Sometimes it is hot water.
Sometimes it is the ability to flush toilet paper.
Sometimes it is the ease of walking unremarked.

And sometimes it is hands that can type, build, scrub, carry, and belong across environments.

That is not wealth in the conventional sense… Just adaptability.

And adaptability, in a world of accelerating instability, may be the most practical form of security there is.

All we wanted was to camp alone. Not in a “luxury solitude” kind of way—just far enough from the Dora-the-Explorer convoy of pop-top Land Cruisers where everyone gasps on cue (I’ll write another about theater safari with risk management and beige costume reality). We assumed other travelers felt the same and occasionally drifted through. Reasonable. Optimistic. Foolish.

We did, improbably, get a site. A special campsite just by randomly emailing the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). NDEPES 4.

What we did not get were directions.

Email after email. Could we have coordinates? A landmark? A sketch? Anything remotely navigational?

No.

“Just ask someone when you are in the area,” said the woman at the Ndutu gate, cool as a cat in the shade. “They will know.”

We tried the Ndutu ranger station. A group of guys gestured vaguely and said, “Go to the airstrip.” So we went to the airstrip—a neat little box of a runway with a tiny souvenir stand and fancy espresso/coffee booth. clearly designed for people who prefer their wilderness pre-sliced and flown in.

There was one office. I walked in holding our paperwork like a peace offering.

“We’re looking for special campsite NDEPES 4 that we arranged with Romanus? We’re self-driving.”

The man nodded slowly. Yes. He knew. Or maybe he knew someone who knew someone who’d heard that some crazy whites wanted a bush site in solitude—and well, money is money.

A brief exchange followed. He summoned a young guy in army fatigues and boots. More explaining. More nodding.

“Okay,” the young man said. “Come. I take you.”

We tried to explain—no, no, we have our own car.

Misunderstanding. Correction. Reset.

“Okay,” he said again. “You drive. First stop—we get gun. For safety.”

Naturally.

I gave him my passenger seat and he directed us back to that ranger station, stepped out for a few minutes, and then returned with a wood-stocked rifle slung over his shoulder.

He then directed us a short distance off-road to a clearing the size of a soccer field overlooking a dried lakebed. No fence. No sign. No neighbors. Just space. Pure, wide, indifferent space.

We offered to drive him back.

“No,” he said. “I walk.”

“Is it safe here?” we asked, half joking, half not. “You need the gun?”

“Yes, safe.” He said stoically. “I walk. Gun for safety.”

“Anyone else stay here?” We asked. “No, just you.”

That was the end of the discussion.

The first night felt almost pastoral. We gathered wood. We wandered over to a curious stone marker we initially assumed was a boundary or place-marker, only to discover it was a gravesite belonging to a man named Hugo Van Lawick (1937–2002). We quietly wondered whether he was a wealthy white man who loved the African wild enough to pay for eternity with this view, or whether he’d died here and his family chose to let his body keep living the dream he’d chased. Either way, we respected it. We cooked chicken. Sat by the fire. Slept deeply.

The next day we saw everything. Including a full-maned, full-bellied lion sleeping like he paid rent.

When we returned in the afternoon, a convoy of Land Cruisers had gathered off the road near our camp. Two lionesses—one draped in a tree, the other posted on a hill—had become the main attractions. The trucks kept inching closer. Pushing. Compressing space.

We parked and began setting up camp again in the same spot we were given.

Curious, we walked toward our ridge right over Hugo’s gravesite and realized just how close both the lioness and the convoy actually were—far closer than we’d assumed. A guide in the nearest Land Cruiser spotted us and immediately reacted as if we were reckless foreigners who’d wandered up for a closer look out of sheer ignorance. He poked his head out of his truck, outrage already loaded, and barked up at us with unmistakable anger:

“WHAT are you guys DOING there?! WHAT are you DOING?!”

His hands flew out in sharp, exaggerated gestures—palms open, arms slicing the air.

Startled, I shouted back, “This is our CAMP!”

For two reasons. One: they put us here. If it’s unsafe, that’s a conversation to have with the people who handed us the permit. Two: don’t yell at us while your trucks herd a lioness closer and closer to where we sleep.

No one came up to warn us. No ranger. No guide. No concerned authority with a clipboard and a plan.

So we made dinner—sausages and eggs. Very conscious of the scent, more concerned with not wasting food.

As if on cue, a herd of wildebeest thundered through our clearing. “Do you think they’re running from something or just for evening exercise?”

Thirty minutes later, gazelle grazed within feet of us. Two giraffes fed on trees right within our field. Zebra appeared like backup dancers sent in to reassure me that this was, in fact, still nature and not a setup. It was actually calming and quietly consecrating.

When darkness fell, we went into the tent early without a fire. It was eerie. But I slept hard for a few hours out of exhaustion.

Around midnight, Travis stepped out to pee and came back with a feeling he couldn’t shake. He stayed awake after that. Later he said it was the pattern that got to him—bursts of wild noise followed by sudden, total silence. A few times over. The kind of quiet that makes you feel like something is nearby, even if you can’t see it making every earlier detail feel suddenly loaded.

At 2:45 a.m., I woke sudden and certain to that sound.

The hyena cackle.

The laugh everyone recognizes from documentaries—the soundtrack to a Serengeti bloodbath, a sound so distorted and assured that my mind gave it a face: grinning, blood-red at the edges, like the Joker smiling because he already knew the ending—and that he had the upper hand.

My brain went into interrogation mode.

Do they cackle when they’re closing in?

Is one group downstairs making noise while others circle silently?

How much time do we have?

Travis wanted to make a run for the truck. I said absolutely not. We argued in hushed voices, the dark pressing in around us. The silence grew deep enough to feel like a mistake—until the laughter returned, sudden and unmistakable, cutting through the dark and snapping the brain back into immediacy.

Finally, I decided to pop my head out and scan with our headlamp.

Eyes reflected back at me. Less than 75 feet away. Four stationary. Two or more moving at the edges, heads cocked, watching us.

This was confirmation—expected, but still eerie.

“Yeah,” Travis said quietly, peering out. “I don’t think it’s wise to stay here. We have nothing. No signal, no weapon. If they close in, we’re fucked. Do you agree?”

I didn’t. Not fully.

“No,” I said. “The ground is far. If we fumble, we don’t know how they’ll react. Cackling could actually be to make us try and flee so they can attack.” I reasoned.

We argued again—more sharply this time. Then, in a rush of panic, I said it plainly: “This is my FIRST TIME. I don’t know the best decision. I know what I think. If I’m wrong, that would suck. But if we make it to the truck, then yes—we’re safe. IF.”

I scanned the bushes again. No eyes nearby.

Travis went first. Fast. Clean. Snagged the keys from the chest and dove into the jeep.

“Okay—come on!”

Here we go.

I’m not fast. I’m deliberate. Careful. Hyper-aware. Ready to fight, but not fast. I judged my steps—three, skip one, find footing, skip again—and half-rolled an ankle, landed hard, made it. Door slammed.

Done.

The engine turned. The headlights snapped on.

Our predators burned into view—and almost instantly, into retreat. The sound, the light, the machine collapsed the moment. Hyenas are much larger than documentaries ever prepare you for.

We stayed awake, watching for twenty minutes. Then I grabbed our blanket and phones from the tent. I took a beer from the fridge and started writing to calm my nerves.

Morning came faster than usual, particularly once safety returned and the mind began tallying how much sleep was still possible crammed in this dusty old truck.

As we drove out of Ndutu toward the Serengeti, the sun spilled gold over vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, gazelle—galloping, weaving, alive. We joked that maybe this was the full experience. Everyone survived the night. The morning wasn’t celebration so much as relief. Or momentum.

Adrenaline for nothing. Adrenaline for something.

Life trying to hold on. To avoid pain. To avoid death.

In the end, it felt like everything was afraid of everything else. All of us—animals, humans, machines—defending territory, protecting something, all just eating.

AFTER writing this, I had Travis read version 15, and he’s like, “Hey did you ever google Hugo Van Lawick?” I’m thinking, probably won’t find anything about the guy but YES I shall! Hugo Van Lawick… Ex-husband of Jane Goodall, that explains a lot…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_van_Lawick

Subscribe now

Subscribe now