What's it all about then?

I guess you should always start at the beginning, so that's what I'll do here.  Set the scene, so to speak.

Rachel (Mrs W) and I are urban born and bred.  Both brought up in the Midlands (UK) and now both working in the City of London.  Good educations, good jobs, nice home, no children.......but life was a bit routine.  We have 1 or 2 holidays a year, most recently to Africa for safaris, but this didn't so much relieve the routine as exagerated the feeling that there must be more to live than the daily 9-5 grind and the odd holiday.

A couple of years ago we set the old grey cells working, thinking about what we could change; we thought of the obvious like new car (I had my eye on a Porsche!), move house (maybe a swanky City apartment) or travel.  Well, the first 2 are nice ideas but what do they really change?  Yes I'd have a flash car, or we'd be in the swanky part of town, but the 9-5 grind would still be there.  There would be no fundamental change.

It then became clear that what we love is travelling.  We live for our holidays.  So travelling it would be.

At that time Rachel was still working on her MBA so the timing was not right.  This was OK though as we had some serious thinking to do; where should we go, how long for etc.  We bought the usual type of books aimed at gap years away, bought travel mags, went to travel shows, used everyone's friend Google and about 18 months ago decided on the tried and tested 'around the world' trip.

We were happy - we'd agreed on a basic plan, it was the detail now to consider.  We'd obviously thought about the 'normal' backpackers sites to visit (Thailand, Laos etc etc) but then moved on to what we'd really like to see.  This took us to Indonesia for komodo dragons, China for pandas, Brazil for Jaguar .. the list was getting endless.  We then stood back and thought - what we're really interested in is animals and wildlife, as much as the travel itself.  So how could we build this new bright spark of realisation into our gap year?

I’m a avid reader and around this time I picked up a book by Peter Allison (Whatever you do .. don’t run); Peter is an Oz chap who went to Africa in search of adventure, and fell into safari guiding in Botswana. This got us thinking – could anyone do this?  A search on Google confirmed that yes, there were courses running where you could train to be a safari guide.

Wow – this is what we wanted to do with our year off.  None of that traipsing from one tourist commune to the next, and following the well trodden path of the gap year, but to d something that we REALLY wanted to do.  The seeds were sown, now to see what grows!