The snacks started before dawn: A pair of cookies tucked onto a tray of coffee delivered to my tent. Eyes barely open, I picked one up and inspected it—shortbread, the really good kind that leaves a faint trace of butter on your fingertips. Better not, I thought, before taking a bite and returning the half-eaten cookie to its tray.
There’s no shortage of food on safari. There would, after all, be snacks on the morning game drive. And then back at camp there would be a hearty breakfast, followed by more snacks in my tent, and then lunch, followed by scones with clotted cream at high tea, then an afternoon game drive with, of course, sundowner gin and tonics paired with shreds of biltong and heaps of spiced nuts before, naturally, dinner.
I’ve spent enough time on safari to know that the bush routine involves a lot of sitting and eating and eating and sitting, but the 5:30 a.m. shortbread took me by surprise. Well, maybe surprise isn’t the right word—at a five-star establishment like Natural Selection’s Jack’s Camp, I would expect no detail to go unnoticed, so of course a coffee wake-up call would include a little something to nibble on.
What set this safari apart, however, was that it was my first long-haul trip since embarking on a serious body composition journey—my nutrition coach doesn’t like the term “weight loss”—and after four months of revolutionizing the ways I eat and work out, I am, for the first time in my adult life, finding real success at achieving my fitness goals. Things are fitting better, energy is at an all-time high, the muscles are muscling and, if I can stay the course, there might—might—be abs in the near future. This was also the first trip where my anxiety was so bad that I had a hard time getting on the plane.
I’ve never been immune to pre-trip jitters. What if I leave a faucet running before I leave the house? How quickly could I fly home in case of a family emergency? But the build-up to Botswana was like nothing I had ever experienced. I woke up intermittently in the middle of the nights leading up to my departure, I went stricter on my diet and worked out harder, and found myself unable to get any meaningful work done. Safari is one of my favorite things to do in the whole world, but my anxiety about leaving behind my newfound routine was diminishing what should have been genuine excitement.
