Last month I spent two intense weeks in Tanzania, Africa. Together with my husband and 20 others, I visited a variety of schools, a hospital and church, tribes of ancient heritage, and experienced the breathtakingly raw splendor of Safaris in the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. I will dedicate several future posts to each of these experiences for the mark they made on me, but this post is dedicated to the woman I met on the plane leaving Kilimanjaro to journey home. The Universe placed me next to Aadje Geertsema on that 8+ hour, overnight KLM flight and I can’t get her out of my head.

Aadje, born in Holland, has lived in Tanzania for forty-plus years as the owner of Ndutu, a Safari Lodge located at the heart of the Serengeti plain and the head of Oldapai Gorge, (a place our group visited). I relished the opportunity to talk with Aadje about the Africa of “then,” imaging thousands more beasts on a more unfettered plain. She affirmed what I thought and spoke of the magnificence.

In fact, she told me how, as a young woman in Tanzania, she made a super-8 film of the elusive Serval cats who lived on the floor of the crater. She said that for weeks she did not see another human with exception of an old Maasai man who brought her bush meat occasionally because he thought she might starve.(She didn’t eat it.)  Imagine – just one other human on that massive space that is now traversed by 200+ Safari vehicles a day. Yes, how magnificent it must have been.

Aadje’s film, set to a Pink Floyd tune, got her funding to do the first research on Servals, which sent her back to the crater floor for four more years, although this time with home port at Ndutu Lodge. The cats were so elusive, she did not get her first data on them for six months. Eventually, her research was published in the Netherlands Journal of Zoology in 1985. This put her on a speaking circuit in Holland that raised money for the Save the Rhino Foundation.

Aadje didn’t tell me about the published research or the speaking circuit part. This rounding out to her story I found when I searched for her on Google. I found (and bought) a book, Licensed to Guide, published in 2005, in which she is featured, and this is where I got the parts Aadje didn’t brag about. She did tell me she returned to Tanzania to buy Ndutu Lodge,  a place she couldn’t get out of her head. In fact, in the book they relay that Aadje first travelled to Tanzania as a young girl with her father, a  friend and advisor to Prince Bernhard, and the first President of the World Wildlife Fund. Here’s the line in the book that resonates so strongly with me since returning from my trip: “Africa did its familiar act of digging itself under Aadje’s skin, causing her to return and live a large portion of her life in Tanzania.”  

Now in her seventies, Aadje told me she has sold the Lodge to great partners from New Zealand – people who want her to stay on as advisor. She will spend more time in native Holland to print her wildlife photos and tend to her family’s award-winning, oft-visited garden. She told me that she knew it was time because, before at Ndutu, people would return from Safari excited about all they had seen. They would sit around the camp fire with Cheetahs pacing in the periphery, and discuss their sightings and their adventures. Today, she said, the first question people ask when they check in is, “what’s the wifi password?” As many lodges in the area, wifi at Ndutu is spotty and temporarily available to guests. Aadje relayed that today, people come back from amazing Safari adventure days, plop down with face in phone, don’t talk to one another, and when the wifi time is up, retire to bed without conversation about the splendor they got to witness that day. This is the travesty she relayed, and I realized she is right. I did my share of wifi searching in our lodges and I wonder what I missed.

My conversation with Aadje on that flight home will always be with me as a special cap to a life-changing experience. Each of us drifted off to sleep a few times through that overnight flight, but once Aadje awakened me to show me the northeast coast of Africa, the Mediterranean Sea and what might have been the lights of Cairo, and said, “Look, we are now leaving Africa.” I tear up at the poignancy of that moment. Why did she wake me to show me that?

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe I was meant to meet Aadje, for Africa has dug itself under my skin, too. I dream of it…the places we visited, the people I met. When I got home and was looking over my journal of the trip, there on a page by itself, written days before meeting Aadje:  Other Safari lodges, Ndutu.