I am open-minded about the location.
I am fortunate that I have been able to travel fairly extensively in my almost, soon to be, 53 years ( as of the 25th February) .
I have had a life-long interest in Natural History.
in the last 7 years I have had a marked depreciation in my mobility. An old footballing injury, from when I was 18, an undergraduate at Cambridge University and someone took out my kneecap, rather than the ball, rupturing my left cruciate ligament.
This will limit, physically, the kind of trips which I can now undertake, so, sadly, no longer, for example, will I be able to trek through extensive rainforest, in Borneo , Sri Lanka , or Costa Rica, or Australia as I have in the past.
I think my current knee injury means that now I am most likely best suited to trips, if overseas, which involve me being driven around, with short - short / medium walks , which are not on too uneven a terrain or with steep inclines up or down.
I love Africa and would be most interested to explore further. I visited South Africa in 2007, visiting parks in The Kruger, St Lucia area and Swaziland. Last year I visited Botswana. In 2010 The Gambia. I would be very interested in visiting most parts of Africa, including Tanzania, Ethiopia, Namibia, South Africa, again, including for its rarer mammals
I also enjoyed India last year and would be interested in re-visiting India - perhaps Bhangarvardh, Chambal, Bharatpur and Satpura.
I am a friendly, welcoming and flexible person.
I have recently become a Joint Volunteer Bird Warden for Bristol water and am hoping to inspire and enthuse others with my love of Natural History.
I don't wish to be too preclusive about locations, as I genuinely have an open mind. Although I could travel alone, I would far rather be in the company of like -minded fellow travellers. I appreciate that my travelling companions will need to be happy with the restrictions which my knee injury places on me.
I hope that helps, but please feel free to ask me any questions you wish and I look forward to any suggestions which anyone might have.
Thanking you, in advance, for your kind consideration and help.
Kind regards
Carol
Hello Carol,
I have just come across this thread, and will comment on two topics - your travel possibilities and your injury.
1 (Travel) My wife and I first visited Africa about ten years ago. We went with a small (6 or 8 people) tour group from the country we live in (Japan). A few of the people were singles, but as a small group you get to know the others, so you are not alone. Because of lions and suchlike, very little walking was involved.
We did this three times in different places with the same company, and enjoyed all the trips. However, there were two problems. The first was that, although several people had visited Africa multiple times, they mainly wanted to see Lions, Elephants, Zebra, and so on, again and again, so they had little patience with me wanting to stop for birds (although I still got 140 secies on that first seven-day trip). The second problem was that in such a small group, it only takes one weirdo to spoil the trip for the rest. We were lucky on our first trip, OK on the second, but unlucky on the third.
So then I started booking trips with African companies we found on the internet, negotiating the itinerary and prices of accomodation. A driver/guide (not a specialist bird guide) and a van for just the two of us cost the same as or less than the group tour, and we could ask the guide to stop any time we wanted. We have been lucky - only once have we had an experience which could have been disastrous (in terms of interest, not physically dangerous), although it worked out OK.
But without your own travelling companion, such trips would be a bit boring I think.
Last year, we did a trip to Botswana booking through a South African company called Sun Safaris (apart from this trip, and that we hope to use them again next year, we have no connection, of course).
https://www.sunsafaris.com/
This company is a travel agent, and the tour they booked for us after negotiation about the locations and prices (we had been to the general area before, so wanted a bit of 'newness'), used camps run by Kwando Safaris (which seems not to have its own booking system, but to rely on travel agents).
https://www.kwando.co.bw/
The way this relates to your post is that each itinerary is personalised, and you move between the camps in light aircraft depending on your personal choices. But at each camp - where there are only about a dozen people in total - you have your own guide who will be responsible for up to four or five people. But because each pair's or family's itinerary is different the partners in your (open-side) vehicle will be different every day or two. So even if you have a group member you don't like (or who doesn't like you - as my wife likes to remind me, sometimes it's not 'them' it might be 'you'), they will be gone in a day or two. Obviously it's a bit more expensive as a single, but you might be able to find a travelling partner somehow. Anyway, you could always talk to someone at the travel agency.
The guides at the Kwando camps were phenomenally well trained and informed, and the staff also.
As you can hear, we thoroughly enjoyed our time here, and hope to do the other camps of this company on another trip.
We did a similar thing in Borneo, Malaysia a few years ago (groups with membership changing on a daily basis). We used this company.
https://www.borneoecotours.com/
However, to get the best out of these tours, there is a fair amount of walking, so perhaps not for you.
But I think you could find tours like this (changing group membership) to places you want to go, and if you have the money, but not friends to travel with, this might be one way to go. For example, even if you find a companion on Bird Forum or some other reputable site, you can't be sure that person will be similarly reputable, or that you will get on even if you are both 'nice' otherwise. But in the situation I am suggesting, you have a whole company looking after you, and you can switch partners and itineraries in mid-course if it were really necessary.
2 (Sports Injuries) I'm ten years older than you, but like you I have sports injuries from early times - in my case my sporting career ended just before university. My two major injuries are related to yours. One was a split menicsus on one knee and the other was a severely stressed ligament on one thumb.
In those days, for the knee, the doctors said (if I remember correctly) that they could remove the entire kneecap, but recommended that I didn't do this. They said that it wouldn't be too bad at first, but that by forty I probably wouldn't be able to bend my leg. So, I did nothing, but gave up sport mostly.
For the ligament, they said grin and bear it. In those early days, if I pressed a bell with my thumb it would sometimes rotate what felt like 360º.
Anyway as life went on, both became worse. In the early years, my knee would lock a few times a year, which took an hour of shaking to release. My thumb became increasingly painful especially as I used it a lot writing on blackboards and on paper.
It was my thumb ligament which went first. One day when I was taking off a sweater, it snapped completely. I could move my thumb 90º across the back of my hand after that, but that was about all I could do with it (a fun party trick, but a useless thumb). But medicine had changed over thirty-something years, and a brilliant doctor removed part of a ligament in my arm and transplanted it into the thumb (there are also artificial versions of this process), and it's now 90% of what it used to be.
The knee lasted (kind of) until I was 60, but suddenly started locking five or ten times a day, so I couldn't even go out with confidence that I could move freely. Again medicine had changed. Keyhole surgery allowed my brilliant doctor to trim off the torn part of the meniscus and suck it out of my knee with no scar, and only a local anaesthetic. And a few days later, it was fine and is perfect three years later.
So, here my point is that you maybe could get something done with modern medicine which could get you walking freely again. After all, 53 isn't old, and although a ligament operation will take a few months or a year to get you back to normal, it would be worth it.
The Japanese medical system has some disadvantages over the NHS, but also some advantages. One of the advantages is that we can use our ordinary (public) insurance but shop around for a doctor who specialises in the treatment you need (the insurance fixes the price paid by the government for any treatment, so it doesn't matter to them which doctor you use).
So with my wife's help and advice I found a hand surgery specialist with an international reputation for the ligament surgery, and a knee specialist with a national reputation for the knee.
Anyway, I advise you to do some research on what is possible for your condition these days.
