Unbeknownst to us, it turns out that very few Westerners come to Africa without booking through a tour company. Because Jeanne and I are arranging our own travel, nobody in the hotel or tourism industry knows what to do with us. We get a lot of confused looks and bizarre behavior, and it isn’t unusual when we book a ride between locations that we have an entire tour bus to ourselves, complete with a very disappointed guide who was expecting tips from forty people, not two.
Same with restaurants, which have massive buffets geared for crowds, and when just two people show up, we get all sorts of mixed feelings from the staff. Last night we had an entire resort complex essentially to ourselves, and the staff of a hundred people were stumbling over themselves to make the massive hospitality machine work for one low-maintenance American couple.
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