This is the first in a series of travel columns by journalist, author and broadcaster Dale Goldhawk. Dale hosts Goldhawk Fights Back For You, on AM 740 or at AM740 ZoomerRadio, Monday through Friday from 11 am to 1 pm, in the eastern time zone. Visit his website at www.goldhawk.com.

Getting there by air was not half the fun. We flew eight hours east to Amsterdam. Then another eight hours south east to Nairobi. We stiff-upper-lipped it for more than 12,500 kilometres of mind-numbing, butt-numbing travel in steerage class — more euphemistically known to airlines as economy.

No matter. Once on the ground in Nairobi, we got ready for the mission — our 4,000-kilometre safari, by road or maybe little or no road at all, through the mountains, savanna and bush of Kenya and Tanzania.

My wife Jill and I have had many road adventures over the last 30 years. We were, as usual, ready for anything.

David Nganga, our guide and driver from Kenya Wildlife Trails, picked us up early. We headed out of the crushing, grinding gridlock of Nairobi, into the bush, where roads are more of a theory or an aspiration than a reality. We were headed for Samburu country, 350 kilometres away. It took us six hours to get there.

As we got deeper into the bush, bouncing along in our safari wagon, hoping our back teeth would not jar loose, we were eager to see and experience the wildlife.

Our first sighting was a pair of dik-diks. It was a small beginning. Dik-diks are delicate, miniature antelope. Full-grown, they’re only a foot and a half high and weigh 15 pounds. They mate for life and they run to hang onto that life as long as they can.

An old African proverb defines survival: The gazelle wakes up in the morning and knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will die. The lion wakes up in the morning and knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will die, too. What almost all of the animals know for sure: when the sun comes up, you better start running.

Only one animal can ignore that rule — the African elephant. It’s the largest land animal on earth, roaming wherever it wants on a continent that’s home to the largest collection of animals on the planet.

It was our second or maybe third animal sighting in east Africa. There they were — a long line of female and young elephants, more than a dozen of them following the green strip of land along a small, muddy river. They lumbered along at a steady pace, some of the mothers pushing their offspring to keep up to the herd where there was protection. Adult elephants, about 13 feet high at maturity, may not have any enemies but the young elephants can be taken by a pride of lions.