After talking with Hannes on the phone a week or so back, I was confident in my choice of outfitters.  Everything was falling into place, and after all these years of dreaming about Africa it was time to book the hunt and send out the deposit check. 

I spent hours looking over the rates that Hannes had quoted me.  During our conversation we had settled on a length of eight days for the hunt.  I was initially looking at seven days, but Hannes had convinced me that adding just one extra day would give us more than enough time to find the animals that I was after.

He quoted me a price of $325 per day as my base rate, which covered everything except the trophy fees.  In Africa, "everything" means food, camp, drinks, laundry, and the services of the hunter, trackers, skinners, and the rest of the camp support staff.  For eight days, I'd be paying a total of $2600. 

Like many African outfitters, Hannes has trophy fees for the various animals that the clients hunt.  We settled on a gemsbok for $1000, an impala for $350, a kudu for $1500, a warthog for $250, and a zebra for $1150.  All of this brought the total cost of the hunt to $6850.  Not bad, considering that a mule deer hunt I took to Montana back in 1996 cost me around $3000.

After spending a bit of time thinking about the numbers, I decided to go ahead with my initial plan of putting down $5000 a deposit on the hunt.  This would cover the full cost of my daily rates and most of my trophy fees.  I had considered paying the full amount up front, but then I realized that I might not get at least one or two of the animals on my list, or I might decide to shoot something different once I saw some of the African animals in the wild.  No, $5000 would be just the right amount to send.  With no big hurry necessary on mailing out the check, I waited around until March 2 to send it.

There's not much more to tell.  I wrote the check, made a copy of it for my records, and mailed it off to Hannes.  Shortly thereafter I received a confirmation note from him, as well as the gift of a beautiful shot placement guide for African game animals. 

Thinking forward, I realized that the next step would be the point of no return.  Once I got my flights booked and paid for, with most of the cost of the hunt already out of the way there wouldn't be much that could keep me out of Africa.  Even an unexpected bump in my career path would have little effect on the trip with most of it being paid for in advance.

With that in mind, I started contacting travel agents who specialized in getting hunters to their destinations.  Unfortunately, I was told that I was a bit early on this piece of the puzzle, and that I wouldn't need to worry about booking my flights until about September of this year.

And so began a long stretch of inactivity as far as the safari was concerned.  I continued to do some hiking over at King's Mountain, but as deer season approached I decided to take a break from the walks and get back to them in January of 2007.   For now, the only thing to do was sit back and wait.