Sean C. Morgan
The Garrett family slid in a last-minute vacation before lockdowns and stay-at-home orders ended international travel.
It was close. They escaped South Africa the day before that nation locked down all travel in and out of its borders.
The vacation was a South African safari hunting trip for the Sweet Home family. Chet Garrett, 14, and his brothers and sisters, Reid, 9; Lily, 8; and Zane, 11, each bagged two animals during the trip, while their parents, Shelley and Will, shot one. The animals were all similar to deer, antelope, goats and sheep.
“This is a trip that Chet has always dreamed of since kindergarten,” Shelley said. “He’s always been fascinated with African animals.”
Shelley and Will have promised their children that when each turns 14, they get to pick the family vacation.
“Chet started a business, Tombstone Traders,” Shelley said, selling truck parts on eBay. “He actually paid his way to to go to Africa. It makes it more meaningful.”
Chet paid for the whole safari, while his parents paid for the plane tickets, he said.
Will said the expedition was relatively inexpensive, even more so if there is no hunting, noting that it is comparable to the cost for a family vacation to Disneyland.
The family planned to leave on the trip on March 16, Shelley said, but by March 13, the COVID-19 coronavirus was starting to spread more rapidly.
“We thought, ‘This is Chet’s dream trip,'” Shelley said. “It wouldn’t be so good if Chet didn’t get to go.”
They contacted the airline and were able to push up their departure date to March 14.
“The whole trip, we just flew under the radar and missed everything by a day,” Shelley said. They headed for Portland and stayed overnight March 13, then flew out on March 14. After a stop in Los Angeles, they landed in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on March 15.
They had planned to stay briefly in Dubai with friends, but they learned South Africa would stop allowing inbound flights the next day. So the Garretts were able to adjust their flight and leave on the night of March 16 and reach South Africa the next morning.
“We landed in Johannesburg, one of the guys told us, ‘You’re lucky,'” Will said. South Africa had planned to close the border within 10 to 20 hours.
Shelley said it was a relief watching their passports get stamped in customs.
Arriving in South Africa, Reid said, military people came in and took the passengers’ temperatures.
That was before anyone was allowed to even unbuckle their safety belts, Will said.
They flew to Port Elizabeth and then rode two hours to Iliwa Safaris on a 30,000-acre sheep ranch in Uitenhage, which Shelley described as the middle of nowhere.
A guide picked them up at the airport, Will said. He had to stop and purchase groceries on the way back. They stopped at a Woolworth’s, but it was more like Trader Joe’s. Like the toilet paper and disinfectant shelves in the United States, all of the shelves had been wiped out.
The ranch was beautiful, Will said.
“They were amazing,” Shelley said. There was no cell service, and the family was “just blissful” while hunting.
While there, Chet bagged a steinbock and a common springbuck, which are both hard to hunt, he said. Zane shot a kudu and a common duiker. Reid harvested an impala and a springbuck. Lily got a blesbok and an impala, the first animal she ever shot. Will and Shelley bagged a springbuck.
Regulations prohibited the family from bringing the meat home, Will said. The ranch cooked some of it for the family, but the meat primarily goes to the ranch hands, and some of it goes to market.
The safari company will ship the trophies in about a year.
Will said he chose Iliwa Safaris based on how the company interacted with Chet at the annual sportsmen’s show in Portland. The Garretts attend regularly, and typically, the representatives interact little with children. Iliwa engaged with Chet.
“I just watched those people, how they talked to Chet,” Will said, and he was sold. “We got so lucky. It’s a family-operated company, and it’s beautiful.”
He strongly recommends Iliwa.
“It’s like running into the pillars of the Sweet Home community,” Will said. “If you need anything on your farm, they’ll be there to help you.”
“Most of the animals, they’re just so different to what we have here,” Will said.
They had hoped to visit the Addo National Park to see a cheetah breeding ground, Will said, but they had to cut that from the itinerary, knowing that COVID-19 would cut the trip short.
“It just means we have to go back,” Shelley said.
“I wasn’t really sure what to expect going into it,” Chet said. “But it was definitely really cool. I think the best part was seeing all the animals and seeing how they cooperate or don’t cooperate with us (while hunting).”
Chet had been looking specifically for a steinbock and a springbuck. They weren’t having much luck, but finally, they got onto a springbuck. Chet crawled on his hands and knees to get close enough to shoot it.
On the way back through a sheep field to process the meat, their guide, Francois, spotted a steinbock at the bottom of a hill. Chet ran up, trying to line up a shot, moved closer and took it down with one round.
“It was awesome,” Zane said. He especially enjoyed spekdoom, which translates to “bacon tree.”
The plant has a bitter-sour taste, Reid said.
“You guys were eating that all the time,” Will noted.
Chet explained that it typically grows in shoots on a structure, like a downed tree. The second leaf down is the one to eat.
Reid said he likes the bigger leaves because they’re the most sour.
“I really liked it,” Lily said of the trip.
“She was so excited when she shot her blesbok,” Shelley said. She wrote about it for a writing assignment at school.
It also gave her and Will a close encounter with a cobra.
The family had split up to head back. Will and Lily were still out with the guide. Will said the guide was about 20 feet away. He jumped back and started throwing rocks.
“He yelled, ‘cobra!’ to us,” Will said. “I knew there were cobras, but we’d never talked about snakes.”
Will grabbed Lily and put her on his shoulder and moved away. The guide was a little more than 5 feet tall, Will said, and he told Will the snake, a brown cape cobra, had lifted its head and was looking the guide in the eye.
“Then it went into a bush,” Lily said.
“We walked out with the guide,” Will noted.
Reid said he loved the trip as well.
“I loved like what animals I shot,” Reid said “And on his farm across the road where Chet shot his springbuck, there was about 200 springbuck in a herd. Shet, he told our guide, our tracker, how could you tell which ones are boys and girls?”
They learned that the females have different horns and stay in the herd, while the older males are kicked out of the herd.
It wasn’t just the hunting, wildlife, scenery and spekdoom that made the trip interesting. The family did some archaeological sight-seeing. After finishing lunch one day, “we went through a whole bunch of brush” up a box canyon, Zane said. “There was a cave, and there were hand drawings” from the indigenous Bushmen.
All good trips end. Or they’re supposed to. This one almost didn’t, at least not for the foreseeable future.
The Garretts cut short the originally planned trip and flew out of Port Elizabeth on March 24. By the time they had reached Johannesburg, the United Arab Emirates had shut down all flights into Dubai, stranding theirs. Delta Airlines had shut down as well.
“This is where everything turned crazy,” Shelley said.
Will said there was a church group of 400 trying to get back to the United States. He asked them for help and asked how they were getting home. One kid said they had a charter plane for 300.
Will asked how the remaining 100 were getting home. An older guy replied, “‘We have it taken care of.’ He wouldn’t bend. He just kept on walking.”
In the meantime, Will spoke with the guide, who was a 10- to 11-hour drive away. He said the family could stay at the ranch even if it took a year before they could get home.
Will’s job was the biggest worry at that point, he said. People here in Sweet Home would be worried.
He owns and operates Radiator Supply House with his brother, Ryan Garrett.
British Airways was still functioning, and Will thought he would give it a shot. The family stood in line for two hours. After reaching the desk, he learned the family could get on standby and convert tickets for $12,000; and the desk didn’t have any way to take a payment anyway.
“I’m thinking, ‘This is our last resort,'” Will said, and they were never able to get on that plane, which Will learned later was just half full.
Will had booked flights with Alaska Airlines, another business he now highly recommends, and Alaska converted tickets to British Airways overnight for $1,000. The family hunkered down in a hotel that evening.
On March 25, the Garretts had to wait until 4 p.m. before British Airways opened. They stood in a long line again for standby, and a man told Will that South Africa was closing all flights out of the country the next day.
Will talked to the manager about getting a flight out, but he wasn’t having any luck. Fortunately, the family’s guide called Will. He asked Will to let him speak to the manager. After he hung up the phone, the Garretts had their flight home.
When it came time to board, “they told us to run,” Will said. “They rushed us through. We were the last ones on the plane.”
They spent six hours at Heathrow Airport in London on a packed plane. Heathrow was deserted, and nothing was open. Will said it was 20 to 30 minutes between seeing planes take off.
“They didn’t have coffee open,” Shelley said, but Will said there was one little place with sandwiches.
The airport got busier, and within the next 3½ hours, there was nothing left on the shelves there.
“It was so surreal,” Shelley said. “Airports are very noisy. It was very quiet. Everyone was very subdued.”
There was no music or announcements.
It wasn’t quite quiet enough to hear a pin drop, Will said, but it was quiet.
Another long flight brought the family to SeaTac Airport on March 27, and they were immediately screened for COVID-19 symptoms.
“We were at the very end,” Shelley said. On the evening drive home, the freeway was empty, just trucks and a few passenger vehicles, although, Will said, based on a drive he had taken to Medford, it was already getting like that just prior to leaving on the trip.
When they arrived in Sweet Home, the Garretts entered a required 14-day quarantine.