Reservations

When it comes to making last-moment reservations, Jenny is a miracle worker. My form of luck involves finding street parking in crowded neighborhoods. Hers comes in arranging the best lodging available, regardless of how long it's been "sold out." She says it's because she retains skills from her days as a travel agent, I say it's something completely different: karma. Juujuu, mojo, luck, it's practically preternatural. 

Christmas is the busy time at Kruger National Park, when people book a year in advance to stay in the camps there. Not only did Jenny arrange lodging over Christmas, she got the range she wanted, luxurious to simple, and she did it two weeks before Christmas, one week before she wanted to depart. And she did it for four people.

Not including us, I'm sorry to say.

We were quite at home in the poor house, thank you very much, having travelled the previous Christmas in So Africa and the one before that in Switzerland, both times with Jenny and her spouse, Charles. 

Art and I can't say enough about traveling with Jenny and Charles; they're as generous, thoughtful and amusing as any traveling companions we could desire. Charles sure took the work out of Switzerland, speaking fluent Swiss-German as he does. The traveling is easy, but at the end of each day, we end up in the most charming place you can imagine, thanks to Jenny's magic.

I could tell you how we marched, roomless, into Zermatt, Switzerland--knowing full well that Zermatt was fully booked at Christmas--but Jenny had a theory, one that worked. And so, next morning, we left well rested and full of breakfast fit for mountaineers. The real joy came in the surprise that our cozy rooms, in a town where there was no room, overlooked the Matterhorn on a crystal clear evening and a brilliant morning.

But this is about Africa, not Switzerland.

Magically populated by the charming terra cotta people and creatures pulled from a local Venda woman's imagination, Lesheba is a desolate mountain resort way up the narrow track of a red clay road in the Soutpansberg mountains of South Africa. The artist, now world-famous, is Noira Mabasa and sculpting is her game. She sculpts giant cows, tiny lizards, old men, pregnant women, snakes and rhinos, giraffes and mythical critters, whatever, and drops them, an unseen god, into their surroundings. I've been lucky to stay in her marvelous Venda Village twice, thanks to Jenny's magic.

If you book the Venda Village, a tidy cluster of nine huts guarded by Mabasa's statues, you get the entire place to yourself. That's what makes it so magic: the solitude. How is it that Jenny booked us there at Christmas, two separate years?

I don't know, but I'm not asking.