Going to Africa is an adventure of the lifetime that LGBT travelers have been enjoying for a decade thanks to Jody Cole, owner and tour guide of Wild Rainbow African Safaris, who has unraveled Africa’s mystery, magic and complexity for her guests.
It’s been a 10 year adventure turning her love of Africa into a full-fledge safari business, but Jody’s passion has drawn her life partner, Katharine Cole, who is the safari company’s office administrator, her longtime friends and anyone who meets her into her love for Africa.
“It has been the thrill of a lifetime to help my guests experience and appreciate the magic of Africa over these last 10 years,” says Jody, 52, expressing her gratitude for the journey and the guests that have joined her during her exploration of Africa in a June 2 news release from the safari company.
In 2004, Jody launched Wild Rainbow African Safari, a boutique safari company. A year later she began taking guests to Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe to name a few of the countries she’s trekked through.
More than 300 people have followed Jody across a total of 10 East and Southern African countries in small and large groups. Her small staff of three full-time employees – Katharine Cole and herself – along with two part-time staff – has helped Jody take a total of 50 groups on safari during the past decade.
“Africa is a place that you feel in your soul,” says Jody, who is currently on safari. “I’m looking forward to many more great journeys over the next 10 years.”
(Photo: Robin Lowey)
For the Love of Africa
Girls That Roam has sat down with Jody on several occasions to talk about Africa and her experience launching Wild Rainbow African Safaris as well as spoken with some of her guests.
Jody’s love of Africa is contagious and courageous.
Anyone who has gone on safari with her or simply spoken with her about Africa catches her passion for the continent. Many of her guests echo each other about their experience going on safari with Jody, calling it, “life changing.” Like Jody, they have gotten hooked on Africa.
“I’ll go back,” says Carol Steinkamp, 57, who went on her dream trip to Uganda trekking gorillas and chimpanzees in the equatorial forest with Wild Rainbow African Safaris last year. “Once you go there you get hook.”
“The whole experience touched me in so many different ways,” says Carol, who also worked with Jody’s team to plan her extended journey to Kenya. “I had a lot of fun. I made some friends on the trip.”
The trip “went off without a hitch,” Carol says.
“Jody is such a friendly, outgoing, warm person. She’s like the living embodiment of a hug,” says Shannon Wentworth, a chief technology officer for Lesbian.com. “On the other side of that, she is a humble student of Africa. Even though she’s been dozens of times, she still celebrates its awe and wonder with an almost childlike glee.”
Shannon and Jody partnered their companies – Shannon’s now defunct Sweet and Wild Rainbow African Safaris – to offer a safari to Kenya in 2010.
“I think it was my favorite of all the Sweet trips I did,” says Shannon, who is planning on returning to Africa next year for the Kilimanjaro climb and safari with Jody. “I would not go to Africa with anyone else. It’s truly the best way to experience Africa.”
“Spending time with Jody anywhere on earth is a complete joy, but her whole being lights up in Africa,” continues Shannon. “It’s truly the best way to experience Africa. Her passion is magnetic. Her respect for Africa, its people, culture and creatures, is second to none. A safari with Jody will ignite and awaken you in ways you’ve not imagined.”
Robin Lowey, a graphic design professional and lesbian blogger at Epochalips, agrees.
“It was so great. Jody is just so knowledgeable. She made us feel so safe walking around the jungle,” says Robin, about her South African safari in 2013.
“I think she’s the premiere most knowledgeable in the business and the fact that she’s a lesbian too makes it fun for queers to go,” Robin praises Jody.
(Photo: Robin Lowey)
As an American woman guide in Africa, Jody has accomplished what few women have achieved. Not only is she a lesbian safari guide who owns her own company, but she’s earned the second highest level of certification from the Field Guides Association of Southern Africa. The association oversees and sets standards for professional guides in Africa.
“[It] takes me out of everyone else’s realm and put me in a more exclusive realm,” says Jody, who has her eyes set on obtaining the top level field guide certification next.
In 2013, Jody, who accompanies between 4 and 18 guests on each trip, for the first time she began taking a few adventurous and daring guests acting more like guides of Africa in training out on a morning walking trek and a nighttime game drive, lectures on wildlife or geology of the region, and some overnight camping in the bush for the ultimate safari experience.
“Guests get a much more profound safari experience,” says Jody about a typical safari where guests go out in the morning on a three hour game drive, return to the lodge for lunch and the afternoon off before heading back out in the evening.
On these safaris guests actually get hands-on experiences in the bush exploring and talking about everything they see.
“Sometimes we encounter game, sometimes we don’t, but it’s a very engaging and interactive experience,” says Jody.
Generally, Jody offers a mixture of traditional and hands-on safaris as well as custom crafted trips for guests ranging from $6,000 to $10,550, not including airfare.
Rainbow African Safaris
“I’m very interested in speaking to my travel colleagues,” says Jody about talking with the few other LGBT African safari travel companies about the politics of bringing LGBT travelers to Africa and into countries that are well-known to be homophobic.
Politically speaking, Africa is a complex continent with many homophobic countries, most of which Jody leads tours, where being gay is illegal. The exception is South Africa, but that country isn’t without its own problems with anti-gay violence.
Jody is very careful when she leads tours in Africa, especially with LGBT travelers, she says. She doesn’t necessarily tell her guests not to find local LGBT people, but she encourages them to exercise good judgment.
“I would say tourist, gay tourist, come to all these countries all of the time,” says Jody, who briefs her guests on local customs – such as men casually locking pinkies while walking down the street or women holding hands – and laws at the first dinner gathering. She also hasn’t had a problem with lodges accommodating gay and lesbian couples.
“I wouldn’t be walking down the streets of Kampala, Uganda holding a woman’s hand. I would never do anything like that,” says Carol, who was a “little apprehensive” before she went to Uganda. Her concerns and fears melted away once she was trekking through the jungle and when her group found the gorillas. “It was awesome. It was great.”
Tourism is an important industry in Africa, so most countries won’t mess with it, but it is a “very thin veil of protection,” Jody says.
Until recently, Jody hadn’t gotten involved in Africa’s LGBT movement. After a decade of leading LGBT guests on safari, she is now getting more involved locally in Africa’s LGBT movement.
Jody joined the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission in 2011, the same year she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in the name of anti-bullying and raised more than $14,000 in support of Equality California‘s anti-bullying initiatives.
Two years later she participated in an LGBT philanthropist tour of Africa.
As a result of Uganda’s recent anti-homosexuality law, Cole has canceled a “Great Apes Safari” for that country that had been scheduled for next June, according to her website.
(Photo: Shannon Wentworth)
Dreaming of Africa
So, how does a nice Southern girl from Alabama become a tour guide in the wilds of Africa?
It was a childhood dream that she never imagined would become a reality, much less more than a reality: her life’s passion and work.
It was 1997, broken hearted about the latest girl to have “done me wrong,” and a close friend who had knocked on deaths door several times simply asked her, “Jody, if you knew if you were going to die in a month what would your regrets be?” she says.
Frozen for a second, she sat there stumped by his question. Then, Africa, a distant land she never had been to, entered her mind.
She immediately began planning her first journey, which would be one of more than 30 of her 26 to 36-hour trips from the San Francisco Bay Area to Africa to date.
After nearly 30-years in the Bay Area, Jody moved her company to Atlanta, Georgia in 2013.
“I think that most people completely forget that it’s taken that long to get there,” once guests arrive and see the wildlife while on safari, says Jody, but it’s the experience she provides guests.
“I think that I provide an opportunity for [guests] to see things a little differently,” says Jody about what separates her from other safari companies.
For 10 years she has provided guests with her first experience of Africa.
“My experience of Africa was going with someone who was acutely interested in it,” she says about her first guide who took her into the wilds of the African bush. “He really knew what he was talking about and loved the bush, really loved the intricacies of the way things worked in life at least in the bush.”
(Photo: Courtesy of Wild Rainbow African Safaris)
She’s often joined by guides who are native to the countries she leads safaris. They work together complementing each other’s knowledge and bridge cultural divides, she says.
“Of course they know far more than I do because they live there and I don’t, but I can interpret it in a way where an American mind can understand it or look more deeply into it from a place of familiarity from their own experience at home,” says Jody.
One of the biggest complements she’s ever experienced was when she dropped one of her groups off at the airport and “not one of them had a dry eye. They did not want to leave,” she says.
“When I left them at the airport and I drove away I had that sense of pride that I was the one lucky enough being on the safari with them and that they left me feeling the way they felt. What better complement is there?” Jody asks.
Jody doesn’t remember the name of the girl who broke her heart, because she found it again with her first trip to Africa in 1998 and with her life partner, Katharine Cole, who she met in 2002 and married in 2008.
“There is a tug on me, either my heart or my spirit or my soul,” says Jody about her draw to Africa, “it’s more, almost a spiritual draw.”
“Some people are drawn to cultures and they like spending time in the cities and feeling the vibrancy of busy life around them,” says Jody. “I’m more drawn to the sounds of the wind blowing through the acacia trees, watching animals do what animals do and listening to the bugs.”
That sound, the sound of existence and life is one of the things Jody loves sharing with her guests when she brings them to Africa.
To get people in the African mood, Jody meets with guests six months before their departure. She gives them reading materials and talks with them about Africa.
“It’s a very hands on experience getting ready for safari, especially with Wild Rainbow African Safaris,” says Jody.
Just before taking the journey she asks guests to bring three things with them on their adventure:
- An open mind
- A flexible attitude
- Your child-like curiosity
“I love taking people there and watching them see Africa,” says Jody. “That is the thing that turns me on the most.”
To celebrate Wild Rainbow African Safaris 10 year anniversary, Cole has planned several epic trips in 2015, including a Mount Kilimanjaro climb and Tanzania safari, a Zimbabwe canoeing and walking safari, an unforgettable Rwanda gorilla safari, a classic Kenya and Tanzania safari and a diverse South Africa walking safari.
(Video Courtesy of Epochalips)
To book your Wild Rainbow African Safari adventure, contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at Travel Advisors of Los Gatos at 408-354-6531at or .
To contract an original article, purchase reprints or become a media partner, contact ">editor [@] girlsthatroam [.] com.
Great work girlsthatroam. Thanks for the info!