Sunday, August 4, 2013

Book Review: Botswana, Travels with Gannon and Wyatt (teen, Africa)


Travels with Gannon and Wyatt – Botswana, by Patti Wheeler and Keith Hemstreet, Claim Stake Publishing, 2009, about 19.95$, 144 pp (with DVD) 

Twins Gannon and Wyatt from Colorado are home-schooled – or, rather, world-schooled.!

They actually travel the world with their parents to learn geography and natural history firsthand - then write up their adventures for credit in English.  And adventures they are!

Meet the Big Five of Africa – the Lion, the Leopard, the Cape Buffalo, the Elephant, and the Rhinoceros: the twins manage to see them all while on safari – some of them too much up front and close. Like the time their jeep is charged by a mother rhino or they see a dust cloud in the distance that soon surrounds them only to discover that the dust is kicked up by 500 Cape Buffalo!

Wyatt and Gannon’s photographs are interspersed throughout the book and their very professional videotaping is included in a DVD that features a narrated interview with the twins as well as a videotour of the boys visiting Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 18 years) and Capetown, South Africa (and additional photos).

It is hard to believe that such wild and exciting adventures are still possible in today’s world (picture two young Indiana Jones types). Wyatt and Gannon experience what most boys only dream about – but now you, too, can join YES, the Youth Exploration Society.  (www.travelswithgannonandwyatt.com)

Toss in some hippos, a small tribe of Bushmen, a black mamba snake, Wyatt’s mysterious malady, a wounded lion with four lion cubs and an eye-patched poacher, armed and dangerous!

Botswana is the first in a series that will take the twins to the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada, Egypt, China, the South Pacific, Antarctica, the Australian Outback, Machu Picchu – just for starters. I can’t wait!

(Also see www.gannonandwyatt.com for lots of action and an interview with the boys while they were visiting their aunt in my  hometown of Spokane! Small world, eh?)

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