Candice Mortimer

Homebase:
Pangani, Tanzania

Passions:
Travel, yoga, good food, music, and sustainability.

Work:
Marketing and PR for Alex Walker’s Serian camps in the Serengeti, Tanzania and Masai Mara, Kenya.

What are you looking for out of the Global Passport community?
Inspiration, connection, and growth.

What’s one of the most interesting or surprising things you’ve ever done?
I finished my Master’s degree in Washington, DC and left for what was to be a 7 month contract in Tanzania. Looking back from 9 years on, it’s hard to imagine a starker contrast between these two worlds. Less than a year in, I ended up living in a communal, open, green, nature-steeped cob house for two years, working in sustainable education. Our organisation was unstructured, organic, grassroots-inspired and self-starting – the total opposite to all the stereotypes of city life in the fast lane. It marked a pivotal change in direction and a deep rooted connection to my inner earthiness. Looking back, it was undoubtedly an instrumental fork in the road that’s wound its way to where I am now.

What’s one of the most challenging things you’ve ever done?
Climbing Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active volcano in the Great Rift Valley with a vast flamingo-studded soda lake at its foot and the most surreal moonscape vistas as far as the eye can see. Its name is the Maasai term for ‘mountain of God’ and it really does have that kind of omnipotent presence and power. You start at midnight to summit at dawn, and when light finally comes, you’re grateful you couldn’t see what was ahead because the gradient of the slope appears truly insurmountable. Its slopes are scree and ash, so for every one step upward, you slide three back, and at points you’re using hands, feet and Spiderman moves to inch your way up. And this is all before you get to the bubbling, smouldering cauldron up top…

What is the most Unsettled thing you’ve ever done?
I’d just given up my Tanzanian home in favour of casting myself adrift on the wind, living truly nomadically and giving over to travel as a full-time lifestyle… and Covid landed me in lockdown in Nairobi for 6 months. A deeply unsettling involuntary settle, and the opposite of what I’d just set in motion.

How do you envision the future of sustainable tourism? 
It has to be about slowing down… less shallow and wide box-ticking, and more about mindfully narrowing one’s focus to deep-dive into an experience.Our focus has to shift away from just saying you’ve been to a place, and toward truly experiencing where you’re going. More than minimising actual planet-damaging travel, it’s about fostering connections and truly immersing. Whether that looks like basing yourself somewhere for three months and becoming a local, or just taking the time to meet the people, eat the food, drink the drinks, get a flavour for what it’s really about… it can only happen if we slow down and take time to take it all in.