Dream Safari Turned Nightmare: Calif. Couple Relays Tale of African Imprisonment

By Bay City News Service:

FOSTER CITY, CA- A Foster City couple is home after three weeks under arrest earlier this year in Tanzania accused of poaching.

Jon and Linda Grant say they took a cruise that started in Cape Town, South Africa, that took them to a game reserve near Durban, South Africa. At the game reserve, they stopped at a curio shop where Jon spotted a 15- to 18-inch giraffe bone with a herd of elephants carved on it.

Jon says he was interested in the bone because he hadn't seen anything like it and thought it might look good on his desk at home. He's a retired dentist who's traveled to 132 countries on seven continents.

"Is that legal," Jon said was the first thing he asked the shop clerk.

The clerk apparently said yes and told Grant all the laws have to do with ivory.

"That sounded logical," he said. But he hadn't thought the bone might be illegal in another country.

Later in the trip the couple flew from Kenya to Tanzania for a 6-day safari. On the way out of the country, a baggage checker asked Jon to remove the bone from his luggage.

Jon told the checker what it was and where he bought it, he said. The checker examined it while the couple's luggage was put on a plane. But the next thing he knew his plane tickets had been canceled and the couple had their luggage back.

"The giraffe is our national animal," Jon said he was told.

The couple was taken away in a van and spent two nights in jail and one night in prison. They faced 20 years in prison and a $150,000 fine for poaching.

"It was so out of line with what we did," Jon said.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Francisco/San Mateo, has a somewhat different interpretation. Speier says she thinks they were targeted because they were Americans and they looked like they had money.

Getting out of Tanzania cost the Grants $62,000, little of they will get back even though American officials intervened, according to the local official.

Speier said the U.S. gives millions in aid to Tanzania each year. She said U.S. officials should reevaluate that aid or at least have a direct conversation about how local customs agents handle Americans being processed through their system.

She said the problem faced by the Grants may be a pattern that has developed. If there is a pattern, U.S. officials need to reevaluate the U.S.'s relationship with Tanzania, according to Speier.

Future travelers need to be alerted too, Speier said. Before the Grants were able to come home they had to pay $2,000 to have a person carry an original receipt from South Africa to a Tanzanian courtroom to prove where they bought the bone.

"This is pretty egregious," Speier said.

(Image via screenshot of KPIX 5 News)