Still wandering round Africa

"I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not happy" Ernest Hemingway

In case you were starting to wonder what had happened to us in the past month, we are both alive and well and loving every minute of our African adventure (except for the 240 minutes we spent waiting for a bus yesterday).

We left Arusha and after a night in the hills made it to a wee place between Tanga and Pangani.  We could happily still be at the Peponi Beach Resort with our campsite right on the beach, fresh fish, a cute village and friendly locals.  But the oh so great owner manged to organise us a dhow (hand made wooden boat) over to Zanzibar, where we arrived after four hours on the crystal white sand.  Coming from NZ I'm not one to rave about beaches but this was just lovely - about the colour and texture of milk powder and made the clear waters so bright.

We stayed on Zanzibar a few days, diving in the north and eating in the south.  As we really are still novice divers we chose to do a couple of dives towards our Advanced Open Water and chose the two closest dives to falling off a boat and looking at fish - being "Boat Diving" and "Fish ID".

Back on the mainland we explored Dar es Salam doing the one main sight of the museum and the lesser known site of the fish markets.  We also had one of the best curries outside of India at the Badminton Association, watching the cricket on the big screen and enjoying the hospitality of the marketing director of Serengeti Breweries.

We then headed south into Malawi.  Malawi was great.  Being alongside the lake for so long I felt the cleanest I've felt in months, although sadly some of the tan washed away... We went to a national park which is technically rather accessable on public transport, although this did mean three different rides in the back of three rather full pickups.  It was quite a treat for us to be able to camp within the park and to sort our own cooking.  We also had a guardian elephant which was really cool.  We had a spot of diving in the lake one day which meant we got to see some of the hundreds cichlids which have populated the lake. In Malawi we were also adopted by the lovely Graham and Colleen who we hope to catch up with in Cape Town (especially as they are currently transporting all of our heavy things!).

Which brings us now to Zambia.  We made the trek up to South Luanga National Park thanks to some lovely Danes who gave us a ride in their truck.  I knew we were going to get on just fine when their matching t-shirts said "Danish Coffee Tour 2009".  The park was amazing, so many different animals in such a small space.  We saw lions eating a buffalo for breakfast, loads of basking crocs, hippos grazing and my personal favourite camp-dwelling-elephants.

We always knew that we would make it as far as Tanzania and being able to make it further south has been a real bonus.