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.

Visiting Mbotukunga in Tanzania

While we are in Tanzania we have taken the chance to visit eight year old Mboa (who we sponsor through World Vision) and his family in the community of Magugu.

WV's work is about a third through as they have been involved in the community for 6 years, and plan to remain for a total of 15.

We had a really interesting morning meeting the family, seeing his home, playing football and having the village women sing and dance for us.

More interesting however was the couple of hours that we spent with the Field Team afterwards as Paul and I quizzed them on their goals, the progress and the vision for the community's future.

If you were ever interested in sponsoring a child then I would encourage you to look this community up on WV's website. Their aim is to see 10% of the children in the area sponsored and presently they only have sponsorship for 1570 out of 2500.

A view from the top of Africa

East Africa Epic

Wow we have been slack in the past few weeks in doing any sort of update.  Part of that is African internet, and the rest is we've hardly stopped!

 

After a few dramas in Kigali in sorting our gorilla permits we spent a couple of days in Gisenyi on the lake near the DRC. We did think to pop to DRC for lunch one day but sadly that would mean we had to get another Rwandan visa, and at 60USD each, that would have been a very expensive lunch… so we Didn't Really get to Congo.

 

It is not possible to rave enough about how cool the gorillas were when we went to see them.   The day before we knew that it took five hours to see the Susa Group so we went prepared for a very long walk to find them.  Our guide Hope had a great sense of humour so we thought he was joking when an hour up the hill he said that the silver back had called to say we were allowed to visit in 15 mins. 

 

He may not have been right about the phone call, but the gorillas were there for sure.  In masses.  In the hour we spent with them we were able to see some kid aged gorillas playing tumble, a mother feeding her newborn, sleeping silverbacks and the entire troop on the move.  It was impossible to stay seven metres away as to move in one direction only put you closer to another. 

 

Our animal kingdom adventure continued with a four day safari in the Serengeti and Ngrongro Crater, where we saw masses of elephants, giraffes, lions enjoying sun, cheetahs having gazelles for breakfast and all those other sights which would be at home on a BBC documentary narrated by David Atteborough.  We also had a very cool campsite where an elephant drank from the water tank, and the zebras gazed outside our tent waking us up in the night.

 

The most recent big event was or climb up Kilimanjaro. Led by a black man called White we made it to the top in time to see the sun rise over all the glaciers.  V cool indeed!

 

We have the weekend "off" before heading to the beach.