Last Post

My last post of the trip. Apologies for the long gap from the previous post to this but Africa you know, not the best of internet facilities. But the country makes up for it many other ways.
Given that it's been nearly 6 weeks since my last monologue, I thought I'd spare you all the details and just give you the highlights. Blimey, that's a huge sigh of relief I'm hearing!
I left you in Swakopmund where the following day I went quad-biking. So much fun! And so much embarrassment when I got stuck in the sand. Twice! Eek! From there we headed up to Etosha National Park where there was a floodlit watering hole and during our night viewing we saw giraffe (my favourite!), impala, elephant, rhino and a leopard. Soooo cool.
After stopping off at the Cape Cross Seal Colony which whilst having a gozillion very cute seals was extremely smelly, we headed to Windhoek which is where we spent Christmas day. Very odd for me having a hot Christmas. But lots of fun and we had a great Christmas lunch at Joe's Beerhouse (which is actually a restaurant before you all start thinking I'm turning into and alcoholic) and I got a very cool carved comb as my Secret Santa present.
Very early the next day, a very hungover truck load of people headed to Ghanzi in Botswana ready for our trip the following day into the Okavango Delta. We travelled to our campsite in the delta in Mokoros, hollowed out tree trunk canoes, mine and Mark's steered by Letta our poler. This was a magical journey and very relaxing - a few snores could be heard from our group! In the Delta we spent the afternoon relaxing because it was too hot to do anything else then as it cooled down and then again very early in the morning we did a couple of game walks where we saw elephants, wildebeest, zebra and a couple of hyenas.
From the Delta we headed to Chobe National Park. A bit disappointing on the animal front as the rain had started with a vengeance by now and all the animals seemed to go in to hiding. We did get to see a lot of beautiful birds though and there were lots of impala and hippo to keep us amused. We also had New Years here - even got to sing Aulde Lang Syne with Fiona - the only other English person on the tour (Mark my Welsh canoeing partner refused to join in - not a bad thing if you were to hear him sing!).
From Botswana we headed into Zambia where we stopped in Livingstone for 5 very long, very very wet days. There were literally rivers running through the campsite and at times you couldn't even see the other side of the Zambezi river the rain came down so hard. It is also here that I thought I was going to die when the white water rafting raft I was in flipped us over and we all obviously fell out which wouldn't have been so bad had we not been heading for a rapid which was level 6, not allowed to go through under any circumstances called "Commercial Suicide". Fortunately all turned out OK and I lived to tell the tale although think I'm now put off WWR for a while! Victoria falls on the other hand was absolutely gorgeous. Amazing power of nature and worth a far longer trip than the hour we spent there.
After being almost washed away in Livingstone we headed into Malawi and had 2 nights at Kande Beach where I got to dive in Lake Malawi and hopefully didn't get schistosomiasis! Malawi is incredibly beautiful and I think probably my most favourite African country that I visited. At Kande beach we got to do a village walk on which I was guided by Steven and Captain Morgan (I also met Tony Blair, Fred Flintstone and Jack Daniels!) and it was both amazing and shocking to see the school where there were 1250 students, most of whom lived in the attached orphanage because their parents had died, usually due to AIDS. They were adorable though and would fight each other over who was going to hold your hand - that coming from me who isn't very keen on children too! From there it was up to Chitimba and Iringa (and a campsite with the cleanest long-drop toilets you could ever come across!).
Tanzania was the next stop and 3 nights in Zanzibar. Incredible place. Stonetown was a labyrinth of tiny alleyways yielding great shops selling every nicknack, souvenir and random object you could wish to buy and then up to North Beach where the pristine white beaches and amazingly blue sea could make the tensest of people relax (although I was about chilled as I could possibly get by this point anyway). Lots of good food and massages on the beach made this couple of days feel like 2 weeks. Would definitely recommend a few days here to chill out!
Then it was back to mainland Africa and heading up to Arusha, our jumping off point for the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater. These 2 places were amazing. We saw 4 out of the big 5 here, only missing out on leopard - and that's because I did a hot air balloon ride over the Serengeti and those that didn't saw one on their game drive that morning. Unfortunately the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and so we only got a half hour ride rather than an hour but it just meant we drank more champagne to make up for it, followed by a full English breakfast in the middle of the Serengeti. Marvelous!
The Ngorongoro crater had the highest concentration of animals you can imagine and so we saw so much there. Impala, hippo, male and female lion, cheetah, warthogs, wildebeest, buffalo, zebra, jackals, hyena. The list goes on!
And then on our last day - as by this point we knew that tour was being finished in Arusha and not going into Kenya because of all the trouble there - we did a Maasai village walk and saw their education centre and their health centre where we met up with 4 people from our tour who had just been diagnosed with malaria. That being the case and a good percentage of us having had dodgy stomachs for a while and a couple of us having cold symptoms, we all decided to get tested and it ended up with 14 out of the 24 of testing positive - me being one of them! So no big night out for the last night, the pills made quite a few of us feel really rough and so we were in bed by 9pm!
Fortunately the effects were gone the next morning when I woke up at 3.30am to go to the airport to fly to Dar Es Salaam ready for my flight the next day back home and the night in a 5* hotel where I treated myself for the last night also helped and now being looked after by my Mum is the final icing on the cake!
This has been the most amazing 6 months of my life. Anyone vaguely contemplating doing something like this I would say go for it. Since I've been back, the most common question I've been asked is "what was your favourite place?" but with a trip like this, there isn't really anywhere that's favourite. Some places you like for the place, some for the people, some for the things you do there. It's just exciting visiting the places and finding out the reason why you like it. I know one thing. I can't wait to do something like this again.