Travel Diary
South Africa to Zanzibar
We started in Johannesburg just over three weeks ago now, first stop the Kruger National Park. There are 8 of us travelling on a truck thing, along with 2 guides. The park was amazing - seeing all the game in their natural habitats was very surreal to begin with, and on our first game drive we saw 4 of the Big 5 (elephant, buffalo, leopard, rhino) only missing out on a lion sighting. Instead of appearing to us they just decided to keep us awake at night roaring. We'll hopefully catch a glimpse of some in the Ngorogoro Crater next week, fingers crossed! The list of wildlife we've seen is huge and I won't bore you with it now, but needless to say I have one or two photos of them.
We then headed up through Zambia to the Chobi National Park. There are apparently thousands of elephants there, so we were all quite excited about the morning game drive we went on, having to crawl out of bed (well actually I was sleeping on top of the truck, which I've been doing a lot and is great -- really comfortable and sleeping under the stars rocks) at 5am which was quite rude. However, that day every single elephant decided to hide, and we managed to see 2 out of the possible hundred thousand or so, hmm.
The next major stop was Victoria Falls, where we spent a few days on the Zimbabwe side. It was all very stressful visiting the markets and haggling for loads of curios, and every so often I'd have to remind myself when haggling over $600 it was actually $1 US! Our last night in Zimbabwe we had a bit of cash left so decided to lose it at a casino. The only problem was that me and someone else found ourselves on a winning streak and managed to win about $17,000! Well, only $30 US but hey! So we were forced to buy lots of drinks before the money became worthless when we left the country, damn.
I went whitewater rafting at Vic Falls down the Zambeze which was the scariest thing I think I've ever done. The river's nearly at its lowest at this time of year, and has lots of Grade V rapids. Ours was known as the swimming raft after flipping it most, and I'll never forget the look of sheer terror on the face of Chris (someone else on the tour) after we flipped the first time.
From Vic Falls we spent 2 days canoeing down the Zambeze sharing the river with hippos, crocodiles and elephants. Came far to close for comfort to pods of hippos a few times, and I was a bit reluctant to set up camp on a set of hippo tracks but luckily we didn't get trampled to death in our sleep!
On to Lake Malawi, the 3rd biggest freshwater lake in Africa for a few days of lazing around on a beach and a spot of diving. From there up to Tanzania and over to Zanzibar. We flew over here which was an experience. We were late for our flight, so the pilot just nipped to get some breakfast. Then just nipped to do another flight. Then he went for lunch. We finally left about 5 hours late, and I'll quite happily admit I was rather scared about this flight after seeing the plane. It was a 12-seater thing, v v small! Once we were airborne it ended up being much fun - I was sitting in the row behind the pilot which was amazing! Except when strange alarms went off every so often...
A minor hiccup in that we've separated from our guides after one of them had an accident and had to get flown back to the mainland a couple of days ago as they don't have an x-ray machine on this island, and we're due to meet up with them again today fingers crossed. Zanzibar has lived up to its reputation as a seafood haven, and we've stuffed ourselves full of a plethora of fish every night, including the biggest prawns I've ever seen! It's been a couple of days of relaxation along with some more diving around the coral reef on the east of the island where we saw some huuuge lobsters and a fair few beautiful fish.
Back to the mainland and Dar Es Salaam this evening for an evening of drunkeness courtesy of alcoholic slush puppies, then up towards Nairobi with a couple more national parks on the way. Arrive in Nairobi on Thursday for my flight back to the UK on Friday night.