Happy Halloween! I’m now in my 9^th African country, Namibia. So far everything seems very nice here. It has a really low population density, so when we drive we hardly ever see people or even villages. It is quite a Westernized country, and Germans were the ones who settled here. So everything is run very orderly and exactly (completely different from the rest of Africa). The first night in Namibia, we stayed in a little municipal park. I literally felt like I was back in Minnesota at a little neighborhood park (like Countryside our something). It was a perfect lawn, with sprinklers, swings, slides, and a little bathroom building that looked so American. We were all in culture shock! Our first big site was Etosha National Park. We stayed in 2 different campsites that were both converted German military forts. Their best feature was the floodlit watering hole, where you could sit and watch the animals all night. (We ended up seeing some black rhino, genet, zebras, jackals etc.) It was very peaceful and serene sitting there and relaxing with the animals.

Etosha is a very dry park with big saltpans in the middle of it, so most of the animals sit at the watering holes. We did a bunch of game drives and saw some great things. We had to black rhinos walk right in front of our truck. Then later on that drive we saw a huge herd of elephants with their babies splashing around at a water hole. The next day we saw a big pack of 9 lions. Then within an hour 3 cheetahs came up right by the truck. It was great! (But sadly this was our last game drive of the trip.)

The final night there it seemed like it was going to rain, so we got to eat dinner in the fancy restraunt. It was a buffet, so I got to try another kind of game meat: Gembuck (sp?). (Gembuck is a big antelope thing with super long pointy horns. They are very beautiful, so I felt kind of bad eating it. But it was quite yummy!)

Tonight we are staying at a cheetah sanctuary, so I get to pet and walk with the cheetahs. (Yeah!) Then tomorrow we set off for the desert.

The last night in Vic Falls we went to a very cool restraunt for dinner. They had a big buffet and I got to try impala. It was very yummy! (Sorry African Bambi!)

The next day Avril, Jo and I went to a hotel nearby and relaxed by the pool. We even got to eat lunch at the swim up bar in the pool. That was sure a nice way to escape the heat.

That afternoon we set off for Botswana. We stayed at a camp site right next to Chobe National Park that was really nice except for one thing… the sewage pump or line had burst and our tents and truck were surrounded in sewage. Nasty! Some people just sat there happily and ate there dinner in the middle of the stench, but I had to stay as far away as possible. (Luckily, the next night some of the other campers had left so we could move our tents.) We went on a game drive in Chobe Park, which was pretty cool. The best part of the drive was that we were able to see a leopard eating a big lizard. (Leopards are one of the hardest animals to spot, so this was only the second time we had seen one.)

We moved on to the North-Central part of Botswana and went to the Okavango Delta. The delta is a really neat place that is basically like a huge marsh with a few islands in the middle were animals live, and where we camped. Our mode of transportation the whole time we were in the delta was a macoro. (sp?) Which is basically a little canoe that is carved out of a tree trunk. They are really small and tippy. We had polers for each of our macoros to get us around. They drive it by pushing a long stick down in the water and push off the muddy bottom.

 

We bush camped in the delta, so there were no toilets, showers, or even water. (We had to just stick our water bottles in the delta and fill them with the water there, which is supposedly very clean.) It was extremely hot while we were there, so for most of the day we just laid around in the shade, read, played cards, and sweated a lot! In the evenings and mornings we went on game walks and saw a bunch of animals (elephants, hippos, zebra, gazelle, impala, badgers etc).

 

There were a few very exciting moments. The first one happened when Katherine sent one of the polers out to fill up our water bottle. He was out in the middle of the waterway bent over with the jug, when an elephant that had been drinking in the distance decided that he didn’t like the poler and was going to charge him. He came running at him full speed through the water and was trumpeting so loudly. The poler waved around his stick and yelled at the elephant to scary it. Luckily his tactic worked and the elephant stopped about 10 feet in front of him. That sure freaked everyone out. Later in the same day we were going for a sunset macoro ride, when the polers decided that they wanted to bring us to a hippo hotspot. We were all very nervous about this, since we were in tippy canoes just inches from the water. Plus hippos happen to be very aggressive animals and they kill the most people every year in Africa. When we got there, they told us that the hippos were all gone. That’s when one decided to pop up out of the water. It would submerge and get closer and closer each time it popped up. A bunch of us were freaking out and begging our polers to take us back. After a few minutes of laughing at us they took us back to camp.

 

That evening they sang some songs for us and we played some games around the camp fire. It was a very cool experience!

The last 3 days have been amazing! I have so many things to write about, I can’t even think of where to start.

In Livingstone, we stayed at Grubby’s Grotto which is basically an old mansion with a pool where people camp on the lawn. It was pretty cool, but the guy running the place was a bit crazy. The first major activity that I did was a flight in a microlight airplane. (A microlight basically looks like a go kart/shopping cart with a hanggliding wing attached to the top. It’s really a motorized hangglider. There are no sides and it is basically like having to plastic lawn chairs attached to the bottom of a hanggliding wing with a small motor on the back. The pilot controls it with a triangle shape piece of metal, just like they do on a real hangglider, so no stering wheel or stick controller thing.)

I was quite freaked out for the first 5 minutes of the flight, but it turned out to be very cool. The scariest part is that it is so easily pushed around by the wind, so everytime there was a gust it felt like we would be blown out of the sky. (I had a death grip on the handles near my seat and my arms ached for about a day afterwards.) I saw some animals (elephants, hippos, buffalo, and crocs) on the flight. Plus of course you circle around Vic Falls a few times. (Victoria Falls are one of the biggest waterfalls in the world. It is about 1500 meters wide and over 100 meters tall. It was dry season when we were there, but they were still amazing!)

Once we all finsihed our microlight flights, we headed for the falls. You really need to see them from air and land to full appreciate them. It was very cool. The rest of that day was sort of rainy and chilly, so I basically read a book and hibernated.

The next day, we packed up early and headed for the national park to do a game/rhino walk. Our guide was awesome! He knew so many little facts about all the animals, birds, plants, and trees to impress us all. We saw some elephants, giraffes, impalas, buffalo, waterbuck, baboons, and best of all…white rhinos. We were all to walk right up to them (only about 20 feet away). The guide said that there are only 15 rhinos left in Zambia, and we were able to see 2 of them. How cool! They are these huge prehistoric looking beasts.

After the walk, we had to move to our new campsite which was in Zimbabwe. Crossing the border was pretty easy, but things are a bit backwards here. It’s illegal to exchange Zim money with other currencies, but it’s all illegal to use US dollars to pay for things (figure that out). Luckily, Katherine straightened everything out for us. That evening we did our booze cruise down the Zambezi. It was quite fun, but it ended much earlier than we had expected. (It was supposed to be 4 hours but ended up only being 1 1/2!) Anyways, we all had a great semi-crazy night out.

That brings us to today, this morning I had to leave the campsite at 6:30am (after the booze cruise) to do a lion walk. The lion walk/encounter was incredible. (It was one of the best things I did in Africa!) They give you a little breifing, arm you with a twig (to fend out the lions if they try to bite or scratch you), and off you go walking with the lions. (All of the lions in the park are domesticated, but will be released into the wild when they are older.) We got to see 3 lions that were 20 months old (and almost as big as adults) and 2 5 month old cubs.

At first, I was a bit scaried to be hanging out with lions, but they were all sweethearts that just wanted to play around like a big cat. We walked with them, petted them, and sat with them. It was great! (I have a ton of awesome photos to show/email you all.)

In the afternoon, some of us decided to see the Zim side of Vic Falls. After along hot walk (I would say it’s at least 90+ degrees here) we got there. This side was even more impressive than the Zambian side. There was a lot more water falling on the Zim side, plus you were able to get really close to them and fell the spray from the falls. (Of course I have some more awesome photos to show.)

Tonight, we are going to a dinner/ African dance show. So that should be fun. Then tomorrow, we are leaving this incredibly fun, but touristy town and heading to Botswana.

After all of the excitement at South Luangwa, the next few days were quite boring. The next morning we had a really long drive (at least 12 hours) going halfway across Zambia. The roads were really dry and dusty, so we were all covered in dirt within a few hours. My dreads were really bugging me and making my head itch (with all the dirt covering my scalp). So I decide to take them out. Avril was nice enough to help me, so we got them all out within about 3 hours. My hair was so crimpy and crazy that I really did have an afro! (Personally I thought I looked like Side Show Bob from the Simpson’s tv show.)

 

The next day we set off for Lake Kariba, were we bordered a house boat. Boy, was that luxury after camping a driving all the time. Since, we were the only people on the boat we each got to have our own bedroom and bathrooms. Plus we even got air conditioning one night. (Talk about upgrading from the tent and sleeping bag!) We basically spent the whole time on the boat being lazy bums!

We entertained ourselves by playing tons of Scrabble and a Taboo like game, reading, and listening to music. A few of the more adventurous people jumped off of the top of our 3 story houseboat into the lake. Personally, I didn’t even want to swim in that lake, since it was full of crocodiles and hippos.

 

We had 3 house boys cooking and cleaning for us, which was awesome. (One night I had requested that we have enchiladas. They ended up making rice with spaghetti sauce on top. Oh well, at least we didn’t have to do the dishes!)

We were all getting a little crazy by the 3^rd morning, so I was pumped to be going to Livingstone and Victoria Falls today. The next few days are going to be jam packed with adventurous activities. I will be going in a micro light airplane over the falls, everyone is doing a Rhino walk, than doing a dinner/drink boat cruise down the Zambezi River, and the last day I’ll be walking with lions. Yeah!

We stayed in South Luangwa for 3 nights, and we had a lot of adventures there. The night game drive was really cool! It is a pretty quiet and remote park, so there weren’t too many people there. It started out like any other game drive (watching hippos, impalas, lions etc.) After the sun went down it felt like a game drive/haunted hayride/search and rescue mission. It was quite spooky to be in the complete dark in an open truck knowing that there are lions all around.

We did end up finding one male lion and it was really neat. He was watching a herd of elephants cross a little gorge.

During the day time we basically just relaxed by the pool, reading and what not. On our last night at Flatdogs, we had a very exciting evening. Jo and Mike were in the middle of cooking dinner for us all, when the night watch man came around telling us that there were elephants and hippos in the camp. We immediately spotted it and made a beeline for the truck, so that we would be safe from any charges. We sat in the truck for about 30 minutes watching the group of elephants.

After a while they moved off, and Katherine (our guide) said it was safe to walk to reception to pay our bill. So we all set off there, and paid with no problems. Me, Claire, Mike, Claire, Jo and Avril decided to go back to our campsite to finish making dinner, we got a security guard from the camp to walk with us. (He was supposed to be the elephant expert and our protector, who would throw himself in-between us and the elephants if it came to that.) Anyways, as we were walking back, we noticed that he wasn’t really shining his flashlight around. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an elephant coming straight for us. The next few seconds were crazy. Basically it was me shouting, “Elephant!” and grabbing the security man. Then the security man threw Claire and me into a tiny tree, and he just left the other 4 to fend for themselves. (The tree he threw us behind was about 4 feet tall and about 2 inches around, I’m quite sure that wasn’t going to protect us from an elephant charge.) As we were running around screaming, the elephant turned around and started retreating from the crazy white people. We were safe, but very freaked out.

That night we had about 6 elephants walk right under our tree house as we were trying to sleep. It was a very interesting, elephant-packed day!

For the past few weeks we have been making our way south, and are basically hanging out at the ocean, islands, beaches, and pools. The pace of the trip has slowed down a lot and it’s been really nice to relax, instead of drive every day.

I am now in my 6^th African country, Zambia. So far the landscape is pretty similar to Malawi. We are staying at a really cool campsite called Flat Dogs, near South Luangwa National Park. There are tons of elephants and hippos all around the site. We could hear them calling all night long. (You couldn’t believe how loud a hippo can be!) Claire and I have put our tent up on a tree platform. I was pretty hard to get it set up 20 feet above the ground on a platform that is a few inches narrower than our tent, and doesn’t have any railing or safety things. But it’s really neat to sleep up there with the monkeys all around us.

 

Last night at our campsite, a lady was walking to the bathroom at about 3:00am, and she was charged by an elephant. The elephant ran at her and pushed her into a bush. She was fine, but a bit freaked out. (I’d be too!) I’ve decided I’m never going to the bathroom in the middle of the night again.

Tonight, we are going on a night game drive. It starts a bit before sundown, and then we drive around with a big spotlight to show us all of the nighttime creatures. It should be pretty cool.

I’m starting to get excited to come home, and show off my amazing tan!

After getting the ferry back to Dar Es Salaam, we basically just had 2 long driving days while we made our way to Malawi. So I’ve now been to 5 African countries!

We did stay at a nice farmhouse/camping place in Tanzania. We were really spoiled by having an awesome dinner at their restraunt. We had homemade bread and soup for starters, steak, potatoes, and veggies for the main course, and an excellent dessert of brownies and hot chocolate. We all felt like we had upgraded to a luxury tour or something!

We spent almost all of our time in Malawi relaxing at Lake Malawi. The lake takes up 20% of the country and really looks like the ocean (with waves and all). We spent 3 days at a great place called Kande Beach. Our campsite was right on the water and it was a very relaxing place. We spent most of our time chilling on the beach, but we also did tons of bartering with the local wood cravers. (Malawi is known for it’s amazingly talented wood cravers, so we all had to buy some things.) It was a long bartering/ trading process, but it was fun talking to the locals. (They really wanted to trade things like cell phones, batteries, watches, sunglasses, t-shirts etc.) My $3 watch was a hot ticket item, but I managed to hold on to it.

Oh, I almost forgot to say that I got my hair put into dreadlocks! I know it sounds pretty crazy, but I figured “when can I ever have dreadlocks again in my life?” So I’m starting to look like a rasta myself. It is sort of nice to have your hair tied into a million knots and not having to brush it every morning. (btw It’s supposed to be temporary dreads, so I’m supposed to be able to take them out when I want to instead of cutting all my hair off.)

For the past 4 days I’ve been relaxing on the beach in Zanzibar. It is an amazing place and I really appreciate the break from the Overland Truck! We all needed some chill out time on the beach. We are staying at a place called Kembu Rocks and it is quite nice. Basically I’ve spent most of my time hanging out on the beach, eating awesome seafood, getting massages, and reading.

Yesterday, a bunch of us went on a sailing/snorkelling trip. The water is crystal clear and turquoise blue, you really couldn’t ask for a nicer island. Anyways, the amount, variety, and quanity of fish was amazing. The coral was really colorful and interesting too. There was just 1 problem… Jellyfish! Hundreds of them. I was one of the first to jump in the water and I was swimming around just fine until I got attacked by a big school of them. (Don’t worry they were pretty small and harmless, but they sure stung and left tons of red stinging spots on my body.) Not too fun! I only snorkeled for about 15 minutes before the jellyfish made me quit.

Oh well! We relaxed on the dhow (sailboat) and stopped at a beautiful beach for a nice simple meal. We had grilled tuna fish with fruit and bread. (The tuna was awesome, and imagine me the “fishhater” saying that.) After swimming for a bit, we sailed back to our part of Zanzibar. The boat guys were hillarious and we all had a fun afternoon joking around with them.

We leave Zanzibar tomorrow, and have 2 more days in Tanzania and then it’s the beaches in Malawi!