One of those lame summing up posts.

I should probably write something meaningful here summing up my trip, and how it changed my life but i'm not very good at that - also I was basically on a 8 month holiday and there's nothing particularly meaningful about that! So i will sum up some top fives here....

• Best Countries - Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Zim and Lesotho (Kenya looses out as the South is a bit shit whereas the north is AMAZING).

Sudan	Making friends in Zimbabwe

• Worst Counties, I can't pick 5 here, but definitely Mozambique (for the unfriendly people, getting ripped off and un-laid back vibe) and South Africa (for the prices, the segregation and feeling the most unsafe in the whole of Africa)
  
• Best manmade places - The pyramids (Cairo, Egypt) Karnak Temple (Luxor, Egypt), Orlando Towers (Soweto, SA), The Big Hole (Kimberly, SA) and Great Zimbabwe (Masvingo, Zimbabwe)

Karnak Temple	Orlando Towers

• Best natural places – the skies in Kenya, Sanddunes in Namibia, Sudanease desert, Mountains in Lesotho and the Simien Mountains
  

Soussivali, Namibia	cloud porn, Kenya

• Best 'cultural experiences' - any local disco, the King of Swaziland's wedding, Samburu scrabble in Kenya, negotiating the markets in Ethiopia, the ferry between Egypt and Sudan.
  

Topless virgins at the King of Swaziland’s wedding	Diet coke break anyone? Somewhere on Lake Nassar, Egypt

• Most underwhelming places - Tanzania (seems a bit 'blah'), Zanzibar (not the island paradise I was expecting), Victoria Falls (good but just not amazing), Marsabit NP (no animals, truck with no breaks), The Masai Mara.
  

I guess Vic Falls is alright…	…as is Zanzibar

• Best animal moments - feeding the hyenas in Harar, Ethiopia, seeing the gorillas in DRC, Ostrich riding in SA, Elephants in South Lwanga NP, Charly, Alice and me posing like animals at every opportunity

Seriously who needs wildlife when you can just create your own/this is what happens when you spend 10 hours squashed into a truck listening to inane conversations.	Riding an ostrich, as you do, Oudstoorm, South Africa.

• Worst campsites - Karen Camp (Nairobi) Kande Beach (Malawi); The other place we stayed  (Malawi) Jinja (Uganda), Grubby’s Grotto (Livingstone, Zambia) and all those other compounds we stayed in in Southern Africa that I've erased from my memory.

Birthday breakfast, the only good thing about Karen Camp	Sam and Alice doing anything to entertain themselves, Grubby’s Grotto, Livingstone.

• Best campsites - any bushcamp in Sudan, The quarry on the way to Harar, Mount Kenya, Side of the hill, Lesotho, The place with the camels, Sudan/Ethiopia.

Good morning camels	Quarry, Ethiopia

• Best food/drink - Karl's veggie patties, Diet Coke, lemon curd at the farm, KFC brownie avalanche ice cream/any fast food in SA, beer in Ethiopia

30cent beer…yes please	fast food overload in SA

• Worst food/drink - Simien Mountain beer, Chibuku, that gross carbonara we had on the truck once, powdered milk, warm water in Sudan.

Chibuku!!

• Best oufits – my England Shorts, Tris’ muu muu, Galbyn’s Christmas Hat, Amy’s Arusha jumpers, Alice’s Bindi outfit

muu muu!!	And Bindi was born

• Best nights out - unbreakers (Bahir Dar, Ethiopia), Marsabit (Kenya), Chibuku night (Malawi), The last night in Cape Town (South AfricA) and the night of the Gondor Brewery Tour (Ethiopia)

‘unbreakers’	Marty showing off his dance moves, Cape Town

• Songs of the trip - Wavin' Flag, Waka Waka, anything written by Tom, Where can you see lions? and that Australian song they always played on the truck.

Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, Kenyaaaaaa

• Favourite dance moves - the reverse boxer (made famous by Galbyn), The Ethiopian shoulder dancing, the bird dance (as taught to me and Charly in Malawi), Samburu warrior dance and of course the funky chicken (seen everywhere and anywhere)

Samburu dancing/funky chicken	The reverse boxer

Thank you Africa, you've been bloody brilliant!

 

(where shall I go next?)

The last weeks in South Africa (a bit overdue!)

So I actually had forgotten that I never finished this off until the other day when my email got hacked and someone kindly posted some adverts on my blog (yes astonishingly it wasn't me who tried to persuade yous to go to some website to buy a printer). Anyway email/blog hacking problems should be sorted now so back to South Africa....

In the middle of out time at the farm we had a few days off so we decided to head down the coast (in an attempt to follow the sun) to Port Elizabeth for the weekend. We stayed in what started out as a lovely little hostel, we were camping on their lawn at the back and had a whole bathroom and living room to ourselves for the first night, on the second night however we were joined by a possibly mentally ill homeless man who proceeded to tell us all about the philosophy of Alice in Wonderland and how trippy it was that we were both called Alice. The highlight was probably the point where Alice went upstairs to speak to the owner and find out if he was actually supposed to be staying there and he came out of nowhere with a huge carving knife and put it right up to my face and asked if I knew how to open a can with it, my life definitely flashed before my eyes at that point I can tell you. Other than risk our lives in the hostel we spent the weekend on the internet applying for jobs (how depressing), shopping (until Alice got her card declined) and playing with some adorable lion cubs at a pretty weird wildlife park (although we had an awesome British guide). 

The weekend was a nice break (especially as we didn't have to get up at 6.30) but it was good to get back to the farm as well. We had about another 10 days there before we were off again. The whole farm experiences was probably one of my favourite parts of my trip, it can probably be summed up as a list of lessons learnt.....

• Lemon curd is easy to make, and contains shit loads of sugar
• Weeding is strangely enjoyable and very relaxing (even in the rain)
• Digging a hole in the sun is a bad idea
• The disturbing image of a little pink piglet bum thrusting when they get it on with their siblings will be forever etched in your memory. 
• You really can't play too much scrabble (which has been proven since I've been home too - Alice and I have played on facebook ever since!)
• It rains a hell of a lot in South Africa in November.
• Everyone loves Karl's veggie patty recipe
• The rhino/nice horn thing will NEVER get old
• Alice and I should go into business building scarecrows - the one we made was pretty sweet.
• Dogs really aren't that scary (but horses definitely are)

From the farm we drove (via the awesome mall in East London where we got a supermarket and Mr Price fix) to a little town about 100kms north west called.....ALICE. We had seen it on a map months before in Kenya and I never actually though we would make it but we did and although there is absolutely nothing there we had fun taking pictures of the Alice church, Alice Memorials, Alice Pharmacy and the Keep Alice Clean bin. Awesome. From there we drove quite late into the night to Aliwal North where we camped at what was supposed to be a spa but looked like a deserted leisure centre grounds (with a few impala roaming around). It didn't really matter though as we were on the road again early to drive to Lesotho. Following the map we'd been given by the rental company we started driving along roads which were getting progressively worse and worse until we realised we were well and truly lost (a first - we had done surprisingly well with directions up to this point). We stopped a truck who (conveniently actually had two guys who were going the same way as us and said if we gave them a lift they would show us the way. Obviously (TIA) these guys couldn't speak a word of English except to shout 'STRAIGHT, STRAIGHT; everytime I turned to look at them, they were old and very cute and after we dropped them in what seemed like the middle of nowhere we were on our way to the border, relieved we had found our way and not died in the hands of our first ever hitchhikers. 

The border was painless (no officials around to run over this time!) and we were soon in Lesotho and on our way, our first stop was the dinosaur footprints which Lesotho is famous for which were (as expected) completely underwhelming but still, pretty cool, and something you definitely have to do. We stopped a bit further along the road to have lunch and then carried on east into the mountains. After about an hour of driving, we had another car 'first' (this day seemed to be full of them!) and we got stopped by the police. To be honest, I think the officer was just bored and wanted a chat - he looked as my driving license and asked where we were from but then told us that we needed a 4x4 to go any further that way so we had to turn round and retrace at least 120km back to the border where we'd started from (surprisingly this wasn't actually that annoying, the scenery in Lesotho AMAZING - some of the best i've ever seen - so I was happy to be experiencing it all again). We decided to head to the capital and after getting stuck in a car parking space outside KFC where I had a mini meltdown about Africa, driving along the same road at least 5 times looking for the campsite we eventually found a place to stay and bedded down for the night in a nice setting on the side of a lake. 

We were up early the next day and continued driving east past more beautiful scenery and amazing waterfalls, in the afternoon we tried to attempt the Sani Pass (even though you need a 4x4) to get to the highest pub in Africa (the things i'll do for a beer!) but after getting stuck on a 30 degree incline, which was basically made up of loose rocks with a 100ft+ drop I decided that our little chev (or my blood pressure/fingernails) weren't up to it and we had to turn back. It was still cool though, i've never driven through a waterfall before. It's a shame the reversing down the slope was too tense to take any pictures (I almost ran Alice over and then reversed into a stream) as I would like to see what is was actually like. Anyway, it all worked out well as we found a beautiful campsite (probably one of the nicest ever) on the side of a hill, next to a shop where the locals had great fun dressing us up in Lesotho blankets and taking our pictures. It was a really fun evening although after all the driving I was glad for an early night. From Lesotho it was back to SA and on to Kimberly which is an old mining town in the middle of nowhere. It was pretty cool - we checked out the local attractions - the big hole (which is actually just a big hole and nowhere near as cool as the coal mine in Yorkshire), pick and pay and mr price before driving up to J'Burg. Now we were supposed to be staying in Soweto, but it was getting a bit late and I didn't want to drive around there at night so we decided to go to a different campsite which should have been easier to find. Well it wasn't, and with night closing in, I was feeling more and more uncomfortable about driving around J'burg. We probably drove back and forth for about 2 hours, and after getting stopped by a lady who told us we weren't safe there and getting some ominous glances from the locals I lost it and decided to drive to the airport and stay in a cheap hotel there. We found a decent one (although it had a really strange bed arrangement and Alice had the longest blanket in the world), had biscuits and dry noodles for dinner, watched some random program about an abortion clinic in America and I slept like a baby so glad that it turned out how it had as it could have been so much worse.

The next day we drove to Orlando towers in Soweto which were pretty cool and took a very sketchy lift up to the top where we could see the whole of Soweto and J'Burg. I was really surprised by Soweto - it was so much more developed with roads and supermarkets and drive throughs and stuff than I had ever imagined, it was a shame we didn't get to take a walking tour but I'm not such a big fan of paying £20+ to walk around someone elses neighbourhood like they are a zoo/tourist attraction. From Soweto, we drove the 100kms to Pretoria, our final destination and stayed in a lovely little hostel just near the University. Our last two days were spent going to see Harry Potter, treating ourselves to awesome food and milkshakes, a last ditch attempt at tanning, shopping and depressing ourselves about going home by watching the 'big freeze' footage on Sky News. 

So that's it, from Pretoria I drove (on my own....cry cry) to the airport and boarded my flight home and all the snow/ice, sad times.

Finally something I like about South Africa!

So we actually ended up staying in Zim for another day as the bus was booked up, I don’t think either of us was sad by this decision, We spent our last 24 hours going to the cinema (twice! It’s only $1 so we saw Date Night - alright, had some funny bits and Leap Year - rubbish although it made Ireland look very nice), sending postcards (Cathy you’ve got a great one coming your way!) and using our amazing bartering skills at the tiny market. I ended up swapping a top and a shirt I never wear for a keyring, a tiny wire gecko and a beaded pumba (not sure what I’ll do with any of that when I get home!) and my too small hiking shoes for some awesome keishi dancing guys. I actually swapped my top with a guy who then proceeded to put it straight on which was quite embarrassing as it fitted him better than me!

We got the greyhound late afternoon, it was relatively comfortable and they played two films to pass the time to the border. The border was one of the biggest and busiest I’d ever seen (it reminded me of Tijuana in Mexico and lets just say the last time I was there it didn’t end well!) and took about 3 hours to get through, what was particularly annoying was that we had to take all out stuff off the coach just to walk through the ‘nothing to declare’ isle and then load it all back on again…not fun when your bag weighs at least 20kg. After an alright few hours sleep we were dropped off in a grey, rainy, cold (welcome back to SA!) Pretoria at 5am, very annoying and to add to that the bus station is outside so we had nowhere to sit. We passed the time by walking (past crack heads, heroin addicts and grey skyscrapers  - I though Pretoria was supposed to be pretty!) searching for McDonalds (we eventually found it 45 minutes later by folliwng empty wrappers) and arrived just as it was opening at 6. I had my first ever Maccers breakfast (not actually that bad!), used their strange toilets (they were so high your feet didn’t touch the ground) and managed to nurse our hot drinks there for about 2 hours. The next few hours before we picked up our hire car we spent on the internet and marvelling at some incredibly tacky wedding dresses in a very tacky mall. I feel we got the whole Pretoria experience!

It was great having a car again, I loved Zim but it was difficult getting around and carrying our bags all the time was an arse (and also I have a huge bruise on the side of my hip from my bag which I’m sure is not good!). We headed out of Pretoria past the incredibly pretty University and Gardens (turns out there are some nice bits) and onto a ridiculously expensive toll road (again….welcome back to SA!). We drove basically all day (having a quick stop at a huge mall in Nelspirit which had been built especially for the World Cup and now looked like a ghost town) and arrived in Graskop late afternoon. The next day we were up early to go and see the Blyde River Canyon, apparently it’s the third biggest in the world (Grand Canyon is the first and the Fish River in Namibia is the second), we were slightly disappointed but it was grey and drizzly so the visibility was bad but it was a nice drive and some of the waterfalls we saw were cool.

That afternoon we drove south towards Swaziland (this time avoiding the tolls) and crossed the border late afternoon (here’s a tip - if you’re crossing a border and want to be allowed into the country, try not to accidentally almost run over a policeman on the way…oops!) and arrived at a nature reserve just as the sun was going down.

The next day we gatecrashed a wedding! Turns out the king of Swaziland was getting married (to his 15th wife) and it’s not too difficult to get into the ceremony (although trying to park in a spot reserved for a diplomat is a BAD idea!). The whole day was pretty surreal, we drove into the grounds and were told by the police I would need to cover my knees but wasn’t allowed to wear trousers (seriously the bride is going to have her boobs out and I have to cover my knees!). It was certainly not like any wedding I’ve ever been to before! There were upwards of a thousand people (mainly women) dancing in long lines facing the king. The new wife was the in the middle wearing a special headdress and the dancing involved lots of singing, stamping and topless woman. This literally went on for about 4 hours, randomly interspersed with warriors getting up and running around and some small children doing a traditional Swazi dance which involves kicking your legs so high you hit your face with your knee! Apparently it goes on like this all night and into the next day so after watching for about 4 hours we decided to call it a night and headed back to the hostel.

We woke up the next morning with torrential rain pouring down on the tent so we had to speed and put it down, the biggest problem though is that we were camped in the middle of a (very hilly) national park with only our tiny Chev Spark to get us out. We waited it out a few hours but decided to chance it, we had a few hairy moments, and a few puddles where we just closed our eyes and crossed our fingers but we finally made it out in one piece. We drove to Manzini where there was supposed to be a great craft market (Alice is on the quest for a wooden giraffe) but unfortunately it was closed so we went to an upmarket craft place along the road which had some awesome things but everything was about 10 times the price it would have been at the local market (Alice paid £7 for a magnet!!). After stopping for lunch we carried on back to South Africa (across the world’s quietest but most confusing border) and to St Lucia where we pitched our tent next to an overland truck and it felt just like old times! After exploring the town a little (there is nothing there although Alice bought a ostrich cuddly toy  and I got a great postcard for Cathy) and buying the world’s smallest pineapple (seriously it fits into my hand!) we returned to the hostel to some Zulu warriors dancing, chanting and jumping around next to the campfire. We watched their performance which was very similar to the dancing in Swaziland, resisted the obligatory tip you’re supposed to give and were about to leave when one Zulu (called Vivien) came up to Alice and asked if he could have his photo taken with  her. Turns out he’d had his eye on her throughout the dancing and only needed 11 more cows before he could afford her to be his wife, he’s got her contact details so he’s going to let her know once he’s saved up.

The weather was bad the next day and there’s only really beach at St Lucia so we decided to drive on to Durban, we’d both heard really good things about Durban and its beaches so we were excited to get there. Unfortunately, it’s just like any other city (although with a shocking crime rate) and after almost getting mugged, walking through some slightly sketchy areas, falling asleep on the beach (only to be woken up by rain) and going to a really badly organised museum (thanks LP - it’s listed as an excellent museum) we left feeling pretty disappointed (although the hostel was nice!). The drive from Durban was awful, along rubbish roads with varying speed limits (they seem to do this a lot in SA…change the speed limit from 100 to 60 to 120 to 80 to 100 all in the space of about 5km) and super slow lorries  interspersed with towns where the people just step out in front of you and arrived at our half way point, Port St Johns, in the pissing rain with hailstones the side of golfballs. We decided not to pitch the tent so spent the night in a shitty dorm, with rubbish beds and no mosquito nets so we were bitten alive (despite us both sleeping in full length clothes with shirts over our faces) by morning. The next day was another bad day of driving on much similar roads before we got to East London which is another ‘lovely’ South African industrial city. We checked into the hostel, explored the town (I.e. went to Shoprite and KFC) and played scrabble before bed.

Now, my South Africa experience hasn’t exactly been the best so far - considering apartied ended over 15 years ago, the country is incredibly segregated (which I find really uncomfortable especially coming from somewhere as diverse as the UK), the weather has been bad too (although I guess I can’t really blame this on the country), the accommodation is expensive (seriously £15 for a rubbish bed in a 10 person dorm), and everything too geared up for tourists ( I like to go places that aren't full of people all paying over the odds!). It’s not like I’ve had a bad time here but it’s not been anywhere near as good as some of the other countries we’ve been too, maybe I’m getting travel fatigue but still, I would not be rushing back here in a hurry. Anyway on a positive note, this was all about to change…we had decided (mainly due to lack of money) that we should volunteer somewhere for the last few weeks of our trip and the place we picked was an organic farm called Peas on Earth about 40km away from East London. The farm is run by a lovely couple called Nicky and Colin and they grow herbs, veg and fruit and have chickens, horses, ducks and pigs. In return for free food (and it’s good food!) and accommodation Alice and I have been working here for the last week or so. We’ve done loads of stuff including feeding the animals, weeding the beds, picking fruit and veg and preparing it for market, chopping down trees, trying to communicate with the two farm hands who only speak Xhosa, painting rooms, brushing down the horses, selling at the local market and building fences…basically anything and everything they need doing! It’s been awesome to be in one place for longer than a few days and it’s great to have nice (and healthy) home cooked food again. The other good thing is that I’ve actually found some dogs which not only am I not scared of, I actually (I hate to admit this) quite like! it’s a bit of a breakthrough so hopefully I will be less weary of other random dogs in the future now. The only downside has been the weather has been rubbish (it has rained A LOT) but we’ve come to expect that of SA now!

I will have to upload more pictures later, my internet time is almost up!