Hello from Africa!  We finally managed to pull ourselves away from St. Lucia after a week on the beach-swimming and snorkeling.  We made our way to a Zulu town called Eshowe.  We had a short stay there but while we were there we visited their museum and went for several hikes. The first hike led us to their tree top boardwalk which was 10 m in the air.  The following day, we hiked to a series of waterfalls that were well hidden from the town.  At t...

After leaving Kruger in South Africa, we set off for another mountain kingdom, Swaziland. A little about Swaziland, it's a little smaller than Lesotho. It also has a king, Mswati III, but he's more of a despot than Letsie III, as he is not accountable to the Parliament so he spends spends spends. In fact, polygamy is acceptable in Swaziland and the king leads the way with 15 wives. This does not help in encouraging people to be faithful to their partners which ...

Kruger kicks ass. Really, that about sums it up. It totally proved to us that we are huge animal lovers. Even seeing warthogs got us excited. We left Nelspruit early in the morning with 5 Dutch backpackers. We got to the park, had a quick breakfast and then set out in our open-air safari truck. We didn't see much for the first hour, despite hearing rumours of a pride of 10+ lions roaming nearby. We saw kudus and impalas, both a type of antelope (I think). Th...

We're now in Nelspruit, about to head to Swaziland for a week or so. We've had the most exciting week; I don't think that we've had time to really process all of the happenings. First of all we headed to Hoedspruit to do our hot air balloon ride. We finally found the place we were staying at, One Stop Akkommodaskie, and we settled in. It was an awesome place and the owners were great. We got up for the 6am flight, drove to the launch site, saw them inflate t...

Hello from the scariest city in the world--Johannesburg! (Luckily, we're safe behind cement walls topped with electric wires and surrounded by security cameras, etc!) We're doing well, staying at a friend's place that is very safe. We're very emotionally drained from our time in Lesotho and then at Our Place (the AIDS hospice in Bloemfontein). We finally got up the nerve to leave the house (which is quite nice, I might add). It's in an upscale, predominantl...