We know this is long over due but computers are few and far between in Africa and when you do find one it's so painfully slow!!

We arrived in Nairobi after a 5 hour delay at Heathrow airport. This time it wasn't due to the usual luggage delays that normally occur, but due to maintenance being carried out on the plane. As long as the maintenance kept our plane in the air, we didn't care how long it took. However while the maintenance was being carried out, a fire broke out in the hanger our plane was in, so we had to wait for another plane to land, be cleaned and re-stoked. We ended up flying out after midnight instead of the scheduled 7pm and arrived in Nairobi at midday instead of 6am. We were just hoping that our transfer would still be meeting us at Nairobi airport and thankfully he was. Once we had checked into our pre-departure hotel we weren't really sure what to do with ourselves due to the 'Nairobbery' and 'Nairoburglary' warning signs in our hotel and we were advised not to venture out after 7pm and take a taxi everywhere. You could say that we were feeling a wee bit nervous. We had a few hours to kill before our pre-departure meeting so we had lunch in the hotel bar and then at 5pm we caught a taxi less than 5mins drive to another hotel for our meeting where we met the people on our tour. Our first tour was 3 days/2nights in the Masai Mara. The group was 12 people, made up of Aussies and Brits and we were the two token Kiwis. After the briefing meeting we walked back to the our hotel with one of the guys from our tour (safety in numbers) as he was staying at the same place as us. On our way we stopped by a supermarket and picked up a couple of local beers and sat on the hotel roof terrace getting to know our fellow traveler. Next morning we loaded up the truck. The truck takes 30 people when full and as there was only 12 of us it was pretty spacious, we had a window seat each. We headed off on the first part of our Africa safari - a tour of the Masai Mara. We travelled for about 4-5 hours stopping off for lunch on the way. The infrastructure isn't that great, we bumped and rocked along pot holed and uneven roads, some roads weren't even sealed, they were just dirt and mud. At one point Shannene stood up and looked through the front window of the truck to see what the road was like ahead and said to Guy "oh great there's a sealed road coming up, we'll soon be off this bumpy dirt road" and Guy said "we are on the sealed road!!" So even sealed roads made for a rough ride too. You could try and doze off for a little while, but you were soon jerked awake when we hit a bump in the road and sitting at the back of the truck was even worse. As we past through small towns, some nothing more than shacks on the side of the road, children waved and smiled enthusiastically. You couldn't help but wave back. Guy reckoned we should have bought one of those giant foam hands you get at sports games - the children would have gotten a real kick out of it and may have saved our aching arms from all the waving.
There was a great set up at the Masai Mara camp, we didn't even have to pitch our tents, this camping millarky is great, a piece of cake !! They had permanent spacious tents with camp beds in them along with mattresses, steps leading up to the entrance and a thatched roof. The tents were set up like a little village and they even had locks on the doors. That evening we had spag bol for tea and Shannene had a separate vege dish. That night, tucked up in our sleeping bags you could hyenas in the distance and something that Shannene thought sounded like a warthog,but was in fact our tour lead Has, snoring in the tent next door. Next morning we boarded the bus and set off to the Masai Mara National Park. We had a brilliant first day on the look our for the big 5 wild animals - Lion, Rhino, Buffalo, Elephant and Leopards We saw two lions who had just moments before we arrived caught a wilder beast. We didn't see the actual kill but they were sitting under the shade of a tree catching their breath. They were still panting and recovering from the chase with their kill proudly on display in front of them. We also saw three cheetahs sunning themselves on a rock, stretching and yawning- they were absolutely beautiful. There were warthogs who are so forgetful they will be running away from their prey suddenly stop to eat some grass and think to themselves why was I running again and then see their prey right behind and think ahh yes that's why best get a move on. Giraffes ever so graceful, loads of zebras with their individually designed black and white stripes and a family of elephants. The baby elephants were so funny as they have problems trying to control their trunks when they are young as they are made up of so many muscles that they need to learn to control. So their trunks were swinging all over the shop!! Not to mention loads of impala, Giselle, ostrich and wilder beast. We also stopped off at a river where hippos hung out in the water and crocodiles on the banks. We had an armed ranger who took us on a walk along the river bank to get a better view of the hippos and crocs. He said that the hippos can be extremely fast movers (hence the gun) and showed us the tracks where they had walked down to the waters edge. It was an absolutely incredible first day, can't even think how many photos we both took and we have so many more days of animals ahead of us, it was just so exciting. As there were only 12 of us on the truck we had so much window space to view the animals and take lots of photos, so no jostling for prime position, but we must have looked like a bunch of paparazzi to the animals though, flashes going off left, right and centre. Everyone was in such high spirits after our first game drive and as animals can be so unpredictable, plus the parks are huge you never know if/what you are going to see, we really did see a lot. Even our tour leader Has, said that we had a great animal spotting day. On the way back to camp we stopped off at the local Masai village where they explained village life - men tended the stock (they always had to be on their guard moving the animals every day ensuring they had enough grass to eat and making sure no wild animals attacked them) and the women fetched the firewood,carried water,cooked and built their homes which were made out of cow dung. Cattle is very important to the village,not only as a form of food, but status (more cattle you are the wealthier you are and also used as a dowry) and the cow dung is used to build their houses. They showed us inside their homes which were very basic a fire in the middle with a small hole in the ceiling for the smoke to escape and rooms dug out off to the side,no doors but a curtain partitioning off from the fire. The whole family would live in one house including the Grandparents. They showed us where they kept their cattle at night time (fenced in, in the centre of the village) secure from wild animals, we tasted their homemade beer made from the fruit of the sausage tree (very potent !!) and both the men and women danced for us which of course we had to participate in as well (more entertaining for them than us I'm sure!). Before we left we stopped by their market stalls which were also made of of cow dung, where they showed us their wares that were for sale, such as jewellery and wooden carvings. One man tried to sell Guy a lion tooth and a lion claw. It all seemed very wrong to us, we just hope it died of natural causes and wasn't hunted and how exactly would you explain that to customs?? One more night spent in the Mara and then we headed back to Nairobi to join the rest of our group for the start of the 42 day tour down to Cape Town.
After our pre-departure meeting and we loaded up the truck we set off around 9:30am. Our group is now 23 people, some of our original group have split up as people go different ways on different tours of Africa. We have a new tour leader named Mat who is American - apparently he used to be a professional tennis player (note to find out his surname and google him) and then a script writer (nothing made it to the big screen though) and now he's a tour leader in Africa- he sold everything back home and now lives on a truck, all his worldly possessions in his back pack and is traveling Africa. Day One (and many more to come we're sure) was spent trying to remember everyone's names. We sat at the back of the truck with Kevin from Canada and Emma and Helen from Ireland. Little did we know on that first day, that our many days at the back of truck were going to be spent in fits of laughter with the Irish girls.