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When we finaly got to the lodge, we were pleasantly supprised to find that is was amazing!!! It was perched on top of a hill in the middle of a massive savanah so you could see for miles. Even kilimanjaro could be seen in the distance! Antonia and her mum were still out sortionn out antonia's ID so we had lunch with Ian (her dad) who is a very funny person and was great to have a chat to. Luke then went for a 'nap' and was asleep for 3 hours when Antonia finaly arrived. It was so so amazing to see her again! After a massive hug we decided to wake luke up. We crept into the tent where luke was sleeping and antonia lept gracefull onto the bed and broke it. Luke then woke up out of a deep sleep and he was so so dazed and confused. He took a while to get his bearings before he relised that someone was in his bed. At first he thought it was Nicky, who we had only just met the day before, until he finaly realised it was Antonia!
Later on we went for a night 'drive' where the car broke down, about 500 meters downhill from the lodge. We then had to get the tyre off to see what was wrong while nicky was shining the spotlight around to search for lions! We finaly got the tyre off to find something had snapped so we obviously just hit it with a spanner so we could drive back to the lodge to get it fully fixed. Getting to know Helen, Ian and Antonia more was so lovely as they are such amazing people. They own the lodge we were in and did community projects from the lodge, working with schools and a village.
The next morning we got up early to go on a game drive and we saw some lions!! There were 2 lionesses and 5 cubs of varying ages. They really weren't bothered at how close we were! They were so so beautiful though! We then got back to the lodge and had a massive fry up and tea followed by a game of perudo, more catching up and then lunch. After lunch we went down to one of the local schools and started to do sketches of animals to liven the place up a bit. This was great fun as the children were just playing around us and being generally sweet.
After spending some hours there we went on another game drive which turned into a night drive. We managed to find another pride of lions in the dark then as we were going back to the lodge we found that ha huge herd of elephants were blocking the road! These elephants have been known to charge cars so we had to wait for so so long until they got out our way.
When we finally got back we had an amazing BBQ. Staying at the lodge was a large group of Irish pre-honeymooners. They drank quite a lot and were subsiquetnly hillarious! They sadly had to go to bed early as they were leaving at 4 the next morning.
ON the 11th, we went on another early morning game drive. We were fairly disapointed at what we had seen until we stumbled across three cheetahs!!! Such beautiful and graceful animals just resting in the shade of a tree. They were quite young so played a little bit before moving off out of our eyesight.
later on we continued with the sketching of the school and started to paint a little bit before out evening game drive. Antonia had recieved money from a scholarship she had won at Kingswood to do the painting of the school to help with their education.
The evening drive was amazing!! We saw a few wildcats, striped hyeena and a porcupine who was running across the road! I got covered in dust from sitting on top of the car so I definately needed a shower afterwards! A family of Austrian/Italians had arrived and were friends of the Leckies so we got to know some more people. They had 3 children roughly the same age as us so it was great fun to have them around and chat to them about where they lived and what they were doing. The eldest, Gartens, invited me luke and Antonia to his house near Diani for a swim and lunch. So so kind of him, but sadly we weere going to be in Tanzania at that point... We all stayed up untill 12 talking until Nicky and Gartens decided they needed sleep so me luke and antonia just talked for ages afterwards! We migrated to Antonias room were our conversation became very deep for such a late time! The other two then fell asleep in that room so I went downstairs to have an entire room to myself.
The next morning I woke up first so i went up to wake the other two. As I was walking to Antonias room, a bush baby came and perched on the fence right next to me and just stared at me! It was so so amazing! We were sadly leaving this day so we had to say goodbye to Nicky. This was very sad as we had vecome quite close to her despite the 20 year age gap! We'll definately try and keep in contact with her.
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