It is now the 23rd January (I started writing this entry on the 5th) and we are in Dar es Salaam after leaving our overland tour a day early to avoid traveling into Kenya. This is the first Internet cafe with equipment fast enough to upload photos etc that we have encountered in the last month! In order to avoid fatigue, yours and mine, I will break down the last several weeks into a number of different entries to be enjoyed at your leisure :-). Enjoy!! After leaving Swakopmund, we headed for the Skeleton Coast of Namibia to an area known [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hi Everyone, We are currently at the town of Kasane in Botswana and just visited the Chobe National Park on an early morning game drive. With over 55,000 elephants, Chobe has the highest elephant population in Africa and is the premier wildlife spot in Botswana - unfortunately for us, it rained early this morning and we didn't see a single elephant! The joys of wildlife viewing :-( Anyway, we have seen some cool stuff in the last couple of weeks so I will try and do a proper blog entry with photos etc sometime over the next few days. In the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hi Everyone, Hope you have all been well since our last blog. We are now in the small, very German town of Swakopmund in Central Namibia on day six of our 41 day journey across Africa. After leaving Uganda we flew into Cape Town, South Africa (via Nairobi and Johannesburg) to spend a few days relaxing and seeing the sights before joining our group for the overland trek that will take us from Cape Town to Nairobi, Kenya. Cape Town is a very pretty and modern city very similar in many ways to Sydney, but also quite different. Despite the fact [View Full Entry]

---

---

Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in deep south-western Uganda is home to about half the world's current population of 700 critically endangered Mountain Gorillas (of Gorillas in the Mist fame). The national park is bordered by the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda (not the most stable area in Africa), so it was with some trepidation that we made our way from London to Kampala for the highlight of our four day "express" visit to Uganda. Arriving at the village of Buhoma after a ten hour drive from Kampala we were pleasantly surprised to find that our "tent" was actually a [View Full Entry]

---

---

Once called the "Pearl of Africa" by Winston Churchill, Uganda is a country of great contrast. Even though we only spent four days there, during our extremely quick visit we covered a lot of ground and got to see a number of different parts of the country due to the 12+ hour drives we had to and from Bwindi. Unfortunately our visit was not without a certain amount of stress and frustration (something I think we're going to have to get used to in Africa) - in transit from London at about 30,000ft I was reading the Lonely Planet section on [View Full Entry]

---

---

Ok - our last stop was supposed to be three relaxing days in Costa Rica....or at least that was the intention. As it turned out, we had a couple of nice days at the beach, but the hassle of getting to and from Tamarindo made it less enjoyable than it could have been. The highlight was watching a sea turtle lay about 60 or so eggs on the beach...very cool. Anyway, we are now in London and are about to run out the door to catch our flight to Uganda. As usual we are running very close to the line, so [View Full Entry]

---

---

Arriving at Machu Picchu, "The Lost City of the Incas", was not only the fulfillment of the 45 kilometre Inca Trail (see previous blog) but also the opportunity to live out a dream that I have had since I was a teenager and first became interested in the South American civilizations of the Inca, Maya and Aztecs. Machu Picchu was 'rediscovered' by the American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1915 after a local boy led him through the jungle (via the Inca Trail) to the site that had been hidden from the outside (at least Western) world for several centuries. Numerous theories [View Full Entry]

---

---

Leaving the highlands of Peru, we flew out of Cusco to the small town of Puerto Maldonado to our last stop in Peru - the Amazon Jungle and Basin. From Puerto Maldonado we took a mini-van for about an hour and a half across a rough dirt road through the verges of the jungle to get to the dock at which we boarded our motorized river canoe to make the roughly two hour trip upriver to our eco-lodge bordering the well regarded Tambopata Reserve. The Tambopata river is one of the major tributaries that flows into the Amazon, so while it [View Full Entry]

---

---

How can I describe the three day, forty-five kilometre high altitude trek that took us from the 82 kilometre marker near the village of Ollantaytambo to the ancient and mysterious city of Machu Picchu......bloody hard!! Seriously, hiking the Inca Trail was definitely one of the hardest things I have done physically and mentally, but being the ancient history buff that I am, walking the roads that the Inca used to accelerate the distribution of information, food and valuables across their empire, seeing the ruins scattered along the trail and finishing up at one of the foremost archealogical sites in the world [View Full Entry]

---

---

Cusco, once imperial seat of the mighty Incan empire, is now home to a population of 300,000 and is the bustling, jumping off point for tourists heading to the Inca Trail, Machu Picchu and other Incan ruins in the region. At an altitude of 3,500 metres it was ironically found to have the highest levels of ultraviolet light on earth by a study in 2006 - interesting given the Incas fascination with the sun. Rising to prominence in the 11th Century, Cusco became the capital of the burgeoning Incan empire and with its fertile valleys, abundant glacial water supply and central [View Full Entry]

---

---