Just doing the final packing for a 3 week trip to Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya. The blog lives and so watch this space for more writing as the trip gets underway. [View Full Entry]

---

---

Home Again It's been almost a week now. The deep winter duvet has yet to lose its appeal as the weather forecasters describe the evenings in London as "mild". It's less than 10 degrees ! How is that "mild". Brrrrrrrrr. I'm not writing this to whinge but it feels very weird being back and to not be paying less than 50p for a hair cut and beard trim. Good news - Travelblog email notifications are working again I'm told. Only just realised that you haven't been receiving notifications for the last 4 or 5 blogs - including my rant about the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Access to internet over the past couple of months has been sporadic as you have probably noticed. We got back to Nkhata Bay on Thursday night after travelling down from Arusha the previous Sunday (the train from Dar to Mbeya is VERY slow) We leave here on Friday and finally head back to the UK on Saturday - where have those 6 months gone ? I have lots of blogging to do. . . like our train journey from Mombasa to Nairobi; Our mad rush through the Rift Valley trying to take in as many lakes as possible (Naivasha, Nakuru and [View Full Entry]

---

---

Breathless On Mount Kenya It's the second highest point on the African Continent, is easily accessible from Nairobi and, with Point Lenana, at 4,890m, described as "trekable", it's no wonder there is a constant stream of tourists and backpackers rolling into Nanyuki looking for a quick and easy taste of the high mountains and falling into the hands of often poorly experienced "guides". But let's get this in perspective. Would you consider trying to climb up to Everest Base Camp in just three days ? No - it would take a couple of weeks at least. So, why should it be [View Full Entry]

---

---

Matatus To Watamu After spending New Year dancing around fires in Paje, we sped back up to Stone Town in a rainstorm, tarpaulin flapping around our ears as our Dalah Dalah screached through the home of the red colobus monkey. A super fast ferry back to Dar and, after a day spent sorting out bus tickets in Dar, we were heading north towards the Kenya border and to Mombasa. After a brief stop in Tanga, we hit our first unsealed road as another storm hit us and we slid our way through a muddy border post. We spent a couple of [View Full Entry]

---

---

New Years in Paje and Bwejuu Hop in a dallah dallah and head to the beach again - Paje here we come. Squeezed into the back of a Zanzibari dallah dallah surounded by deisel containers, bags of coconut husk and bananas is THE way to travel. It's cheap and very fast and you get to meet the people of Zanzibar (OK, we were trying to make up for splashing out on taxis to / from Matemwe). En route we discovered that the Seven Seas wasn't in Paje but was actually in Bwejuu, a small village about half an hour's walk up [View Full Entry]

---

---

Stone Town Crumble We had planned to head back to the Tanzanian mainland and travel north of Dar to spend New Year closer to the Kenyan border. As we ticked off all of the fully booked places we called, we realized that we would just have to stay on Zanzibar - damn ! It's horrible here ! Paje and Bwejuu sounded good ("more of a party scene but equally good for wandering along the perfect white sandy beaches") so we started calling around - only to find that Paje was fully booked also. Paradise Beach Bungalows in Paje (A Japanese run [View Full Entry]

---

---

Those Bounty Moments It's one of those moments you can't resist - the phone rings (turned on just to check for messages) and you can't help, looking out over the icing sugar sand into the turquoise lagoon, past the coconut palms and over the dancing beach crabs, shouting into the mouthpiece, in true Trigger Happy TV style - "Hello! I'm on a paradise beach in Zanzibar. It's all a bit shit really. Too much sand !" We decided to do some serious relaxing after what was for me, a pretty hectic and very demanding four months of voluntary work. What better [View Full Entry]

---

---

Four Days To Paradise The bus journey from Mbeya to Dar was long and tiring but gave us a unique view of Tanzania all the way from the Southern Highlands right down to the coastal plains. Leaving Mbeya in thick mountain fog at 7am (the first time since arriving in Africa that "7am" has really meant 7am - the irate Scandanavian Line bus driver blasting his horn at us as we casually sat eating chapatis and sipping spiced chai in the bus depot breakfast bar) we stormed through towns, the almost constant descent helping the crazed driver hit impossible speeds as [View Full Entry]

---

---

On The Road Again Malawi has been very hard work and very rewarding and I have lots to post once I get some time to sit and upload some of my notes from the past 5 weeks. We'd planned to leave Nkhata Bay on Sunday morning but I managed to pick up a nasty throat infection which turned to tonsilitis and which had me in bed shivering and sweating until Tuesday evening. We finally left Paul, Claire and Jorda Norrish to enjoy their own Xmas at Njaya on Wednesday morning and travelled north as far as Karonga - the last major [View Full Entry]

---

---