Amber and Mat

Zambia - Malawi - Tanzania - Kenya. After being home for four weeks I finally find some spare time to blog about Africa. And now I just don't even know where to begin! Perhaps the airport where my brother and I were reunited...What a disaster! My last words to Jourdain before he left "I will meet you at arrivals and we will check into our connecting flight together. Don't board the plane without me." At Heathrow they checked Jourdain onto both flights (heathrow - Jo'burg &  Joburg to Zambia) so he was never directed, or needed, to come out at arrivals. Cue two and a half hours of pure panic. My flight from Perth arrived in jo'burg at 5am and Jourds landed at 6.57am. I literally watched the clock for two hours getting more and more ... read more

So, this is it. After a few minutes of considering what to write Mat gave me a big cuddle and said "I'm scared" to which I responded "me too". Traveling has been our way of life for the last six months; unpredictable, encapsulating, educational. We've had so many highs and some lows in there too, which we have learnt are just character building. There have been some national tragedies along the way which, at times, seemed to be following us. I said to my Dad last night "we've been pretty unlucky" to which he replied "no, you are the lucky ones." He is so right of course. People said you will come back changed people and I was dubious, they were right too. It will be very hard for us when we return to not always ... read more

So it's 6am and we have just arrived in Cairns, our final stop on the east coast. I normally try and write chronologically but this story is too funny to leave until the end of this blog. At 4am this morning, Mat started shouting "Dad!" in his sleep at quite some volume and he was getting louder and louder. I woke up on the first "Dad!" and was nudging him by the second but my arms were all wrapped up in my sleeping sheet so I couldn't shake him. I knew he was having a nightmare and by the 6th "Dad!" (at this point it was ridiculously loud) Mat woke up. I would just like to add that the bus we were on was full! As soon as he woke up he knew what he'd done ... read more

We have spent the last 9 days with a family in Byron and have loved every minute. This family is quite a large one; our Wwoof hosts, their 6 children (ages 8-17), their cat Rascal and their dog Tara. For most of our stay there has been 2 French Wwoofers here too, Laure and Anthony. Absolute chaos! The family is 15 minutes away from Byron Bay and on top of driving the children around they also dropped us off in Byron pretty much every day! Note to parents: If you thought you had it bad dropping/picking us up, you haven't seen anything!! Anthony and Leure had been here 5 weeks before we arrived and were sleeping in the caravan so we were given the cabin. When we arrived it was all kinds of colours, so our ... read more

So the last week has seen a change of scenery for us as we've been residing in the bush! We stayed with our first Wwoof hosts, lived on their 400 acres of land and worked on thier projects with them. Our hosts have three mahussive plant nurseries and sell their plants at the Farmers Market in Newcastle; they are also herbalists who specialise in treating incurable diseases through herbal medicine and have created their own cosmetic range too. They are both very anti orthodox medicine and believe it is the drugs that pharmaceutical companies make that create illness and disease. To begin we found their views quite hard to digest and their way of talking about those who do take orthodox medicine a little condescending. We questioned the things they said that we couldn't quite comprehend ... read more