After the mountain gorillas, the Serengeti National Park and Ngorogoro Crater Conservation Area are the highlight of our trip, and we’re all hugely excited as we head out from Arusha in jeeps, leaving Hyena behind for a few days. We drive up and along the crater rim before descending onto the vast Serengeti plain - a truly awesome place, barren and dry. Now that we’ve seen all the prey, our focus at the Serengeti is the predators. We instruct our driver and guide, Julius, that we only want to stop for elephant, lions, cheetah and leopards. We’ve been told that leopards are rare and difficult to spot (no pun intended!), but pretty soon we pull up along 15 or so other jeeps all staring intently at a tree... where a leopard is dozing, it’s tail hanging ... read more

After what seems like an eternity, but has only actually been 17 days, we hit our first safari park and go for a game drive in Hyena (who’d have thought you could stalk wild animals in a big yellow truck?!). Lake Nakuru National Park is known for its flamingoes, which gather in prodigious numbers to sift for food at the edge of the lake, but the park is also home to zebra, antelope, impala, buffalo, rhino, giraffe and just a small number of big cats. On our first drive, we spot all the main African staples (zebra, antelope etc.) - getting them out of the way before we hit the Maasai Mara and Serengeti, where we don’t want to waste precious driving time looking at prey! We’re lucky to see not just a white rhino, but ... read more

Today we enter Rwanda, a country filled with excitement because they represent the home of the gorillas for us, but a place also filled with distant recollections of the Rwandan genocide which happened only 15 years ago. Driving into the country, the scenery changes dramatically, the low-lying plains of Uganda replaced with narrow valleys and steep hillsides - all utilised for agriculture. Rarely have I seen cultivated land so high up... the land is filled with tea plantations and other food crops, and the locals toiling in the fields stop their work and watch us as we pass. Our first stop is the capital city, Kigale, which occupies a commanding position on a hill amid a series of dramatic valleys. We go to the genocide museum, established in the aftermath of the violence to fuel reconcilliation ... read more

I arrive in Nairobi and head straight to the rendezvous with my truck - Hyena. The first 73 days of my trip through Africa will be on an overland truck, from Nairobi to Cape Town. We will pass through ten countries and cover more than 5,000km, starting off in East Africa and working our way slowly south and west, to finish at the southernmost point on the continent. We start off by driving north through the great Rift Valley, stopping on the way to buy provisions. While the truck is parked up, I chat to Christian and Justin from the Democratic Republic of Congo - refugees who have walked hundreds of kilometres to camp outside Nairobi’s UN compound, in a desperate wait for a job or Western sponsorship. I expected stories like this in Africa, but ... read more