Africa!

We flew out to Africa early on Wednesday morning. There had been a slight panic at 3am when I realised that my passport wasn't anywhere in the house... We found it about half an hour before leaving for the airport, in a box of stuff I had stored at the Abery's place. It was a huge relief, as I had visions of it being sealed in a box, sealed in our container, sitting in the Anglo-Pacific depot ready to sail to NZ!

We had a good BA flight out of terminal 5 to Nairobi. We met Richard & Rachel Roe at Nairobi airport. They had come from NZ, via a couple of nights in Jo 'Burg, & arrived an hour or two before us.

Thursday was a big sightseeing day. We started out at an animal orphanage where they hand rear orphaned baby elephants & rhinos. When they are 3 years old they re-release them back into the wild. They only open the centre to the public for one hour each day, so that the animals don't get too habituated to people. The younger group of elephants wore blankets to protect them from the cold, and were hand-fed bottles of milk. They were very very cute. They then bought out an adorable baby rhino...

They kept the baby rhino away from the crowds where they could make an easy escape. They explained that a rhino which was reared at the centre but had been released in the wild still tended to turn up during the viewing hour for a bit of attention. Sure enough, he made an appearance & they hurried the baby away as the older one was likely to attack it.Next was the giraffe centre where you could stand on a platform and hand feed Rothschild giraffes. Will even gave one a big smooch! Luckily their saliva is antiseptic...On Friday the plan was to travel to a Maasi Education centre in Kuku, as we had a contact for the place through Curto. However after discussing with the travel centre options for getting there, we decided it wouldn't really be feasible. Kuku is out in the middle of nowhere, & transport options were tricky, to put it mildy. It would have cost a fortune to get out there. We had a few days to kill before we were due to start our safari in Arusha, so we decided to head into Tanzania early & spend 3 nights in Moshi, right at the foot of Mt Kiliminjaro. It pretty much took the whole day on the bus to get here, but that did include a hold-up of a couple of hours at the Kenyan-Tanzanian border where a couple on our bus had insufficient funds to pay for the Tanzanian visa. In the end we had to leave them behind to catch the next bus passing through...Moshi is a cool little place. We are staying in a good cheap hotel which has a rooftop terrace giving amazing views over Kili. It has been shrouded in cloud all day today, so hopefully it will be clearer tomorrow for a few pics. We did get a glimpse of it yesterday, & our bus driver was kind enough to pull over so the tourists could take some pics. Today was a very nice chilled day spent wandering around the markets. It's a relaxed place with not a huge amount of tourism, apart from people climbing Kili. There doesn't seem to be the hassle here that you get in a lot of African towns. In an hour or so we are heading up to our roof-top terrace for our own 'happy hour'. Rich & Rachel bought all sorts of goodies over from NZ, including a block of speights beer, & a lovely bottle of NZ Sauv Blanc!