I'm resisting the urge to copy and paste the blog entry Kirsty did on her site earlier this morning and am going to write my own! Not that it's a chore or anything... ;) If you want a different view of things though feel free to go to www.offexploring.com/kirstymacdowall!

So anyway, my trip so far in brief:

No. of times the phrase 'I've lost my passport!' uttered in panic: 4
No. of times actually lost passport: 0
No. of times I've said 'I don't really get bitten': 3
No. of bites I have: 15
No. of rhino seen: 1
No. of leopards seen: 4
No. of cheetahs seen: 7
No. of lions seen: lots
No. of elephants seen: lots and lots
No. of wilderbeast/buffalo seen: too many
No. of kills seen: 1
No. of photos taken: 856
No. of cameras lost: 0 (proving you wrong so far dad! >> touch wood <<)
No. of injuries sustained: 1 (and it was kirsty shutting a door on her foot!)
No. of flushing toilets seen in entire trip: no more than 4
No. of new friends made on tour: 21
No. of people on tour: 23
No. of countries visited: 4 (if you count our detour to Egypt on our way to Kenya from Heathrow as our plane had 'technical difficulties' - oh good!)
No. of times I've eaten something and not known what it was: everyday
No. of times we've been hassled by people on the street: about 80
No. of times we've bought something on the street: 1 (and it was a pancake!)

This could go on forever so I think I'll stop there! Although that does pretty much sum up our entire trip so far... but I'll try and elaborate on some of it anyway. (Internet is ridiculously cheap here in Zanzibar, about a pound for one hour, but it took me about half of that to back-up all my photos!).

So after navigating our way from the airport and meeting our tour group and our two south african tour guides in Nairobi we immediately began the relatively long drive to the Masai Mara. They eased us into the backpacking/camping lifestyle slowly as there we got kind of raised camp beds to sleep in, under large static tents, which were actually surprisingly comfortable. Although to be honest I have never had a night where i've been lying awake trying to get to sleep... I'm permanently exhausted from our adventures! Our 3 days safari in the Masai Mara turned out to be everythign I was expecting and more, as our tour guide said we saw more in our first day than most people do on an entire month's tour. This included seeing 4 of the 'big five', including lions extremely close up (our 4x4 drivers raced each other across the extremely bumpy terrain trying to get to things first!) and a leopard lying in the grass completely oblivious to the many cameras trained on him just metres away - that was until some idiot from another tour dropped a fag end in the grass and started a bush fire! The leopard scarpered pretty quickly when the grass started burning around him, as did we... We also saw, and apparantly we were incredibly lucky to get the opportunity although I think it depends on your definition of 'luck'!, some of the Masai men cutting up one of their own cows with a massice machete after it was killed by a lion. They were getting really angry that all us tourists were watching but our drivers seemed pretty oblivious and the family of lions were just chilling under a tree a few hundred metres away waiting to see if they were going to be left anything! (they weren't...). Apparantly the cow had strayed away from the herd and by the time anyone noticed it was too late. Seeing it being chopped to pieces though has rather put me off beef... (not that I see much of that, I think my staple diet at the moment is goat stew!!).

After our few days in the Masai Mar we headed to the border and crossed into Tanzania so we could head to the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Cue another 400 or so photos of animals! This time however we managed to complete our 'big five' and spotted a rhino (I'm probably going to be the only one who knows exactly what that distant black blob is in the photo I took!) and also got a lot closer to some giraffes and zebras. The highlight however (and again we were so lucky to get to see it) was a cheetah and her four cubs stalking and then killing a redbuck (an antelope/gazelle type thing) literally about 20 metres from our 4x4's. Unfortunately I was so frozen with excitement/disgust that I didn't take any photos! It was amazing to see 'natural selection' in Africa at work though...

After all the safari-ing I'm looking forward to the next few days we have on Zanzibar, with nothing really to do apart from lie in the sun and swim in the sea! We did the Spice Tour in Stonetown yesterday which was actually really interesting but I'll have to talk about that another day as I've run out of time!

I hope you're all well... What's going on in the world? We don't get much news out here unless it's about Barack Obama - they LOVE him over here!

Lots of love, Heather xx