Having been woken unacceptably early by an unwanted political party's policies being broadcast by a loudhailer on the back of a pick up cruising painfully slowly up and down the main street we met Charlie and Hattie on the roof top for breakfast.

Having demolished the coffee, cereal and toast, accompanied by some worryingly liquid peanut butter, we spread out the maps and guidebooks on the big table in the bar and started planning! Charlie had the framework of an itinerary and we spent a very exciting hour trying to co-ordinate the logistics connecting his ideas whilst trying to avoid. reading about all of the stunning luxury lodges which were well out of our price range!

As the ideas all started coming together we headed into town with the two simple aims of finding a SIM card and pulling out some cash. Both of these jobs were made significantly harder by the army of 'flycatchers' who soon formed around us. Being typically British and smiling pleasantly at our new friends was a recipe for disaster though as Hattie found out, making conversation even more-so. Bob had the right idea, with a face like thunder and a determined bustle but Hattie was soon being shown endless canvasses of gaudy Tanzanian scenes, all painted by the hawkers Grandmother in order to feed his 20 siblings.... They were like a pack of hyenas around a carcass and the whole experience was really quite intimidating, but Hattie came away with a lovely original painting.

We hid in numerous shops to try and lose our insistent tail but they were very happy to wait for our reappearance and our patience wore thin. Eventually we had a SIM card (our Tanzanian phone number is 0687748557) and our wallets contained enough shillings for the next few days. We collapsed for a well earned lunch break in a little cafe and then arranged to meet up with the company who's vehicle we were hiring. They offered to come and pick us up and after some confusion as to where we were we jumped into their minibus and headed out of town to their office.

The 'office' was actually the owners house and it was certainly off the beaten track. Having been greeted by an out of place fluffy white lap dog called Bush we went through our itinerary with them and settled the balance, a painful experience especially after adding the 5% credit card surcharge... We also got a chance to meet our guide for the first few days, Josh, who closely matched the characteristics of a Masai described in the guide book, arrogant, aloof and aristocratic though this probably wasn't helped by Charlie and I trying to build rapport, asking repeated dumb dumb questions in unnessecary and ridiculous accents, with gestures included, much to the girls displeasure.

Josh put on a brave face and drove us back to the superbly stocked supermarket where we made a shopping list for our victualling trip the next morning. With the light fading we walked back to the hostel, all unwanted attention shrugged off by our new streetwise tactics and returned to our rooms to pack.

Safe in the knowledge that all of Hattie's colour co-ordinated keys fitted all of her colour coordinated padlocks, irrelevant of colour, we ate supper in the hostel and finalised our itinerary plans before retiring to a very welcome bed and our last night in a proper bed for a while...