Well , last blog finally! After this there is not even a whole day in Johannesburg then home via Sydney. Yes it's time to come home, especially as my beloved pooch is very sick and poor Chelsea has had to do a bone marrow aspirate and blood transfusion. So to get here was a bit weird. We were picked up at the hotel by the Tour Co van then went back to the airport transfer station where we'd been at 10 pm the night before, then changed to a City Express bus fo...

Back again, 3 days into our 4 day tour. Turns out the 'Garden Route' doesn't mean gardens/ vineyards like I thought but refers to the lush green scenery and many rivers / streams from the high rainfall in this area. The area is east from Cape Town towards Port Elizabeth, sort of along the coast, through many very exclusive holiday towns( for whites only, with the black townships always 3-5 Kms along the road) And EVERY beach or headland we have stopped at ther...

Well, that view is NOT what we saw when we climbed Table Mt! By the time we got to the top the whole city was covered in cloud , tho the top where we were was clear- but freezing cold. So we scampered around the top which is massive, looked at all the plants( there is more plant variety on this Mt than the whole of UK ) and got the chair lift down as we didn't have time to walk back down. It was surprisingly hard to climb up with massive rocks to scramble up. Ca...

Back again. We had a very delayed flight from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls as the plane was kaput in Harare and they had to fly one in from Zimbabwe for us, but we finally got here. We couldn't see the Falls from the plane, as the airport is 20 Kms away in the middle of nowhere. It is incredibly dry here, just sticks of trees and sand everywhere. ( from the Kalahari Desert apparently) just so different to the green countryside up north. The Lodge had no recor...

Well hello from the beach.It's great here! We're on Zanzibar Is off the Tanzania coast. What a comparison to the misty green mountains of Rwanda! We had a shortish flight to Dar Es Salaam over Arusha and Mt Kilimanjaro which was exciting, then a lengthy wait, with xraying of our stuff on arrival, then into transit, where it was done again, then again going into the gate area! A b----y pain as Courtney can't be scanned so it takes much explanation to get her aro...