Happy New Year everyone!
Am back in Jinja now after an eventful few days,including dodging ebola, viewing gorillas and a near death experience for one of the group while white water rafting on the nile.

The gorillas were absolutey amazing - seeing them was best thing I've ever done and I highly recommend it! They are such magnificent creatures and so gentle too. However, one of the teenage girl gorillas ran up to and tugged at my top, which was quite scary. She was only playing though and the guide rescued me. A silverback also charged one of the other people in my group (luckily just to get past him and not to kill him ;-). We saw lots of babies and they were so cute! I never knew they had afros! No sign of any drumkits though. We had to climb to just under 3000m to find them (not as hard as it sounds as we started at 2500m), but it was half steep rocky terrain or steep overgrown jungle, so it took a good few hours. The scenery was just stunning! Rwanda is quite simply the most breathtakingly beautiful country I've ever been to.

When we were on our way into Rwanda we were told about the ebola virus outbreak and were given lots of information about what to look out for and how to avoid it, including not eating dead monkeys or going to funerals. As there had been an outbreak in uganda, rwanda really didn't want it so were being really strict and only letting the safe people in. Luckily we weren't near any of the affected areas. But it did freak us out slightly.

Yesterday we went white water rafting on the nile and I think that it the scariest thing I've ever done. Much worse than bungee jumping or skydiving. Even though i'd done it before the nile rapids are hardcore grade 5 ones. It was fantastic fun until the raft overturned in a big bad way on one of the more evil rapids and Richard (one of the guys on my tour) was pushed under for aound 45 seconds and had to be rescued. He's now in Kampala in hospital but sounds like he is on the mend. He'll have to fly straight home though. One of the other girls in the group also had a really experience when her raft capsized so it put a bit of a dampener on the new year celebrations. Thankfully everyone is ok. I don't think I'll be rafting again in a hurry. Despite that though, the rest of us had a good knees up last night once we knew everyone was going to be ok.

We've also heard that there are riots in Kenya because of the elections and the borders are currenty closed, so the next part of my trip (2 weeks volunteering in Kisumu) now hangs in the balance. I'm getting daily updates from the people who know though, so I'll have to wait and see if it calms down and think about alternatives.

Anyway, am off to lounge around in the sun. The weather here is just beautiful every single day! Yay!

Take care and happy new year!
Sandra x