End of East Africa

G'day! My tour of East Africa ended today. They've dropped us off in Arusha which is a town in Tanzania and we've got about three hours to kill before the 6 hour bus ride back to Nairobi. So much has happened so maybe if I put it in point form I will write less! Yeah right.

* After my last blog update, Dave and I were walking around Nairobi and got scammed either once or twice. Depends on whether the first scam was part of the second scam or not. No time to write the whole story but after giving a small amount of money to a guy who claimed he was one of the porters in our hotel, we were then spoken to by some guys who were "the police" who said they had arrested the guy we gave money to. They wanted to interview us to clear our name and prove we weren't involved in drug trading. Turned out he wanted to take us to a dark looking restaurant to do this interview. this is where we put the foot down and asked for some uniformed police to identify them. We were told to "GO!" at this point and made our way out of Nairobi pretty quickly after that. Scary stuff considering that the least that would have happened was robbery. I tell ya, the beers back at the hotel afterwards were much needed! We learned why Nairobi is sometimes called Nairobbery that day.

* We've seen so many animals in the game reserves. Monc, we've seen two sets of mongoose (also known as meerkats) and they are way cute! Those we saw yesterday were really small and would have fitted in our pockets easily but I already had three baby Elephants and a baby Giraffe to smuggle back at that stage and I was starting to look suspicious.

* Camping in the game reserves has been slightly scary. A couple of them were quite open to animals. One night a lion was heard walking through our camp at about 4.30am and we've also seen bush pigs, Cape Buffalo (big angry bastards!) and hyenas (I think I trust these least of all of them) near our campsites. The two nights that we were warned are most dangerous were the ones that I decided it was best not to get up to use the toilet at night. Better to feel a little discomfort than be eaten.

* Dave got lucky a couple of days ago. No, not like that! They say it's lucky to be shat on by a bird from above. Dave copped a whole lot of luck the other day from a bird that must have been saving up for a special occasion. That bird had been eating a lot of fruit! It gave the tour a laugh.

* We stayed at a Maasai camp and met the people and visited a village and a school about three days ago. I wasn't expecting too much but it was great fun. The village kids that were too young for school came charging out and we were picking them up and throwing them around and swinging them and everything. It was tiring but luckily they are as light as a feather with not an ounce of fat on them. Not starving or anything though which was good. At the school the kids sang us "Heads and shoulders, knees and toes" in funny English and were struggling to get the parts of the face matching up with the words. Another group sang for us a more traditional song and did a dance. Since our group is 10 Aussies and 4 Canadians, we sang Waltzing Matilda, Oh Canada and gave a really bad rendition of "I'm A Little Teapot" but we struggled with the words and the actions on that one and it dissolved into a bit of a shambles.

That'll do for now. Tomorrow Dave and I are in Johannesburg, SA and then we go to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe for a couple of days of seeing the Falls and some sort of adventure stuff like bungee jumping or a flying fox across the falls.
Finally, if you've emailed my gmail email account I can't check it becase the internet browser here can't handle it. If you have something urgent (yeah right) then it can be sent to superdam@hotmail.com. That works everywhere.