2013: Week 8

After taking 3,500 photos on honeymoon, I took a grand total of 4 this week. Happily, our wedding photographer sent through the photos he took on the day, so I've supplemented what I have with a couple of those.

Saturday 16 February

We finally arrived home from honeymoon at lunchtime, well over 48 hours after setting off from the Waterberry Lodge in Livingstone, Zambia. Mum, Dad and Daisy were there to greet us, although the greeting was not exactly overwhelming from Daisy :). Actually I'm happier that she didn't seem to miss us too much; I'd rather that than the opposite. We got right back into the swing of things, which today included trying to show her how to use the camera she got for Christmas, and being told that she was quite happy doing it her own way - that is, holding the camera up to her face but not actually looking through the binocular-style viewfinder, pressing the button and hoping for the best. And the best is usually a picture of the floor. Say cheese!

Sunday 17 February

I bought Jon some cufflinks as a wedding present. The writing on them is quite small so you need a magnifying glass to read it, but it's the thought that counts :).

Monday 18 February

Nanna and Grandpa left today, and Daisy and I had a lazy day at home. Daisy loves to play hide and seek in the sofa cover while we're putting away the sofa bed in the lounge :).

Tuesday 19 February

Jon's gift to each member of his groom's party.

Wednesday 20 February

I had been planning on starting potty training with Daisy this weekend, and when I came into the lounge from the kitchen and found her sitting like this on the potty with her pyjama bottoms round her ankles, I took it as a good sign. Then I suggested to her that we take her nappy off and sit on the potty, and she had a mega-paddy. I concluded that if she wasn't prepared to sit on the potty with her nappy off, she probably wasn't ready to potty-train this weekend, so we abandoned that plan for another day. Incidentally, I love that as well as pulling her pants down, she's also managed to move her top to around her waist :).

Thursday 21 February

My bouquet. I LOVED the flowers we had at the wedding; very simple and very pretty.

Friday 22 February

Butter wouldn't melt, right? ;)

2013: Week 7

Saturday 9 February

Sunrise over the beach on our last morning at the resort before we headed to Stone Town, Zanzibar's main town, for a night.

Sunday 10 February

We had a beautiful sunset dinner on the rooftop terrace of our hotel last night, but the random American man we asked to take our picture didn't do a very good job, so instead of a photo of both of us, you get one of just my husband :).

Monday 11 February

We flew to Dar es Salaam yesterday and got up at 03:30 this morning (second time in two weeks - I won't be making a habit of this!) to fly to Livingstone in Zambia via Johannesburg this morning. By the time we arrived in Livingstone, only one of our bags had made its way there too, and unfortunately for us it was the one that contained only our shoes and our dirty laundry, but we did get the other bag back with our toiletries and clean clothes in it 24 hours later, so we were only smelly for a day :). This was our accommodation at the Waterberry Lodge in Zambia, taken from the lodge's boat as it took us for a sunset cruise this evening - how cute???

Tuesday 12 February

Today we did the main thing we came to Livingstone to do - visit the Victoria Falls. This time of year is rainy season in Zambia and the Falls were very full (although they won't peak until late March/early April), which meant there was a LOT of spray being thrown up and taking photographs was difficult. Here's one we took of us right at the brink of the Falls.

Wednesday 13 February

I have two photographs to show today and none for Friday so I'll just use some artistic licence with the dates on the last three pictures for this week :). This morning we went on a walk through the nearest couple of villages to the lodge with our guide, Webbie, who lives in the village and works at the lodge. Every time we saw some children (most of whom should have been in school!) they asked us to take their picture, then clamoured to see themselves on our camera :).

Thursday 14 February

Yesterday afternoon we went fishing on the Zambezi river with Chrispin from the lodge. I caught a fish! It was a tiger fish, as was evident from its teeth. It was really hard work reeling it in, and we both subsequently had bites then lost them trying to reel them in, so this was our only catch of the afternoon. Despite that, we LOVED it! I can totally see the attraction on a nice day to sitting on a riverbank or a boat and waiting for a bite. I wouldn't bother if it was raining, though!

Friday 15 February

We left Zambia yesterday morning on a flight to Johannesburg, then had a 9-hour layover before our flight to Amsterdam. Rather than sitting in the airport all that time, we took a train to Sandton, a northern suburb of the city, and had a meal in a great steak restaurant in Nelson Mandela Square, a swanky shopping centre. Here we are with the shopping centre's namesake. When our flight left later on, there was a problem with the cabin pressurisation and at 04:30, having sat at the gate for four and a half hours waiting for it to be fixed, we were told that they couldn't fix it and we'd have to disembark, go back through immigration, pick up our luggage and be taken to a hotel. We arrived there at 07:00 and had four hours' sleep before getting a call from our travel agent saying we'd been re-booked onto an overnight flight to Paris that evening, then a flight to London on Saturday morning. We were pretty tired when we eventually did get home, having only had eight hours' sleep over the previous two nights, but things could have been a lot worse, and it didn't detract from a fabulous honeymoon :).

2013: Week 6

Saturday 2 February

Today our driver took us to Arusha Airport for our flight to Zanzibar and a week at Breezes Beach Resort. Welcome cocktails awaited us on the first evening :).

Sunday 3 February

Today we booked a dinner in a private 'room' next to the beach with our own chef and waiter. We loved it! The food was fabulous and our waiter, Josephat, became a good friend over the course of the week.

Monday 4 February

There was a bottle of bubbly waiting for us in our room when we arrived, and we drank it on our terrace before dinner this evening. You wouldn't believe how long it took us to set up this shot, and how many 'practice' shots we took before we were happy with the result :).

Tuesday 5 February

I actually took this photo on Wednesday on our trip to Prison Island but I already have a shot for that day and I wanted to put this one in somewhere. I spotted the potential for a great photo while we were waiting for our man to bring his boat round to the dock so we could go back to Stone Town after the tour of the island, so while he was doing that I ran round to see if the photograph would live up to the image I had of it in my head. I think it does, even though I forgot to check that the F number was low enough so that I got the anchor in focus and the boat a bit blurry in the background. Turns out the F number was at 7, which is quite low but I could probably have set it a bit lower so the background was even more blurry. Nevertheless, I like it :).

Wednesday 6 February

This was the main reason for our trip to Prison Island (whose building was never actually used as a prison, as immigration took off in a big way after it was built so it became a quarantine station). There's a Giant Tortoise Sanctuary here, whose inhabitants are second in size only to the Galapagos Tortoises. The one in the photo is the oldest here, and their ages are all written on their shells. Yep, that's 189 years old!

Thursday 7 February

Drinks and nibbles on our terrace, courtesy of the resort. This honeymoon lark is great!

Friday 8 February

Today we did by far the most rewarding thing of our trip: we went to the two schools (one charity, one government) in the local village and gave them each some money. This is me with some of the kids in the first school, which was the charity one and was significantly better off than the government-run one. One of the restaurant supervisors, Mufti, lives in the village and drove us there on his day off so we could make our donations. He told us the following day that the headteacher of the charity school, who wasn't there when we visited, and also the village chief, asked him to pass on their thanks to us. We gave them $150 each and the principal of the government school said they would use the money to build a new classroom, which humbled us a lot. For the rest of the day, everything we did was measured in school fees - a Coke, for example, cost the equivalent of one month's school fees. Wow.

2013: Week 5

Saturday 26 January

Wedding Day! We had a fab day, despite there still being lots to do this morning (I was at the reception venue at 08:00 and Jon spent a couple of hours there between 09:30 and 11:30). In the end it all went smoothly, and anything that didn't was kept far away from me so I didn't know about it :).

Sunday 27 January

All we did today was clean up the venue (actually, our families did that; by the time we got there it was almost all done), go out for lunch, pack to go on honeymoon and drive to Heathrow, so here's another photo from yesterday.

Monday 28 January

We got up at 03:30 this morning for our 06:30 flight to Amsterdam, and then a ten-hour flight to Kilimanjaro Airport in Northern Tanzania. We arrived at our lodge at around 22:30. It's a shame we're leaving here at 08:30 tomorrow morning, as this place is gorgeous!

Tuesday 29 January

On our first day on safari, our driver, Peter, told us his nickname was Mr No Guarantee - he would try his best to find all the animals we wanted to see but he couldn't guarantee it :).  What he could guarantee today, though, was elephants. We drove through Tanzania's principal northern city, Arusha, and spent the afternoon driving round Lake Manyara National Park. Sure enough, we saw loads of elephants, and also lots of baboons.

Wednesday 30 January

Today we drove from Lake Manyara through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to Lake Ndutu, which borders the Serengeti National Park. Within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is the Ngorongoro Crater, which is what's left after a volcano higher than Mount Everest erupted and collapsed in on itself thousands of years ago. We didn't go into the crater today but we will do on Friday. For now, we just stopped at a viewing point on the rim of the crater and got a random Frenchman to take our photo.

Thursday 31 January

Today was definitely the best day on safari in terms of seeing animals. This morning we saw, among other things, three lionesses and two cheetahs, but my favourite sight was of this beautiful leopard with a cub in her mouth. Having spoken to other safari drivers, we managed to establish that this leopard had given birth to two cubs, probably within the last 24 hours and possibly even as recently as this morning, and was transporting them one by one to the shade of a bush. We found her as she was moving the second of the two cubs, then once she'd got inside the bush we didn't see her again, and we probably waited almost an hour to see if she would come out :). Our driver said it's rare to see leopards in this area, and even rarer to see one with a cub like this, so we felt very lucky.

Friday 1 February

Today we left the Serengeti and drove back through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, going down into the crater itself to see if we could see a rhino. There are only about 20 black rhino living there, but they don't leave the crater as the sides are so steep, so they're a bit like sitting ducks. Having said that, the floor of the crater covers 100 square miles, so you still have to look quite hard to find one. We did manage to find one, in fact we found three, but while they were lying down, which they were, they just looked like big rocks, and even when one did stand up (after we waited for well over an hour), we were far enough away that it still looks fairly small in our photos :). Instead, here's a photo we took yesterday afternoon when we went on a game drive into the Serengeti. There were zebra, buffalo, wildebeest, gazelles and numerous species of bird everywhere, in all directions. Beautiful.