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 :).