I’m writing this post from my comfortable window seat in our somewhat-obnoxious-but-effective “moonvehicle” that’s been the center of our lives for the last seven days. This leg of our journey has been in parts hectic, fun, dull, and exhilarating as we travel for long hours between campsites where we set up camp on arrival and take it apart (often very early) in the morning before departing for our next stop.

We left Zambia on the morning of the 24th after a last day wandering around the charming town of Livingstone. Livingstone is a curiosity because it is very Westernized, probably due to the flood of tourists that visit every year to see Victoria Falls. The people are extremely friendly and endlessly curious about Canada. They also seem to be walking encyclopedias about Canadian politics. “Aha, Canada! How is Steven Harper? Jean Chretien! Kim Campbell! Brian Mulroney!”

From Livingstone, through Botswana and into South Africa, the Western influence asserts itself more and more as we’ve watched the Africa we’ve known for the last two-and-a-half months melt away to be replaced by gleaming shopping malls, well-maintained highways, and maybe most importantly, the first soft-serve ice-cream we’ve had since we got here. It’s nice to be back in surroundings that are more familiar, but there’s more than a little sense of yearning for the grittier lifestyle we’d adapted to in East Africa. It’s most likely exacerbated by the fact that our tour is on a tight schedule and the only stops we make are at malls for stocking up on supplies and at our campsites, which have been unfailingly well-equipped with running water, hot showers, and often a bar and a swimming pool. It affords us little time to get a sense for the real Africa of these places.

Botswana in particular flew past in a 3-day blur of asphalt and concrete, although we did spend one fantastic night bush camping next to a watering hole in the heart of a jungle home to all sorts of wild things, including lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, etc. Although I was kind of hoping to be woken by a lion’s roar, we had to settle for the trumpeting and crashing of a herd of elephants dropping by for a nighttime drink.

We were woken in the morning by a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder followed shortly by a downpour. Solo thunderclouds meander the landscape here and deliver the rain as though from a huge, heavenly hose.

Despite the more modern infrastructure and homey amenities, much of the area is still wild and untouched. Elephants roam the forests and fields of Botswana; it’s not uncommon to see a herd of elephants grazing in a grove of trees beside a busy highway. Every campsite includes warnings to look out for snakes. In one campsite a seven-fingered helper showed us the baby spitting cobra he’d caught earlier that day, the foot-long snake writhing and rearing, its hood open as it tried to spit its venom into the helper’s eyes. The helper’s other three fingers were lost in an unfortunate incident with a puff adder.

From Botswana we passed into South Africa. The border crossing was quick and easy—they’ve all been for that matter, usually with little to no wait, a few friendly questions, a stamp and a visa and we’re on our way. We visited the world-famous and breathtaking Kruger National Park yesterday, another gem in Africa’s fabulous collection of wildlife reserves. Lots of animals, beautiful landscape, and without question the most petrifying and exhilarating encounter we’ve had with an animal to date.

To make a long story short, this is what a family of white rhinos looks like standing on a road in the park.

And this is what the largest of those rhinos looks like a split second before it charges your vehicle, digging its horn into the undercarriage and lifting you a few inches off the ground before your driver speeds away.

Thankfully nobody was hurt, including the rhino. And it makes for a terrific story—nobody we’ve talked to, including guides, drivers, and rangers, have ever heard of or seen something like this happen.

Mother nature celebrated our adventurous day by delivering us the most astounding thunderstorm I’ve ever seen. Lightning lit the sky almost constantly—at times it was more often light than dark, and sometimes the light was so bright it gave a momentary illusion of daylight. We stayed up to watch for as long as we could, but after a while the sprinkles gave way to a deluge and we were forced into our tents. We fell asleep last night to the sound of pouring rain and hyenas howling just outside the fence of the campsite.

And now the bus carries us onward to Johannesburg, where we’ll stay in a hotel tonight and wake bright and early to catch a 7am flight to Cape Town tomorrow morning. We’ve made friends on this tour and it will be sad to leave them, but after the grind of daily travel it will be very nice to settle into a comfortable apartment for five days.

And I’m kind of looking forward to a Starbucks latte.

Early morning Friday marked the beginning of a 2000+ km (can we call this 2+ megameter?) journey over water and land to our current location in Livingstone, Zambia. Our ferry left Zanzibar promptly at 7am and arrived in Dar es Salaam promptly at 9. The efficiency and timeliness was almost disorienting. Thankfully the train trip more than compensated.

Arriving in Dar es Salaam early meant that we got to spend four hours in the hot, sweaty first class lounge of the Tazara train station. We were treated to a library of Michael Bolton music, including an entire Christmas album. Nobody’s “Oh Night Devine!” is quite so powerful, especially in the dead heat and humidity of a March morning in Dar es Salaam. But the train showed up, more or less on time, and we hauled our bags (now at an embarrassing number and total weight due to our collector natures) into our first-class sleeper compartment, ready for our two-day ride to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

The ride started fantastically, and was really all-in-all a great experience and a terrific way to cover a lot of ground and see a lot of land we wouldn’t otherwise see. The Tanzanian landscape was particularly beautiful, and we were treated to sights of impalas, zebras, and giraffes from our window as the sun set. We were met at many of the stations by locals. Tanzania is entering its rainy season and the smell was rich and green and children were selling homemade treats from trays illuminated by a candle while fireflies blinked in the wet grass.

Our spirits were high entering day two. We were climbing into the mountains and the stifling heat had given way to cooler temperatures. We seemed to be making good progress…until we reached the town of Mbeya.

In Mbeya we stopped. Now, Mbeya has a fairly large station and we’d been traveling steadily for a full day, so a more extended stop seemed reasonable at first. Maybe we were just resupplying? But suspicious things were happening. People were abandoning the train. A group of Korean travelers started to make their own dinner on the platform. Workers were looking at our train with the bored look of somebody looking at something that they would be looking at for quite some time.

We asked.

“You must change trains here. The other train, it is coming, but it is late. Maybe four hours.”

That was about 4. At midnight the other train finally arrived. A knock on the door told us it was time to pack our bags and make the switch. All of the passengers who were leaving Coach 2 flooded into the narrow walkway precisely as all of the new passengers destined for Coach 2 flooded onto the train. Stalemate. People and bags headed in opposite directions in a meter-wide walkway with no exits causes an immediate and intractable human traffic jam. Confusion reined. People were shouting at people to move, but nobody could. We finally forced our way to the exit at the end of the car, passing our bags over and around the passengers stuck in the walkway.

There were no stairs. There was no platform between the trains. We had to jump down from the car to the gravel ground between the trains with our heavy packs on our backs. In my delirium I was working to protect a half-eaten canister of Pringles whose lid kept falling off. There were no stairs on the next train either, so we had to scale the side of the car to get in. We were directed to the wrong cabin where we were yelled at for being there.

We finally settled into the right cabin, where we flopped exhausted into our bunks. Then the real fun began. For the next hour (or two? or three?) as we were trying to fall asleep, the train was being rearranged to put the cars in the right order. This is not a delicate procedure. Every coupling involves a bone-jarring collision that will wake you out of any slumber and have you grabbing at anything you can hold on to to keep you from being flung from your bed.

We woke up the next day with dampened spirits that were matched by the dingy, rainy weather we rode through for most of the day. But things steadily improved. We crossed into Zambia at about midday—which was roughly our scheduled arrival time, but instead marked the midpoint of our journey. We didn’t encounter any more delays and spent only one extra night on the train, arriving at Kapiri Mposhi station the next morning a tidy 21 hours behind schedule.

From Kapiri Mposhi, we took a 2-hour taxi to the capital city Lukasa, then a 6-hour bus ride to Livingstone. We’re staying at Fawlty Towers, which is actually very nice despite its too-clever-by-half name. A hot shower and excellent food sent us to bed happy.

Our next step is the penultimate leg of our journey: an 8-day overland tour from here through Botswana to Johannesburg. We leave on Thursday which gives us a little time to explore Livingstone and its main attraction, Victoria Falls.

We visited the falls today in all their thundering, drenching glory. We’re near the peak of the rainy season here when the falls have 10x more volume than they do when it’s dry and they’re reduced to almost a trickle. Apparently you can walk along the lip of the falls during the dry season, something that’s completely inconceivable now with the torrents of water cascading over.

It’s hard to really get a feel for the full grandeur of the falls, partly because they’re broken into multiple sections and you can’t see the full stretch of them from the Zambian side (they’re shared with Zimbabwe) and partly because there is so much mist from the water crashing down that you often can’t see them at all.

But you can get alarmingly close to the precipice.

More Livingstone tomorrow before we meet our tour group in the evening. Zambia has been an intriguing stop for us. The country is sparsely populated—around 10-12M in a country that covers more area than either Tanzania or Kenya (both of which have populations over 40M). Much of the land we saw from the train is lush and green and untouched. The infrastructure and amenities feel more like home, but the people are very poor. 1 in 7 adults is infected with HIV, dragging the life expectancy down to a little over 40 years. The people we’ve met are very friendly, but the sellers in the market are quick to use heart wrenching stories of hardship and poverty to try to separate you from your money. It feels at least half truthful. Sometimes you can’t say no. Our stopover feels too brief; we would love to stay a while longer and get to know this place a lot better.

We wrapped up our diving lessons in Stone Town last week and after a day of shopping and exploring the winding streets we headed to the northwest corner of the island to spend time on the beach. The beach was beautiful, but unfortunately the neap tide left us without much water for swimming.

Undaunted, and because we are now certified PADI Open-Water Diversâ„¢, we took the opportunity to explore the amazing underwater scene at Mnemba Atoll. The whole diving experience has been fantastic. The dives at Mnemba were the best so far, with amazing colours in every direction. The second dive site was essentially a huge wall of coral, and the current let you cruise slowly by and gawk with barely any effort.

We’re really good divers…although at times our buoyancy control could use some work.

We leave Zanzibar early tomorrow morning by ferry to Dar es Salaam. In Dar es Salaam we’re boarding a train that will carry us to Zambia. For two days. We’ve reserved an entire 4-person sleeping compartment for ourselves and loaded up on snacks and cheap DVDs (12 movies per disc!) for the laptop. It’s not uncommon for the train to be 24 hours late. On the plus side, we’re covering a lot of ground for not much money and we skirt the edge of the Selous game park and meander our way through a mountain range…all of which we can watch from the comfort of our own bed. To Zambia!

The best stories need to have some kind of ordeal or conflict to grab the reader’s attention and hold on to it, which is why there probably aren’t very many good ones about tourists who spend 10 idyllic days on a sun-drenched tropical island in the Indian Ocean.

Zanzibar is such a place and we are, for now, such tourists.

Born from the same coastal Swahili culture as Lamu, Zanzibar is like the version of Lamu that Disney would concoct for an “Experience Africa!” park. Similar stone buildings and early morning calls to prayer, but lots of cars and muzungu tourists on every walkway. It’s nice to be more anonymous again.

We’re staying in Stone Town, the heart of Zanzibar Town and near the ports that ferry passengers and vehicles from Dar es Salaam to the island and back.

Back around my birthday, Michelle had a fantastic idea for gifts that we could give each other that would be memorable and would perfectly complement our trip: scuba diving lessons! We’ve both always wanted to learn, and an extended stay on a tropical island was the perfect opportunity. We wrapped up our pool lessons yesterday and hit the water this morning.

It was amazing.

I think I was too mesmerized by the feeling of being perfectly weightless underwater to even notice the fish or coral, but our instructor did draw my attention often enough for me to notice spotted rays and a huge school of cuttlefish. I think I’m hooked. We have our final two open-water training dives tomorrow, then we’re official. We may try to head to the depths again when we visit the northeast part of the island next week.

In the meantime, take a minute to absorb the cuteness of the following video. It’s a month old, but I haven’t had the bandwidth to post it until now. (Warning: you many need to watch in installments to avoid a cute overload.)

We spent a last, full day at the community centre last Monday, after which we took a car ride to Kakamega to start the next phase of the great African Adventure. We were sad to leave our new friends behind and departed the family compound with a sense of melancholy. We’ll miss the ambition and optimism of the centre and the hot, dusty days of village life.

There was one more stop in Kenya before we crossed into Tanzania. Michelle taught not far outside of Kakamega when she lived in Kenya 15 years ago, and she wanted to return to the school to say hi to the current staff and students and to see how the school looked all this time later.

The response was pretty overwhelming.

The next day we left Kakamega early for the Tanzanian border. Sometimes the story of a journey is best told with a picture.

The trip took most of the day involved a car, a matatu (oversold as an “express shuttle”), and a final jaunt in a station wagon. We thought we’d reached the ultimate level of absurdity when 13 people were (at times literally) crammed into the station wagon, including children stacked on top of our luggage in the back. Michelle was sitting on my lap in the back seat. The driver pulled away, but was flagged down by another potential passenger. Unable to turn down a fare, he drew the car up to the man and got out, motioning for him to sit down in the driver’s seat. The man got in and the driver got in after him, driving the rest of the 20km run to the border sitting on the man’s lap.

But we made it to the border safely and in reasonably good spirits where we said goodbye to Kenya for now; goodbye to its stunning scenery and mesmerizing wildlife, and goodbye to the lovely people of Kenya, with their ready smiles, warm welcomes, and their lilting, almost-musical accents. It’s a place that is not easy to let go, and when we left it seemed most likely that we weren’t seeing it for the last time.

We’re now in Zanzibar. We flew in this afternoon, on a plane that was typically 3 hours late. We had a sort of epiphany on the shuttle ride to the airport about how far we’d come on this trip psychologically.

It goes like this.

I was checking my e-mail this morning for the first time in a week (we were out of Internet range for the last week, hence the break in posting) and it turned out our flight had been changed to leave from Arusha airport (the one we’d deliberately stayed near) to Kilimanjaro airport about 50km away. Thankfully, the airline had arranged for a shuttle to pick us up at a nearby hotel. (Not actually at the hotel, as we later found out, but kind of near the hotel. That took a while to sort out on its own.) The flight was supposed to leave at 1:50pm, but the shuttle didn’t start moving until after 1. There were only two other people in the shuttle with us, a Spanish couple who had just wrapped up a safari. They looked wide-eyed and panicky.

“Are you flying to Zanzibar??”

“Yes”

“But the plane is supposed to leave soon!! Aren’t you worried??”

Michelle and I looked at each other. Not only were we not worried, it hadn’t even occurred to us to be worried. Something that would have agitated me to the point of fury two months ago barely registered.

“Hm, no, I guess not! I think we’ve been in Africa too long to be worried…”

Our trip from the border to Zanzibar included four days on safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater. Both were incredible. The huge herds of wildebeest and zebras haven’t yet left the Serengeti for the Masai Mara, so the southern expanse of the park was filled with animals. The Ngorongoro crater is the leftovers of a huge volcano that collapsed millions of years ago and is now filled with vegetation and animals of all descriptions. Because the park is so small (covering only 265 square km), the animals have all seen and become accustomed to the tour vans, allowing for close-up viewing that’s not possible in the bigger parks.

We camped in both parks. The campsites are inside the parks themselves and there are no fences to separate campers from the animals. We heard things. The last night as we were camping on the crater rim, I heard something big, a buffalo I think, snorting and grazing a few feet from our tent.

At least it wasn’t a lion.

Now for some pictures! First up: Serengeti. Look for the fascinating sequence where an elephant clears a pride of lions hiding in the grass…

And then, Ngorongoro crater, in which we saw a pair of cheetahs kill a baby gazelle (but too far away for pictures) and the extremely rare black rhino: