Safari madness!

O.K, first of all, I'm sooooo sorry about the scatiness of my blog-updating!! I'v just been so busy in the last two weeks that iv struggled to keep update!! Bit here goes, I'm just warning u, its goin 2 b a long one!!

Friday 31st March, went on Safari. We got picked up at about 6:30am by this really cool guy called musa! he then took us all down to the mt.meru hotel to meet the rest of the houses. We then set off to the Lake Manyara National Park. This was our first day of game viewing and my god the animals were all over the place!!! We saw loads of elephants, babboons, zebras, giraffes, hippos and impala and we saw a mini warthog family!! That night we stayed in a lodge in the hills with a BEAUTIFUL view of the lake. We had our dinner and then got evening entertainment aswell!! I bought a kanga (a piece of material that is worn as a skirt but can be made into pretty much whatever you want) its lovely, havnt had it cut yet cos im not quite sure what i want to do with it!

The next night we went off to the serengeti. To do this we had to drive through the Ngorogoro crater but we didn't actually go down into it. After driving for about half an hour around the rim of the crater, our driver had a phone call to say that one of the cars had broken down! A lot of messing around and waiting later, we were driven to the wildlife lodge inside the National park to wait for the other truck to be picked up, towed, and taken to the garage to be fixed. We were all sat in the lodge and looking at the views off the balcony when Kerry decided to teach us a game that she learnt at uni...its the BEST game ever!!!! Its called mafia and involves pretending to be in the mafia and the rest of the peopl having to work out who is in the mafia!! That passed the time quite well so, eventually, when we decided to all split up and have an extra two people in each car, we set off back towards the serengeti. As it was late, we didn't really have a chance to see much...we had our first lion spotting from which we saw quite a few lions after that!! That night we spent the night in a tented lodge just outside the serengeti. As we pulled up the sun was setting over the serengeti....amazing is all i can say!

The third day was spent in the serengeti and, although we didn't see very much, we did see a leopard!! It was just lounging around in the 'V' of a tree not too far away from the road. I didnt get a photograph cos my camera is poo but, luckily, cat has a camcorder with some ridiculous amount of zoom on it so we got some good footage on that (into which were going to make both a safari dvd and a 'africa' dvd!) also, flic got some really good pics too! Other than that we didn't really see much that was that interesting...we saw some gay giraffes (!!) and loads more dikdiks/impalas/deer-esque animals. After lots of driving and not much game viewing, we headed off back to our accomodation for the night...we were staying in the serengeti wildlife lodfe. It was beautiful. When we arrived we were given hot towels and some fruit juice, then we were briefed about when breakfast and dinner is served. We went to our rooms and then went to the garden bit through the resteraunt for the outside bar to watch the sunset whilst enjoying the luxuries of happy hour!!

The fourth day we headed to the crater where we were going to spend our last day. As the Serengeti is so vast it took us the whole day to get to the Ngorogoro so we did a bit of viewing on the way. We saw more lions and what looked like every single wildebeest on the PLANET migrating! There were THOUSANDS of them!! That evening we arrived at the Ngorogor wildlife lodge. The views from all the windows and, in particular the balcony that came offf the restaruant/lounge area were absolutli breathtaking. And the food was also fit for a king (or a queen...which i am..of course!!)

On our last day we went down into the crater. As there are only a limited number of cars allowed in to the crater, we were only allowed 6 hours down there but, by the end of our six hours, we had seen all 5/6 of the big 5!!! Elephants, buffalos, rhinos (from a distance!!), lions, cheetah (crossing the road right in front of us!!) and leopard! Apparantly, according to everyone else (including cat which must make it true!) if u see either leopard or cheetah it counts!

Wow, Thursday=birthday celebrations! Was worried that nobody would be able to come cos so many people went away yesterday but it was packed!! Met everybody at masai....cant even begin to explain the night! It was good, thats all i can say!!! I have photos to jog everybody's memories!

Just wanted to say, before i go, thank u soooo much 2 people who sent me things! It's always nice 2 get post especially when u know the people who sent the stuff went a long way 2 do so! It made my day...

there....up to date!!!!

Miss u alll tonz and love u lots, next update in about a week probably, very quiet week this week!

love al xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx