AFRICA!!!!

this continent was absolutely amazing! it is the most untouched, unspoilt group of countries we have seen, the countries were so green full of rainforests, farmland, countryside, mountains, lakes, really fantastic landscapes. It really was incredible and crazy driving along seeing giraffes on the side of the road, elephants ahead crossing, zebras, and antelopes all over the place!

Our first day in africa got off to an amazing start, we started out tour with a lot of cool people and drove to Botswana to Kruger National Park area. We did a night drive in a privately owned park in the jeep you can see. The guy who sat in the front seat had a machete so if we couldnt run over the trees he chopped them down! we all got attacked by the acacia trees from the driving - these are the trees the giraffes eat and they have 4 inch thorns on them - im not exhagerating, I have proof!! gavs t-shirt was properly ripped! anyway, back to the animals, the first animals we saw was a group of buffalo some young some fully grown bulls looking very tough! we then saw some elephants, babies too, we were sooooo close, could almost reach out and touch them. we also saw loads of deer - impalas, they are everywhere! we saw some hippos in the water but only saw their noses poking out, so ive saved the better pics for later! we saw so much i cant remember, but the other big one was a pride of adolescent lions. there must have been around 15 and again we were soooooo close, at one point one of the females got up and started heading towards us, and stopped inches away from the car!! she then went off looking for a hunt followed slowly by others, would have been good to see a kill but it wasn't meant to be! still being that close to lions was pretty cool!






these are some of the millions of impalas we saw all over africa, they are in huge heards and become quite boring to see after a few hundred! bad i know!

Back at the campsite we had warthog stew - yum yum african cuisine is delicious!

Ok so day 2 in Botswana we went for a game drive in Kruger National Park - this was a long but fantastic day, we got to the park at around 7 after seeing black elephants, giraffes and zebras on the side of the road on the way! incredible! the park was amazing, really big hence having a day to drive around it, i think it was about 2 million hectares! (2.5 acres = 1 hectare) we were driving around for ages after not seeing anything other than impalas, all a bit drousy and falling asleep in the heat when we saw some elephants, then some giraffes, then more elephants, then zebras, then wilderbeast, then buffalo, more giraffes, more of everything it was amazing! everytime we saw an animal we stopped to admire it, i never got tired of seeing giraffes especially - they really are amazing! and elephants are just enormous, definitely amongst the biggest bums we've ever seen! we saw some kudus (antelope) fighting with their horns, that was quite funny! come to think of it we saw a few fights from different antelope species that day!

i think theres more pics to come on the next entry .....