It began in Africa....

Happy New Year everyone! May 2011 be as good as we started it.

Wow, what a bash! Gilly and Manuel took us to the Yacht Club which was a party and a half – the best New Year we can remember (sort of remember J!). Thanks guys for such an awesome time! What a pleasure to stay with you and have familiarity and luxury all in one! A seriously interesting day on the Favela tour watching (out the corners of our eyes, sunglasses pointed the other way) guys count out money, gun on belt surrounded by bags of marijuana!

Your apartment is awesome, and we could see Christ from our bedroom and didn’t feel the need to HAVE to go up there and do the touristy thing. Naughty naughty, and thanks to Gill for offering us pics of Christ that we could pretend we took J

So we left Rio, and flew to Sau Paulo and onto SA for a short stop over. We were met by the fogles who took us home for a home cooked meal and Daryl and Chris came over. What a lovely and random stop over – we could have had a week more to catch up. Was great to see our pooches who have been somewhat Wilsonified and after they eventually managed to heave themselves out of their new “baskies” they suddenly recognized Andrew and went berserk – it was very cute. But it was back to the airport after a few hours and onto Ghana. Minus one bag but safely there and making camp at Guy’s house – what a pleasure to have a base. And there was Mo, patiently waiting for us, what an awesome sight.

After a good sleep, we missioned out to Shoprite to gather supplies like a fire extinguisher and gas bottles which we weren’t allowed to ship but we came back with neither and a car full of everything else – over 4 hours later, getting lost and of course becoming accustomed to driving on the wrong side of the road with a right hand drive!!

6^th Jan

Today we missioned (notice second use of this non-existent word!) off to the Nigerian embassy to apply for a visa – and of course armed with all the docs we reckoned we needed, we still had to go back and gather another 5 docs – honestly ridiculous but there’s no arguing. We made it back late by 10 mins and a few less hairs as we don’t get another chance til next week and fingers crossed we get to collect Andrew’s bag and the visa tomorrow. We have decided to head west tomorrow to test our kit (we head East home) and then come back East thereafter on our big venture along the coast.

Very comforting to be able to open the window to an apple seller and ask him in English how much he is selling his fruit for and he answers in perfect English. Quite a difference to Kwanto Es? And then we don’t actually understand the response and just look at each other and hand over a big note and see how much change we get. Ghana and Nigeria are English speaking countries, Togo and Benin will be French and then a lot of French after that but at least it’s better than my Spanish!

Congrats to Abs and Neil on their new daughter Madeline, and we wait with baited breath for your daughter Am and Mark, hopefully she decides to make an appearance in the not too distant future!