All over Africa

Well I've been a lot of places since I last updated from Nelspruit. We went to Mozambique for a few days which was great. Driving was a bit crazy, in the cities there were people everywhere on the streets, but outside of there cities it was really empty. We went to Xai-Xai beach which was really beautiful, but a bit cold for swimming. The beach was completely empty tho which was fun. I guess it gets crowded during the holidays, but it was fun to basically have a whole beach to ourselves. After that we went to the capital Maputo, stopping at another beach on the way down that was equally empty. Maputo was cool, we had some good Indian food and went to an art museum. The food so far in Africa has been alright, but not great for vegetarian options. Lots of french fries and cheese sandwiches so it was nice to find some good Indian. The art museum had some crazy art in it, but unfortunately the power went out in the middle so we couldn't see all of it. Oh well, we left and that gave us time to check out a huge market which is always fun.

Next we crossed the border into Swaziland, which is a tiny country. We basically drove across the whole place in about two hours. Its a cool place tho, very rural and desert like. We went to a cultural village and saw how the Swazi people used to live and also saw some really fun traditional dancing. The dancing was possibly made better by there being about 100 Swazi highschoolers there who got really into the dancing. It was quite entertaining. On our way out of the country back to the South African coast we ran into tons to road construction, but eventually we made it to the coast at St Lucia. There we did some more animal park driving stuff and saw rhinos, hippos and lots of different types of deer. We also went to another beautiful beach full of awesome shells that I ran around collecting. Then we took an afternoon boat tour and saw so many hippos, it was great. The boat tho broke down at the end of the tour and another boat had to come rescue us, haha, but it all worked out.

Then we slowly made our way back to Joberg to pick up a bag that had been left at the hostel in Maputo. A nice guy was coming this way anyways and brought it with him, that way we didn't have to go all the way back. On the way we stopped in Ladysmith (the place the band Ladysmith Black Mumbasa is from) and Kestell. Kestell is on the edge of the Drakensberg mountains and we were going to do some hiking but it rained and snowed all day so that didn't work out too well and we could stay any longer to wait out the storm. We picked up the bag today and tomorrow we head to Gaborone, in Botswana for a few days to hang out with a friend of Eric's which should be fun. Some of my later plans have changed a little bit, I'm heading to London on June 24th now. My parents are going to meet me there and we plan to go to France for a few days as well as traveling some in the Uk, which should be nice. My trip is almost half way over, its crazy how fast time goes, but the last five months have been great!