Our Honeymoon!!!

Ok, everybody here thinks it is our Honeymoon.  Now this is because we booked the Honeymoon suite at the Mnarani Resort because it was $20 more per night and alot better.  Much Much better view.  Now everybody we talk to are all excited and giddy for us.  The newlyweds.  At first we tried to correct em, but it is just easy to smile and go about our day.  Not everybody gets two honeymoons!!!!  So we are now the Honeymoon couple at Serena Zanzibar Hotel.  This place is much nicer.  Cleaner really.  The last place had flies or something that was biting us.  Not sure what that was.  Nice place though.  Pool and Tusker is great.  Anyway, we have internet now so Maybe you'll get a little blogging right here at the end.  

Nungwi

We are now at the northern most part of Zanzibar. This is our third day and we have just been lazy. So lazy, we are almost bored. Not quite for me, most definitely for Kim. We all know how much she likes to sit around doing nothing :D It is very beautiful here. We are staying at a place call Mnarani Resort. It is swahili for lighthouse, due to the fact there is a lighthouse right next to us. Today, we woke up late, ate pizza, and walked to the natural aquarium, where they house and take care of sea turtles. I got the pleasure of holding one, Kim was afraid she would drop it. They have them as old as 25 and they live to be over 100. Our next plan is to hop in the pool and immediately order a Tusker (named after the elephant that killed one of its founders).

We have 3 more full days here, then Sunday we go back to Stone Town. After that, we stay until the 21st when we fly back to Nairobi. And then the following day we head back towards ya'll. Not too long now.

We have realized there is internet at the hotel. We didn't know that, and walked about 30 minutes yesterday to pay for it. Its free here. Oh well. At least you can hear from us more now. No Skype though. Too slow and not wireless.

Zanzibar

We have been in Stone Town, Zanzibar for a few days now.  We are staying at a hotel called Tembo Hotel.  Its pretty nice.  I had a good swim yesterday.  It is sweltering here.  Woooo.  After the cool weather of Limuru, this is HOT.  It rained this morning, so it cooled it off for a few hours.  Hot again now.  

Tommorrow we go to our beach resort ( http://www.lighthousezanzibar.com/ ).  It looks beautiful and we got the Honeymoon Suite.  We figured it was close enough to our anniversary and our actual anniversary we will be in Honduras, in seperate rooms, soooo........  

Anyway, I am gonna upload a short video of zanzibar, and hopefully we will have internet where we are going, but no promises....

Diesel

I realized I forgot to tell the diesel story.  But let me go back a little first....

Where we stayed in the Masai Mara, the Sekenani Tent Lodge, we were the only ones there.  21 tents, just the two of us.  Which made things a little strange because we had an entire staff of a resort and only us to attend to.  And apparently no one was coming for awhile after, cause three of the staff members asked for rides back home to their families.  Two to Narok and 1 to Nairobi. They were all nice people. 

Narok is where the fun started....... We pulled in for fuel and let the 2 guys off to go home.  I told the gas station attendent (its full service in Kenya) unleaded, and went in to get an Orange Fanta. This is where it gets fun.  The attendent, filled our truck up with yep, you guessed it, diesel.

When I get back, we were lucky enough for the other attendent to notice and them inform us of the mistake.  So we push the truck into their service bay (lucky they had one).  It was the old school kind where you walk underneath the car.  Apparently this happens frequently around here, cause their gas tanks are like our oil pans.  They have "Gas Plug" that can be unscrewed to let the gas out.  So this takes about 20 minutes to get the shield off and undo the plug.  Well we had a half tank of gas already when it happened, and they don't waste anything.  So we spent 30 minutes looking for things to put the gasoline out of the car into.  2 liter bottles, buckets, 2 gas cans, another bucket, etc etc.  

So now I start to think we are getting scammed.  I pulled in for gas, and now they have emptied my tank and are gonna want to fill it back up for me, at my cost.  Well, that's just not gonna happen.  So I ask the main attendent to let me know what they plan to do about the half tank of gas I had.  She says she doesn't know, so she'll ask her manager.  Her manager isn't there, so they have to call the owner in Nairobi.  After all is done, another 30 minutes go by and they finally have the fuel out and the truck back together.  Then we actually got our half a tank back. I think the attendent who put the diesel in paid, but at least we know it wasn't a scam.  (I actually let him put in about a quarter tank once I found out he had to pay).  

Anyway, lesson learned.  If you are ever getting gas from a full service station, WATCH WHAT THEY ACTUALLY PUT IN YOUR TRUCK.

So lets start with the drive over... The thing about Kenya is one minute there is a road and the next you are riding through ruts and such.  It took us about 4 and half hours to get there.  Once there we went to check in and the manager was very impressed that we had found the place.  It seems because the roads are so bad that most people do not drive in, they fly in like the smart people we aren't :)..  Anyway we check in and they take us to our room which is actually a tent, a very nice tent with a bathroom and everything.  The video below shows the whole thing it was wonderful.  I am so glad we stayed the whole three nights.  The food was amazing.  It was so good that Steven ate things like carrot soup, spinach soup, and cucumber soup.  If you can't tell, we really liked the soup.  We spent monday in the park and we got to see a lot of animals but they were mostly from a good distance off so we didn't get a whole lot of footage on the iFlip so you will all just have to wait until we get home to see the hippos and the leopard, and the herd of elephants..  But I did get some good close ups of some elephants.

Sorry, the elephant video won't upload for some reason.  Better luck next time.

Lake Nakuru

I'm not sure if ya'll know this but Will is back home now.  He had a meeting he had to attend to so he flew back home on Saturday.  Before he went back, we took a trip to Lake Nakuru.  The two main things Lake Nakuru is knows for is the thousands and Flamingos and the great Rhino population (both black and white rhinos).  

So we left Friday for Lake Nakuru with me driving.  Will doesn't like to drive and I really do.  So on the way there I got pulled over by the Kenyan Police.  Now, they don't have cars, they just have this metal spike strips they put in the road to slow you down and then they choose randomly who they are going to pull over.  Being 4 Mazungus (White Europeans) in a Nice Toyota, we were prime candidates for the ole shakedown.  According to the Policeman, I was doing 111 in a 100 zone.  For the mothers out there, that is Kilometers per Hr, not Miles.  I asked him how he knew how fast I was going when they were sitting still at the road block.  He said he had a radar gun just up the road.  Knowing good and well, they don't have a radar gun up the road.  My ticket, was written on a nice piece of torn paper from a notebook.  It just said 111 Red Pajero (which is our type of car).  So, I just stood there telling him No.  I wasn't paying him.  No, I wasn't speeding.  No, I'm not paying you. Until after about 10 minutes his superior just said to let me leave.   So I took my license back.  And left.

The first of a couple of videos on this blog is gonna be the flamingos.  Not the greatest video ever, we have some with the good video camera that won't upload.  Anyway, hopefully this video gets across the flamingo after flamingo after flamingo filled lake.....

This next video is a little montage.  It starts with Will and his "friend" Kim (I don't think they have defined their relationship just yet, but we like her).  Moves on to to a very touristy Masai dance they do for the guests at the Lodge.  And last but not least, Kim's first driving experience, punctuated by Will's dirty mouth.

One last video for you.  Just a nice close up (they are hard to get with the iFlip camera we use to record these lovely videos) of an Impala, the lake from the "Out of Africa" viewpoint, and some Rhinos having an afternoon nap.

That's it for me.  Kim is going to do a blog about our days in the Masai Mara (which is the Kenyan side of the Serengeti)......

Kitchen Roof Video

I am just gonna post a little video of Me and Will working on the roof.  Kim was only there one day so we don't have a picture of the finished product but I thought ya'll would be interested to see what a kitchen looks like in Africa......

Stolen Power

Today you will get many blogs from the past few days.   Starting with the fact that somebody stole the power lines outside Will's house.  So no internet, no power, no nothing.  So the next few blogs should catch everyone up to date on what has been happening with us.