First things first! Madeline is 9 months old today and took her first steps! Don't worry we have it on video! She got quite excited and started walking in circles before falling down on her bum. :-)

Now onto our trip to Ruaha.. We left first thing Saturday morning to get a good start since its a very long journey (I beleive it was 850 km, Rob can convert that to miles) regardless it was long! The return trip straight from there took 11 hours. About 1/3 of that was over dirt roads too!

Back to leaving Dar saturday morning. We had barely got out of the city when the truck broke down.. We thought it might be the fuel pump or something along those lines.. A fundee came by and started tinkering with the truck to fix it. There was about 6 guys looking uner the hood trying to figure out what was wrong. They had taken apart the fuel filter and one boy was sucking diesel from the fuel line to fill the filter. Don't ask.. I just know that we ended up taking a different truck. At this point we were leaving Dar at 12:00 instead of our nice early start!

We stayed over at a beuatiful place in the mountains before Ruaha (just as well, it was dark at this point). Vicky and I had a mouse eating the thatch roof of our Banda through the night so I didn't sleep too well. :-)

Morning was beautiful now that I could see all the lovely flowers. The jacaranda tree was full of flowers and you could hear very loudly all the bees humming in the canopy! Very bizzare.

After a little more driving we arrived at the game reserve in time for lunch! :-)

I wrote a little in my palm pilot so I am going to retype that now (Forgot my Palm pilot cradle)

The stars were so bright last night. I've never seen them twinkle so! It is very dry here though. I feel I have been breathing dirt. The river is almost completely dry.

First night out on safari and we saw a pride of 9 lions on the river bed. They were just relaxing and cleaning themselves. We also saw Giraffes, a herd of water buffalo (dust flying as they stampeded by), zebra, kudu, and elephants very close up! They were flapping their ears at us.

Madeline has been finding it hard. No surprise really. Holliday is hard enough let alone Tanzania and the game reserve. Bringing her to the game reserve may not have been the smartest move. Last night when I got up she woke as well. We couldn't get her to go back to sleep for three hours. This has been wearing on Vicky as well.

Currently I'm watching Madeline sleep. We're in a Banda that has an amazing view of the valley below. The wind is picking up now, seems to at this time of the day (3:00pm). Pretty strong too! Must be the temp change from half the valley being in shade.

Well thats about it for my palm pilot journal..

We're just relaxing after the very eventful weekend.