Final views from Dar

I am amazed at the speed of the internet in the West...my pictures uploaded so fast! It used to take me most of the day at school to get a few pictures uploaded and here I am able to do it in a few minutes...crazy!

Here are the pictures that I tried to upload before I left Dar...enjoy...

From the SELOUS...

The view from our plane looking out over the vast Selous Game Reserve...the scenery was breathtaking.

Alanna and I posing in near the Rufiji River

An elephant by the side of the river

A wild dog...they look just like normal house dogs expect they are very fierce (apparently!) Most of their population live in the Selous. This was the first time I had seen them.

More animal pictures...you can never have enough!

A hippo on the river. There are hundreds of them on the river and this is the closest picture I have ever got of one...just after I took the picture, this one started doing the breast stroke toward us...literally! It was swimming right at our boat, quite fast might I add, and was a little nerve-racking since hippos are HUGE and actally quite dangerous.

Speaking of things charging at us...the very next day while on a game drive, we stopped to watch this herd of elephant in the distance. All of the sudden one of the elephants reared up and started charging at our car, at an alarming rate might I add. Our driver immediately started to drive away but the elephant kept charging. It ended up following us a good distance, even stopping once to regather the herd. It was amazing to see! Our guide said that he had never seen this happen before but he had heard of a herd of elephant that did not like cars...probably because of the poachers. (We did ask after we were far away what would have happened if the car had stalled or got stuck and the response we got was "that would be a big problem"...not too comforting!)

The stunning beauty of a sunset - a good reminder God's love for us!

I like this picture!

Alanna and I on our boat safari

Self-portrait...we are getting quite good at these since there is no one else to take the picture!

On to ZANZIBAR...

We went to Prison Island, which is a small island off the coast that was once used to house slaves, but now is the home to some massive turtles. It also has great snorkling...but it was freezing when we got out!

Another self-portrait

And another...

We decided that we wanted to get henna done so went searching for a place to do it. We stopped at the first sign we saw and decided it would work...little did we know. We picked our designs from a large book and the lady set to work (after going out to buy the henna which should have been our first sign). She started with Alanna and ended up with nothing like the design she had picked and what she had done was not very good. I decided to go ahead and get mine done as well since Alanna had and mine turned out slightly better because we had learned our lesson. We laughed a lot about our "budget" henna and were glad that it started to wash off a few days later.

I love this picture because it not only shows our henna but also shows how tan I am compared to Alanna...it made me feel good!