We’ve spent the last month of our journey back in the glorious United Kingdom. I (daveb) have spent most of my time in South Wales with family and friends, albeit with a short interlude in London to catch-up with more people and sort out our visas for Tanzania. Claire, on the other hand, has been staying with her parents in Leicestershire and has been out winning bread for the next leg of the journey. We’ve not blogged too much as we didn’t want to bore you with our every day life, so apologies to anyone that has been checking back each day, to find relatively few updates of late (note: you can subscribe by RSS or e-mail and let the updates come to you instead!).

We’re less than twenty-four hours away from stepping onto our Emirates aeroplane, which after a further fourteen hours, will drop us off in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania in proper Africa.

How are we feeling?

Don’t ask Claire. She’s curled up in a ball next to me on her parents’ sofa recovering from the effects of general anaesthesia, a malaria tablet and a cholera vaccine. I’m convinced that the cholera vaccine is mostly to blame for her state; I took mine a few days ago and still have a headache and aching tiredness.

I’m looking forward to our adventure across proper Africa. I’ve never sat on a proper paradise island beach like Zanzibar. I’ve never seen proper wildlife. And I’ve certainly never spent three months proper backpacking across developing nations where poverty and disease are the norm (apparently RV’ing across the USA in a luxury 36-foot motorhome doesn’t qualify as proper backpacking and nor does crossing Western Europe in a small camper van).

If the truth be told, I’m also quite apprehensive of Africa. On top of the normal pre-flight nerves, I’m also troubled by the stories in the media and those which concerned friends and family bring-up in polite conversation. I was positively outraged at the “advice” that we were given by an STA Travel consultant in London recently — I won’t reprint such horrific scaremongering propaganda here as I refuse to further distribute such claptrap. On the flip side, we got in touch with some fellow travellers who had actually been to Africa (the STA Travel consultant had not) and got a different (more pleasant) viewpoint from them.

From past experience, all I know is this:

“The fear of the thing is usually much worse than the thing itself.”

(David Bartlett, claimed after searching through five pages of a Quotations Page search.)

I’ll let you know how we get along.