I've travelled around a lot of East and Southern Africa (in fact I've done all of Cape to Cairo in non-consecutive instalments except for the Sudan or Ethiopia or something which would join Egypt to Kenya) and I have a lot of slides - unfortunately they are in the UK and I'm not, so what I have left is some pics taken with the digital camera and a few from a photo CD which my sister kindly created from some of my slides and sent over one Xmas.   There's also one created by scanning a photo years back.  I've tried to make the "Thumb Nails" not so small as you can't work out the picture, and the final images not so huge as to clog up you're Internet link for weeks.

So from Masai Mara in Kenya (one of my all time favourite places), it's the notorious Lion (scanned from a photo taken in 1994).  This trip was my first Safari and turned out to be superb and brilliant value for money - actually a Camping Safari from Kuoni, partly chosen because the single person supplement was only £9!  Ended up with only four customers in a Landcruiser  with a really good guide.  I have quite a number of good slides and prints from this trip - just wait until I get to a scanner.  Recommendation - if you go on Safari nothing beats a 4WD, you can usually get away from the crowds, especially somewhere like the Mara where the Mini-buses seem to out number the Wildebeest!  Also highly recommend the hot air balloon trips - been there, done that, twice in the Mara - awesomely excellent!   Borrowed a scanner, so there's more from this trip  here ...

I went back to Kenya in 1996 on an one month Exodus overland trip which was pretty good.  Later met up with the tour leader at a lodge on the shores of lake Malawi.   After we'd worked out we actually had met before he asked what I was doing there - I said "I live here" which is a reasonable cool response - so it may not be, but we liked it!  Anyway, the trip encompassed Uganda, Tanzania and Zaire (as it then was) to visit the mountain gorillas.   Visiting the gorillas was an amazing (understatement!) experience.  Normally you get within about 3 or 4 metres of the animals - it being dense forest and obviously you have to get fairly near just to see them.  But, while we were watching the big silverback sleeping, he awoke, stood up yawned - impressive - and decided to come straight at the group - not agressive, just wanted to be somewhere behind us - did as we'd been instructed and croutched aside (avoiding eye contact) and he walked straight past, inches from my arm - awesome animal, huge, but so peaceful.  Sadly, this incidence was marred by hearing that another group of animals were attacked by poachers the next day - two gorrillas killed and a baby abducted.  The baby was later recovered and returned to the group - but a horrible reminder that these animals are in constant danger.   Joined the Dian Fossey Gorrila Fund when I returned to the UK.

The same trip included the "natural zoo" - the Ngora-ngora crater in Tanzania, not really my cup of tea, but the light first thing in the morning was something special.  Lunch was enhanced by defending your sandwiches from large numbers of black kites who would swoop down and grab anything in your hands!  Anyway, managed this shot of a elephant against some Acacia and the wall of the crater covered in trees - NOT a stormy sky.

There's also a couple more pussy cats from the Masai Mara  taken on a subsequent trip in 1998 when I traveled up from Malawi to meet some friends in Kenya.  These pictures come from the Photo-CD, but I've knocked some of the stuffing out of the final images so they are no longer 5MB each!

Some more from the Masai (I think - can't remember about the picture of the Impala and Zebra - could be anyway really - Impala are two-a-penny and I should be able to work out where it is from the sub-species of Zebra - except I think both the Masai Mara and Nakuru parks have common Zebra!

This buffalo was snapped on a rainy day in Nakuru National Park.  This is the second visit to this park, the first time (apart from a couple of Rhino) was fairly disappointing, the second was (perhaps due to the rain) rather better - loads of rhino and TWO leopards - but of course the rain made getting a good picture of the leopard difficult - if the slide turns out any good I'll scan it, but leopards are hard work. 

The rhino was also on the same visit, I have better pictures - but guess where they are!  I think the Flamingo's are at Nakuru, but we also visited two lakes further North (Bogoria and Baringo) and it could have been taken there - only one of those is a soda lake but I can't remember which one!

This next group is from Liwonde National Park in Malawi- which now has a page of it's own Liwonde National Park  on the Malawi pages - not that there's many more photo's there yet!

The Lizard is of some unidentified species, other than I've seen a number and they tend to bob the head up and down a lot.  The tree it's clinging to is actually vertical - and the lizard is head down, but it looks odd if the photo is rotated!

And this last few are from my last "Big Trip" around Southern Africa over Xmas 1998.   This included an excellent trip from Victoria falls to Cape Town, which  took in Botswana and Namibia (and Angola, but don't tell anyone!) This was with a small South African company called CampWild, check out their web site for details. These are all from the digital camera, the full images haven't been resized, so they're a little larger than the others, but it'll give you an idea what the Konica can do.  The seal colony is in Namibia at a place called Cape Cross.  You can see why they "harvest" the beasts as there are about 200,000 of them - very impressive if a bit smelly.  Sadly, they haven't come up with a more humane killing system than hitting the pups over the head - one day perhaps.  The Bushbuck is in the Victoria Falls national park in Zimbabwe.  Bushbucks are normally extremely shy, obvious the animals in and around Victoria Falls are very used to humans being around.

The elephant shot was taken at one of the waterholes in Etosha national park in Namibia.   The digital has no zoom at all so you can guess how close the elephant was - about two metres, could have fed it.  The close ups from the 300mm zoom on the "real" camera have to be seen - but you'll have to wait 'til I get those darn slides!!  The other "long shot" shows that, although the attraction of the water holes is supposed to be at night - they're floodlit, there's plenty of action during the day too - you'll just have to belive me, in this photo there are Springbok, Kudu, the Elephant and possibly a Gemsbok - a.k.a. a Orynx.