Car!

Today's main event has been finally sorting out a car - we are mobile! Hurray! It took a while and I ended up sitting in the insurance office for longer than was desirable, but we now own the car, have paid the tax and registration and are even insured. Happily, fully comprehensive cover here also includes road-side pick-up if we're involved in an accident, which is closest you can get to the AA here I think. We'll just have to make sure we don't break down anywhere. Still, having paid the insurance, my first trip was to head straight to the bank where you purchase and charge your National Park access card (or at least, one of them - rather bizarrely different parks require different cards from different banks...). And from there it was to the safari lodge office (via the cafe where the Mancub had lost his cap yesterday...) to pay for a night's accommodation and, amazingly, tomorrow we'll be off with everything sorted for 24hrs at Tarangire. Not the best known of parks in Tanzania, but only about 2 hrs down the road (so not our nearest either), but a place I visited last time I was here and it's brilliant. So our next post should have all sorts of real wildlife interest to report. Kitty wasn't all that keen on going - no, she didn't want to see Elephants or Giraffes - until we said we'd be able to stay in a tent and all of a sudden it's very exciting indeed! I have no doubt that 24 hours won't be long enough, but the advantage of being here long term is that we really ought to be able to make lots of trips to loads of fantastic places (and I charged the park card with more than enough for one visit, since I had to change some money into US$ anyway...). Let's hope we can take some of you with us in the future!

Otherwise Mama and the littlies spent the afternoon getting to know an extremely friendly family who had contacted us by e-mail and when I went to pick them up in our shiny new car ("Our Car", "Big Car" says the Mancub, most happily) they arrived laden with baskets of toys and even a carseat for the Mancub - something of a rariety in these parts. So he's both tall enough to see out of the window now, and shouldn't fall out if we hit an elephant tomorrow. So, all in all a very good day (also measured by the fact the "Tractor Book" didn't come out of the Mancub's cupboard all day - wow!).