6 weeks down - 4 to go

Well, I thought it was about time that we updated you all on a little about us. We have done 6 weeks on the truck in Africa so far and we leave Cape Town in another 4 weeks to arrive in London on 5 August. So far we have been struggling to get to the internet and write about what we have seen and what we have been doing and so we haven't written about how we are doing after 4 months of living out of a backpack. In general we have both remained healthy and our vast planning and excessive purchasing of every antibiotic under the sun along with a mass of medical supplies has been more useful to others on the truck than to us - which is fantastic - at least for us. We have long ago stopped having "Lariam dreams" and are no longer "seeing people" in our bedroom/tent and we have neither become mildly psychotic nor show any inclination that any form of mild psychosis is on the way (to those that don't know, Lariam is an anti-malarial whose common side effects are very vivid dreams (often porno) and a risk of becoming mildly (or not so mildly) psychotic). We are sleeping very well (perhaps something to do with the constant 5-6am starts and usual late nights) and have managed only one puncture in our thermarests while some of our friends have upwards of 20 punctures and have been repairing their mattresses every day for the past month. We are mostly warm enough in our sleeping bags and still love sleeping in our tent (surprised about this because I really did think that the novelty would wear off) although the nights are starting to get colder now (the other night was -2 - ouch!) and we are now having to layer up on the sexy thermals. Showers have been a disappointment for the last few weeks and we have been obliged to shower cold or not at all - this is all made worse by the fact that we have run out of the expensive and delicious bodywash given to us by our good friend, Lano, before we left which has just run out. Things are more expensive that we thought (who would have thought that Africa was just not that cheap!) although, to be fair, we are on a tourist trail and are doing things like (in 2 hours!!!!) going flying in a micro-lite over Victoria Falls - all of which is burning through our funds. We are about a week away from breaking out our UK bank cards and ripping into our UK funds - very naughty. We are absolutely loving not having been to work for months but we are both very aware that September is fast approaching and will arrive far too quickly for our liking. Finally, we are loving being able to hang out all day and night together which is something that we haven't done since we wagged most of our Varsity lectures at Otago. All in all, we are having a brilliant time and are wishing that we had more travelling planned and that things weren't going to be over so quickly. Having said that though, we are hugely excited about arriving in London, setting up home and seeing all of you Londoners very soon!