Best of Africa

After racking our brains over New Zealand & Asia bests, we couldn't leave Africa out of the fun. So a short list of some of our favorite memories from Africa:

Best Hotel: The Plantation Lodge, just outside of the Ngorogoro Conservation Area. This is a restored home on a working coffee plantation, and it had beautiful rooms, spectacular food and an amazingly peaceful setting. We think this might actually have been our best accomodation of the entire trip. And it was set up by our safari company, so we had nothing to do with finding it. Just good luck.

Best Sunset: We saw some spectacular African sunsets, but the best had to be watching the sun sink below the horizon of the Serengeti.

Best Meal: Our dinner at the Zanzibar Palace Hotel in Stonetown (on Zanzibar Island). We weren't expecting much, but the owner of the hotel whipped up a delicious curried soup, an amazing red snapper and Gus' dream dessert (involving chocolate ice cream, bananas and chocolate syrup).

Best Character: Our Nile rafting guide, Peter, whose continuous percentile estimations throughout our rafting trip ("I think there is a 5% chance the boat will not flip.") provided us with a new form of communicating for the rest of our trip. ("I think there is a 93% chance that this cafe will serve ice cream." "I think there is a 1% chance that this cab driver will not try to rip us off.")

Best Thing Witnessed Balanced on a Head: In Asia, it was the motos laden with stuff that amazed us. But in Africa, we couldn't stop marveling at all that they carried - for not insignificant distances - on their heads. We saw all kinds of impressive stuff, but I think the 40 pound sack of potatoes probably takes the cake. It's heavy and lumpy and not at all conducive to being balanced on anything. And yet a woman walked down the road with the potato sack on her head...and a baby strapped to her back. Puts our 10 pound dumbbell workouts to shame.