When last you heard from us, we were on our way to Motobos National Park to walk with Black Rhinos. That was sort of bleh, overpriced, and didn't actually involve Black Rhinos, so we won't speak of it. So, onto Victoria Falls where I jumped off a bridge.

I had it in my head that bunji jumping was something I wanted to at least try once, and where better than the Vic Falls gorge, over the Zambezi river at the third highest commercial bunji in the world? Is it just me, or should rhetorical questions not have actual question marks? D'oh! There I go again. Anyhow, I jumped. Heather captured it on film which we'll post in a few weeks. What she was unable to capture was the audio, which consisted of me screaming "OHMYGOD" over and over again. Now that you all think I'm an idiot, I will alay some of your fears by telling you that I did not enjoy it one bit. I didn't get any sort of a buzz from it, it was mostly just unpleasant plunging to my doom. I did like the bouncy bit though, that was fun.

So the sick thing is, that as I write this, I'm waiting to jump out of a plane (seems just as dumb, no?), by the time I finish writing this, Heather and I will have both tried skydiving for the first time. In fact, its time to save what I've written and return to this when I'm safely back on land in Swakopmund, Namibia. Back in a minute.

Heather and I just jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. There's yet another DVD to watch when we get back home. Two more in fact since we got one for each of us. It was far more enjoyable than jumping off a bridge, and I'd even do it again if somebody else was paying for it, which is not something I can say for bunji jumping.

Before I get carried away though, there was actually a lot that happened between jumping off a bridge and jumping out of a plane, so lets rewind back to Victoria Falls. The day after bunji jumping I went out and did something called an Adrenalin Day, which consists of rapelling, forward rapelling, the Flying Fox, and the Gorge Swing. Rapelling requires no real discussion, attach rope, descend cliff. Forward rapelling is the same but you go down face first. Both fun, but unremarkable. The Flying Fox was by far my favorite activity of the day, its basically a zip-line that you do with a running start, and prone in a sort of superman pose. Lots of fun, I highly recommend it. So having done all of those things, it was my turn to do the gorge swing, and something happened that's never happened to me before. I couldn't make myself do it. I despised the bunji jump so much, I couldn't make myself voluntarily plummet again. Oddly, jumping out of a plane was no problem, go figure. Just to end on a high note, lunch was delicious, and there was free beer.

Whilst I was off doing fun things with ropes over a gorge, Heather went on a horseback Safari and got charged by an Elephant, which I think is the most dangerous thing that's happened to either of us since we started this trip. I'm not really inspired to try to top it, which I think means I'm nearing 30.

The following days we visited the falls on both the Zambian and Zimbabwean sides, the Zambian side is better. Heather spent four hours getting her braids taken out, and we both went for flights over the falls in really tiny aircraft. Heather went for a flight in a Microlight, and I went for a flight in an Ultralight. Both are essentially wings with lawnmower engines attached. But they offered stunning views of the falls and are an absolute can't miss.

Leaving Vic Falls, we drove to the Chobe river in Botswana and had a lovely sunset river cruise and saw a ton of elephants, some hippos and a crocodile. That was probably our most enjoyable game viewing of the whole trip. The next day we moved on to the Okavango Delta where we spent the night and punted around in traditional wooden dugout canoes. We're still not sure whether we really enjoyed it, it certainly was overpriced, but the flight over the Delta was really enjoyable. It should be pretty clear by now that we think Earth really looks its best from a discrete distance.

We left Botswana about a week ago I think, and had a long drive through Namibia stopping at Cheetah Park, which is a Cheetah rescue reserve. We got to pet some domesticated Cheetahs and then watched some of the semi-wild ones get fed donkey parts. Cheetahs make some remarkably non-threatening cat noises, it sounds really wrong coming from a cat that big though.

We reached Swakopmund (our current location) three days ago and it has been really nice to finally be in one place for more than one night again. Swakopmund is a lovely Germanic beach town with some gorgeous dunes. I spent the morning sliding down them on a modified snowboard, which I didn't manage to do very elegantly. There will be yet another video. We leave tomorrow, but with a little luck from the weather, I'll get to go solo-paragliding in the morning.

We both feel pretty lucky, and also a bit exhausted to have had such a ridiculously packed month. We've crossed a lot off of our live's to-do lists, and some of it we would even consider doing again. Sorry its been so long since you've heard from us, Our next big update will probably be in a week once the overland truck trip is over and we have a chance to get some pictures uploaded.

So we just finished up three days at Antelope Park in Zimbabwe. It is a very cool place where you can do something that you can't do anywhere else in the world - walk with lions.

On our first "lion walk," we followed the 3Ps: Praise, Paka, and Phyre. They are 10 months old and siblings. Praise is the boy and Paka and Phyre are girls. They are about the size of large labradors at this age. They have huge paws and claws. They were very cool with us. Lions are notoriously lazy, so they would walk for a couple of minutes and then just flop on the ground. While they are laying down, you can go up behind them and pose for pictures and pet them and tickle their ears. They are playful in the same way as housecats, but they can really hurt you if they get carried away. But it's not their fault because they don't know that. Everyone got a ton of pictures and really enjoyed the time with the 3Ps. We got them back into their enclosure after about an hour and a half of walking. They didn't want to go back in, just like any little kids being sent to their room for the night. It was very cute. We got a DVD of our lion walk so you can see just how much we interacted with them (if you want to see it, that is).

The next morning, we went on a cub feeding. This is where you get in a safari vehicle and drive to the lion enclosure, throw giant pieces of cow over the fence, then go inside. The theory is that the lions are too busy eating to be very bothered by you (they only feed them once every three days, which is about how often they might eat in the wild). This was slightly unnerving to Matt, but I thought it was great. We fed the 3As: Achilles, Apollo, and Athena. Then we fed the 2As (3As sisters): Arial and Ashanti. They are all 17 months old and enormous compared to the 3Ps. Lions don't chew. They just rip off the meat and swallow it whole. This leads to a lot of throwing the meat back up, because they swallow giant chunks way too fast. We saw lions throw up. It was gross. But it was nothing compared to what the 3As would do on our walk early the next morning.

At 6:30 a.m., we joined the 3As, who immediately started farting at us. Sure, they blamed it on having eaten an entire cow less than 24 hours before, but I think it was just rude. Note: Lion farts stink. A lot. More than Matt's. Besides the farting, this lion walk was much different than the previous one. As I said before, they are much bigger and more aggressive. They weren't as interested in interacting with us. They were much more interested in playing with each other. We got to a little muddy pond and they just started wrestling each other in the water and splasing around. It was so fun to watch. Achilles doesn't like the water, so he let Apollo and Athena fight for a while, but eventually he couldn't resist. Once he was in the water, it was over for him, the other two ganged up on him (presumably for being a pansy in the first place) and got him very wet and very muddy. It was all our guide could do to get the three of them to move on from the pond. I think they could have stayed all day and played, but they might have wound up killing each other. Athena got a little knick on her ear that was bleeding. Eventually they got tired enough to lay down and let us pet them and take pictures with them. They weren't too keen on going back in their enclosure, either. But all of the lions are very well treated and are really being prepared for a life in the wild.

Other activities we enjoyed at Antelope Park included an elephant ride on Amai, a 19-year old African elephant that was rescued as an orphan in a 1992 drought. We also went fishing out on the lake. We didn't catch anything, but it was beautiful. Correction: Matt caught a tree. We canoed. And we ate the delicious buffet meals that they prepared there.

We are now in transit to Victoria Falls, where we will do various silly things like a jet boat ride, booze cruise, fly over the Falls in an ultralight (Matt), and a 1920s bi-plane (Heather), bungee jump, gorge swing, rappel, rappel facing down, and other stupid stuff (all Matt), horseback safari (Heather), and have a nice high tea at a fancy hotel.

Tomorrow, we head to Matobo National Park, where we will drive up to black rhinos, get out of the car, and take pictures with them. Zimbabwe just doesn't seem to have the concerns about personal safety as the rest of Africa we've visited so far. But it sure is fun!

That's about all of the updating I can remember to do right now. We promise to sit in Cape Town until all of the pictures are uploaded, so you can all spend your employers' money looking at them soon. But that won't be until the end of the month, so hang in there.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Please have some margaritas and TexMex for us. God, I miss Mexican food.

When there was a bombing in Tel Aviv shortly after we left, I didn't think anything of it. When I heard about the bombings in Dahab I felt lucky we weren't there. But now 400 dead dolphins have washed up at Nungwi beach in Zanzibar two weeks after we left, and I'm starting seriously to think that we are somehow leaving disaster in our wake. So maybe we should just stay where we are.

Which, for those of you who are interested, is Harare, the capitol of Zimbabwe. Which honestly, couldn't possibly have much worse happen to it. The inflation here is just silly. We just had pizza for lunch with a couple of cokes. It came to 2.1 million Zimbabwe dollars (about ten US dollars). Which would be fine and all if they had some million dollar notes, or even some hundred thousand dollar notes. Unfortunately, the largest note available is $20,000. There are $50,000 notes, but we haven't managed to get any. Instead we had to pay for our pizza with a stack of 105 bills that was about a half inch thick. I have the equivalent of $40 USD in my bag right now, which is like three inches thick, and must weigh two or three pounds. The funniest part is, all the $20,000 notes have expiration dates, specifically December 31st, 2005. Nobody seems to care. Possibly the most fascinating bit of currency we've come across is a 5 cent coin. It would take 4 million such coins to equal the value of a dollar. People actually use the $20 bills as toilet paper because they cost less than toilet paper. Stunning really. Its not all bad though, the people here are incredibly nice, if a bit pickpockety, and we even found a brewpub last night that served real ale.

Despite any desire we might have to stay in Harare, our truck moves on tomorrow morning to Antelope Park and then Victoria Falls. We have four weeks left on the trip and the week after we'll be figuring out where to go next, which is probably Pad-Thailand. Which sort of gives me an idea...

Perhaps we can make a living by having people pay us not to go to places they like. So, Botswana, we're scheduled to arrive in about a week. If you'd like us to stay away we will happily do so for the bargain basement price of 42 truckloads of Zimbabwean dollars.