Having just returned from a weekend away, thought I'd write a little note on my adventures. Decided to celebrate St Patrick's Day with the Irish here but they all live up-country so I took a couple of days off work and headed up there. I've been up-country a few times but so far these had either been with a work car or VSO, so public transport was a new experience. There and back in total I traveled about 300km and in that time the vehicles were push started 5 times, I had 3 break downs (one where the vehicle died and a new one had to pick us up – then it broke down later!) and a tyre popped – right under where I was sitting, it's fair to say the vehicles here are not the best! But the travel was fine, although you won't want to be doing it often – where it could be slightly comfortable for 4 people to be sitting there is 5 and not much cushioning on the seat for your behind! You should have seen the state of me coming out of that, you get very dirty and then you run into clean people you know before you have a chance to wash, it's not good!

So we partied at the South African road builders house, which has air conditioning (much neeeded as its hotter up-country), and then trotted back to the VSO house later in the weekend. The problem is the VSO house has resident bats, to be fair I didn't see any but we had to stop using the toilet after dark because apparently they all live down there, and I certainly did not want a bat flying near my bottom!

I'm very impressed by the girls (and boy) who live up-country and think they are all very brave cause it's not always easy and they have to scoot about on motorbikes on sometimes quite sandy roads. Went to visit a village one of the new volunteers is living in, its quite fun scooting about on the back of the motorbike but again you get very dirty!

Well that's me for now