Breaking chronology for a change because I love these photos so much.

There's a lot of old abandoned things in Berlin; there are entire sites dedicated to what's out there, how to get in, what are the risks, etc. I've always been fascinated seeing old places that would have been someone's home or workplace for years on end, but one day left to rot and let nature start reclaiming. I love seeing photos of such places, and the few abandoned places I have been very cool experiences.

One of the places in Berlin that really sounded unique was an old theme park, the Spreepark, which existed way back in the days of East German, becoming more westernised after the reunification of Germany. It was abandoned in 2001 and has since become thoroughly derelict. I read that you can get in to the site through gaps in the fence, but there are often security you have to watch out for, possibly with dogs, so when I found out that they'd started doing tours of the place on Sundays I decided to take the easy way out and pay to get in there legitimately.

As we approached Rwanda, the terrain started getting a lot more hilly than that of Uganda. We got to the border and queued up to hand in our passports and get our visa, all the while with locals trying to cut in line. I got given some minor grief over not having printed out the acceptance letter for my visa. I did have it in digital form and the letter has a giant bar code that one would assume they'd scan, but apparently it's easier to put bar codes on letters than it is to put bar code scanners at the border.

This was our single slowest border crossing, taking over 90 minutes to get some simple ink stamp "visas" put in our passports. Most of the truck was starving by the time we finally got our passports back, but there was still more driving to do before we arrived in Ruhengeri and stopped to make lunch. We were staying in dorm rooms so nobody had to put up tents for a change!

It's impossible to put into words what it's like out on the streets of Africa. They're like no other place I've been. Towards the end of the trip I started taking a LOT of photos out the window in the hope it might capture even just a small fraction of the weird and wonderful things you see out the truck window. Click the photo to go to the full flickr set. Feel free to be distracted, and not notice that I haven't posted about gorillas yet too :P

After crossing into Uganda our first stop was Jinja, the second largest city in Uganda and its unofficial extreme sports capital. We had a free day here to do whatever activities took our fancy; some people went and played mini-golf, some went and played regular golf, but I opted for white water rafting down the White Nile.

All up there was seven people from our Dragoman group who went along, who with our American guide Tyler made up a full raft of people. We got taken to the "put in" point where we were given some breakfast, sorted out with high-flotation life vests and paddles and then were led down to our raft for some basic training, which involved things like paddling in time, turning, getting down low in the raft, flipping the raft and climbing back in. It was all pretty straightforward stuff and the water was a lovely refreshing temperature. A lot of people struggled to get back into the raft unassisted, but I surprised myself by being one of the ones who could! I can't even do a single chin up, but I guess climbing back into a raft probably uses a lot of the same muscles that I built up last year being stuck on crutches for nearly 6 months.

The first rapid of the day was one of the most fun and memorable ones, it was basically a three metre waterfall drop off, followed closely by two more pools of rapids. We went down the waterfall, which felt like a theme park flume log ride on steroids, then paddled as hard as we could for the bigger pool of rapids but the current was too strong and we ended up going down the less turbulent path.

So after leaving Tanzania we were destined for Kenya to visit the Masai Mara, however we ran into a bit of trouble actually getting into Kenya. Everyone's visa got sorted out nice and quickly, but there was some sort of hold up involving the truck. Something to do with the truck's registration being changed over from English to Namibian and us not having the right Carnet de Passage to go with it.

To make better use of the time we set up the kitchen to make lunch there at the border, then after eating some of the group started having a game of cricket! The spectacle drew a small crowd of truck drivers watching, and trying to catch the long shots that went their way.

After a while Steve filled us in on things, apparently the registration was changed over a long time ago and the truck had been in and out of Kenya a bunch of times since then, but in the book they had always written down the old registration details, but because the border officials are so damn ethical they couldn't do that again for us this time.