It's been a good couple of days for Bears.

First we celebrated balloon Bear's birthday. In fact we were a week or so late, but the beauty of dealing with Pigs, Bears and Rodneys is none of them have a clue about days of the week, let alone dates in the year. They only know it's their birthday when we walk in with the cake singing "Happy Birthday".

Balloon was delighted - though a little disappointed we hadn't got him the huge gun he wants as a present.

Then yesterday it was Little Brown's turn for a treat - Steven Seagal in "Under Siege" on the TV. We were about to head off to bed when a little channel hopping stumbled across his all time favourite film.

LB knows every line and enacts the film scene by scene as Steven Seagal slots bad guys left right and centre. His "bestest bit" is the line "I also cook" - class!

The only downside is The Pig and Rod now want something - every day is a challenge with animals as needy as these!

One solution the Pig tried to protect himself from all the things out to eat him in Africa was the old Tortoise shell ploy.

Unfortunately this didn't work as
a) Kapamba Bush Camp might have been a little naffed off if we had taken the shell
b) It wouldn't fit in the bag
c) He heard a graphic description by Gilbert, our wonderful guide, of how big cats get at the meat of a tortoise.

The Pig is now thinking "guns - lots of guns".

The problem with taking Balloon Bear and the Pig on Holiday is they do so much like having their picture taken.

Staying at some lovely lodges we were lucky to have some great locations for pictures - so good even the Pig came out of hiding to have his "pictumumer " taken.

Here's one of the Pig and Bear with a sculpture of a Wild dog - one of the Bear's favourite animals.

The Pig had to be persuaded it wasn't a real doggy before he'd sit with it.

Balloon's penchant for stupidity shows itself yet again as he poses on a carving of a Buffelant - a rare cross between an Elephant and a Buffalo.

He now fancies a career as either a rodeo rider or a mahout.

Only in a room did the Pig feel any where near relatively safe - and only then because we tell him that mosquito nets are magic and can stop any predator that might be interested in eating him.

Of course this ruse started to leak when we discovered a couple of snakes in the room and became very cautious of getting in and out of bed in the dark - the Pig couldn't work out why we didn't trust the mossy net to scare away anything nasty!

As you can see BB doesn't worry about huge animals with bit pointy teeth - on the contrary he thinks they are all his friends and waves to everything.

We saw these lions in South Luangua national park in Zambia and were it not for the fact we were already searching our luggage for frogs Balloon was trying to bring home as pets we've no doubt he would have hatched some sort of plan to bring a lion home with him as a pet.