So, after our Garden Route drive ended in Port Elizabeth, we stayed a day longer to take in a day-long game drive with long-time guide Alan and then flew to Johannesburg where we were picked up and taken to a permanent tented lodge (similar to the type we stayed at in Tanzania's Selous Game reserve - see blog entry "Selous 1" for details) for 4 days of Sabi Sands Game Reserve and Kruger National Park game drives and bush walks. We took them in and relished them knowing that these were the final and still-amazing animal encounters and sightings that we experienced during our awe inspiring 3 plus months' sojourn in Africa. Two highlights stood out amongst the many wonderful creatures we saw for the last time. b. Rhino Encounters All of our previous sightings of ... read more

(Don't forget to check out Barbe's last "Overland" blog, posted on Saturday.) The night we arrived in Cape Town was also our last night with the overland group, and Chris and Lourens, our guide and driver, wanted to do something special. We had gotten up the earliest yet (4:30 am) from our last night of camping near the Namibia border so that we could make the 8-10 hour drive in good time. So maybe we were not all at our best from lack of sleep, but the excitement did start to build as soon as Chris announced, about a hundred km's out, that he could see Table Mountain. There was a lot of affection in his voice, and we slowly learned why Capetonians have such strong feelings about their city. Plus he was finishing almost three ... read more

We finally reached the Atlantic Ocean on February 21. An entire continent crossed with several means of transportation, but essentially "on the ground" since we had left Dar and the Indian Ocean by train about a month earlier (remember the Tazara?). That evening we saw our first "over the water" sunset from the perfectly west-facing jetty and it seemed a good omen of things to come. That afternoon the entire group had visited the "booking office", a not unusual feature of Southern African tourist centres that have many extreme activities to offer. They showed us a very badly edited video with particularly tacky music highlighting some of the adrenaline pumping possibilities: sky-diving, dune-boarding, and quad-biking over the dunes (a bit like playing chicken with an avalanche on a snowmobile in the Whistler back-country). None of them ... read more

After over a week in quaint Livingstone with all our laundry done and everything to be seen and done completed (ok, not the bungi jumping off the bridge but there is no way I was gonna do that), we were champing at the bit to get on the road again. For this leg we are traveling on a overland truck with 15 other people, our CEO (Chief Experience Officer - guide, fixer, cook, nursemaid) Chris from RSA, driver Lawrence from RSA and our big-assed truck (see pic). Our first leg took us through a bit of a reapeat of our Botswana trip (Chobe, Okavango, Maun) and on through to Windhoek, Namibia, but it was much quicker and there were sights, overnight stays and activities unique to both trips and any repetition was more than welcome as ... read more

Ok, so it was actually on the Ntwetwe Pan (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nwetwe_Pan), not quite like a desert sandstorm and was shortly quashed by a driving rainstorm but . . . you get the picture (if not see pics below). We last left our intrepid travellers relaxing in Lusaka and taking in the local sights. Wednesday (25 January 2012) we boarded a comfy coach bus for the trip to the home of Victoria Falls, Livingstone and arrived 6 and a half hours later in the mid afternoon at our backpackers hostel, a local institution named Jollyboys. But this stop was a quick one. Immediately the next morning (26 January 2012) we were picked up for our 7 day camping tour of Botswana. Here we met our amiable and good humoured travelling companion Lucas from Switzerland. The three of ... read more