We checked in online the night before our British Airways flight from Cape Town to London. Unfortunately, so too did everybody else. This meant that the queue for the comically misnamed "Fast Bag Drop" was far longer, and slower, than any we had experienced with Air Namibia, Linhas Aereas de Mocambique, Air Zimbabwe or any of the other carriers which had previously transported us around the African continent. The slowness may have been linked to what happened at the head of the line, when we handed over our three bags. "I'm sorry sir, you are only allowed one hold bag each. [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday morning, just as we had done at the very start of this trip, we rolled into Cape Town very tired after a sleepless overnight journey (this time on a bus, not on a plane). We took a taxi to exactly the same hotel that we stayed in in our first week - the Townhouse, a gem in the City Bowl. We checked into a room identical to that which we had previously stayed in, but one floor lower down. And, just as at the start of the trip, I found myself still grappling with a dreaded lurgy - this time, [View Full Entry]

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We had tried turtle watching on a previous holiday in Sri Lanka, and been unsuccessful - we managed to pick the first night of the turtle watching season when there were no turtles. It was a nice beach, and the stars were pretty, but that wasn't really the point. So we thought we'd give it another go in South Africa, with a company that said they could almost guarantee a sighting. And we came up trumps. Which was just as well, because it was a heck of a slog to get there. First, there was a four hour drive from St [View Full Entry]

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Happy New Year from St Lucia in KwaZulu Natal, a village at the heart of the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park. Or rather, as they renamed it last month, the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. We arrived here yesterday lunchtime. St Lucians seem to share with the Americans an aversion to the idea of going anywhere using those outdated contraptions at the bottom of your body called legs. The lady at our guesthouse looked stunned when she opened the electric gates to her property and we trotted in carrying our backpacks, rather than rolling in on four wheels. The stunned look turned to [View Full Entry]

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So, we've spent the best part of four days over Christmas in the Mozambican capital, Maputo. Maputo comes closer than anywhere else we've visited to the lazy Western stereotype of the African city: dusty, litter-strewn, pot-holed streets choked with black clouds of pollution from cars that should have been consigned to the scrapheap years ago; the better, older buildings quietly decaying while the newer ones, where most of the people live, are mostly ramshackle single storey affairs that look like they wouldn't survive a sharp gust of wind. As Mozambique, unlike everywhere else we've vis [View Full Entry]

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Hmm... for the first time I have spent the last week with one of my subscribers (hello Becky, hope you got back OK), so I had better make sure I tell the whole truth and nothing but... As most of the people who are reading this probably know, the genesis of this whole trip was an invitation to the wedding of the lovely Dan and Katherin at Katherin's parents' family estate near Harare in Zimbabwe. The wedding was two days ago, so Zim is where we have been for the last week. We kicked off with a two day trip to [View Full Entry]

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We flew into the Okavango Delta in a five seater plane with Bruce, a pilot who grew up in Devon, spent years as a mining surveyor, then somehow got into flying planes in Botswana. "Right, where are we going then?" asked Bruce as we got on board. "God, these controls look ancient. Probably date from World War Two. Still, much more fun than flying a commercial airliner - much more to do." More fun from a pilot's point of view, perhaps - from a passenger's point of view I wasn't so sure. Bruce offered me the controls mid-flight, keeping up the [View Full Entry]

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We flew from Windhoek to Maun, which is pronounced "Mow-oon", on Sunday in a little eighteen seater plane. The pilots gave us our lunch before we got on board, and we could see into the cockpit for the whole flight over the empty desert of Namibia and Botswana. I spent much of the journey singing "Fly me to Maun, let me reach for Botswana". By the time we arrived I believe Gemma was ready to kill me. On arrival we had a two hour drive through the Botswana countryside, passing through the occasional settlement of rondavel mud huts with thatched roofs, [View Full Entry]

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There can be few things more exhilarating than speeding at full pelt across the bumpy flats of a desert on a quad bike, then staying at full throttle to power to the top of a dune, before coming gently off the gas to ensure as smooth a descent as possible, while your heart jumps to the top of your throat. Quad biking was a great way to spend the final full afternoon in Swakopmund, Germany-on-Sea on the African Atlantic coast. Friends who had been to Namibia all rated it as one of the highlights of their trip. I was dubious, but [View Full Entry]

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I don't like camping. I like hotels with soft mattresses and big fluffy duvets and en suite bathrooms with power showers and flat screen TVs with numerous cable channels and tea and coffee making facilites and minibars and biscuits in cellophane wrappers and room service and your bed made up every day by someone else. Memories of camping on family holidays still give me the shivers, and I swore never ever to do it again. It therefore came as quite a surprise to a lot of people, not least me, that I spent five of the last seven nights with Gemma [View Full Entry]

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