A holiday from our long holiday To get to Samui to meet up with Cath, Gilly and Jack (and their mates Chris and Lou), we had to brave one of Thailand's tropical downpours on a small long tail boat from Railay. We got soaked, as did our bags even though we'd bought some nice plastic ponchos that slowly steamed us like one of those microwave meals! It was then just a few hours on to a bus to Surat Thani, followed by a much bigger ferry and better weather to Samui. It was really great to see everyone. Cath, Gilly and [View Full Entry]

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Watch out Nancy Lam and Ken Hom From the Golden Triangle, we caught a bus to Chiang Mai. We like Chiang Mai - it has a chilled out vibe, the old town is surrounded by a moat and the streets are narrow and quaint. It's nice to walk around, taking in the sights in the day and wandering the night markets in the evening. (Although there are a few too many old looking european fellas with very young looking thai girls for my liking!) We decided that we should enroll on a cookery course to learn the secrets of thai food [View Full Entry]

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Thailand After Africa, we headed back to the UK for a few weeks so that we could go to Stu and Karen's wedding. We had a great day and are so pleased that we didn't miss it. It was also great to catch up with people again, even if it was a bit of a fleeting visit! A huge thanks to everyone for looking after us and putting us up now that we are homeless in the UK! Our next leg is South East Asia. Starting with Bangkok. This would be interesting as we have been here before. Would we be [View Full Entry]

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Homeward bound This was the homeward leg of the trip. We had planned a couple of relaxing nights in Hermanus to try and spot some whales before flying home, so that left us with 2 nights and 3 days to cover about 1000km and see some sights. From the Desert Homestead we ventured early onto more gravel roads. We were getting quite used to these now and most of them went through amazing rocky landscapes. The plan was to head Keetmanshoop for a night and then on to Fish River Canyon for a few hours before driving to the South Africa [View Full Entry]

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Pretty big sand dunes! We had a great time at Vingerklip but then had a pretty long drive down to Swakopmund on gravel and then salt roads. We had to do this in two legs as it probably wasn't safe to take the polo in the dark on the roads that rollercoastered up and down into dry streams to save the cost of building bridges. We had an overnight stop in a place called Uis. There really is nothing there apart from cave paintings of a white lady, so the few B&bs and restaurants were all called white lady this or [View Full Entry]

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Northern Namibia From Rundu we did a 4 hour drive to Etosha national park to stay at one of the government safari camps called Halali. The camp is actually luxurious and has a floodlit watering hole as one of its main attractions. Etosha is mainly a self drive national park so most days we headed out ourselves in the trusty polo on the gravel roads to try and spot some game. It didn't have the same mystique as Savuti or because we were driving ourselves, the information you get from a guided drive. However, it was still very good and we [View Full Entry]

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A birthday to remember We're writing this retrospectively now! Over a month has passed since I celebrated my 31st birthday in Botswana. After going on our fantastic safari to Savuti, we came back to Maun to spend a couple of days with Mr James Gifford. It was great to see Giff in his element out in Botswana and we got to meet lots of the expat community. We also managed to go on a mokoro trip in the Eastern delta which isn't supposed to be as wildlife rich as other parts of the delta, but we still managed to see elephants [View Full Entry]

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Living the high life! From the salt pan, we headed to Maun and surprised Giff at his office (as all the people at Planet Baobob knew him, they culd give us directions). It was great to see him but he had to work for a couple of days so we decided to see if we could get a last minute deal to one of the posh safari lodges. Amazingly (mainly because Andy agreed to it!!), we could and we booked ourselves in for two nights. You can only get there by flying in, in a really small (12 seater including pilot) [View Full Entry]

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Disaster strikes! Driving in Africa is a bit different to UK as there are so many more obstacles. We usually work it that we have a driver and a "spotter" so that one of us can look out for the goats, cows, people, donkeys etc that get in the way. There are also quite a fews potholes which you have to avoid. The way that it usually works is when I'm driving Andy tells me I can go faster and when Andy's driving I tell him to go slower! Our trip to Chobe started well. Andy was the driver and me [View Full Entry]

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Botswana - Francistown and Nata After being really surprised by Joburg, we were really looking forward to Botswana. We stopped over in a place called Rustenburg to get to Botswana, which wasn't all that nice, so we went to the pics to see Keanu Reeves and Forest Whittaker. We then did a really long drive the next day across the border and up to Francistown, which was about 600km. Immediately, Botswana feels very different to South Africa. For a start it is a lot hotter, but also feels a lot more haphazard and African, if that makes sense. We stayed the [View Full Entry]

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