There I was, minding my own business in the shower of our tree house that was set back from the banks of the Okavango River at Ngepi camp site in the Caprivi Strip of Namibia. The shower, like the tree house, was open fronted, granting splendid views of the river through the trees. It was as I was enjoying these views in this unique setting that those members of our group who had embarked on a mokoro trip started to return. I should point out here that a mokoro is the local form of river transport, a canoe traditionally cut out of the trunk of a tree. No matter, I thought as I stood there exposing myself to the river and all on it, they were far enough away that there was precious little to see, ... read more

Here’s something I didn’t know. Although if caught in the open a human/lion confrontation would go badly for the human, when we’re sat in an open sided safari vehicle, perhaps wondering as I was what there is to stop a lion simply reaching in to drag us out like food from a large can, they in fact don’t see us as distinct parcels of potential dinner. Instead they regard the vehicle as a single large, noisy, yet harmless and ultimately unprofitable animal. Elephants too tend to go round rather than over (or indeed, through) tents because they perceive such things as large solid rocks. These are the sort of snippets I comforted myself with as we settled down one night in our tent, our usual night time soundtrack of city centre drunken revelry and police sirens ... read more

Having left off our last journal with the bombing in Oklahoma City we're going to be continuing our theme of doom with a journal bookmarked by two assassinations. For conspiracy fans the conspiracy museum in downtown Dallas is a must. The video we saw probably challenges many of the accepted explanations of what happened that day when President Kennedy lost his head to the assassins bullet, but some unnecessarily colourful images of the moment the fatal bullet struck home is the only memory I have of that particular visit. It's one of those things I wish I could 'un-see'. For a more conventional interpretation we visited the building where Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly fired the shots. From here one can see the actual window where he lay in wait, and stare down on the view he ... read more

6/6/06 - An auspicious date this one, the 62nd anniversary of the Normandy landings and the cleverly scheduled release here of the remake of The Omen at the cinemas. For our part we marked the evil day by travelling route 666 out of Utah and into Colorado. We were only mildly spooked by the number of ravens flying around though fortunately they were not the eyeball pecking variety. We had travelled up from Page Arizona via the superbly named town of Mexican Hat with an overnight stop in 'cone city Arizona' (actually Moab in Utah where the entire main street was coned off and being dug up, which only added to our wrong side of the road driving perils). Our destination in Utah was the Arches National Park, another spectacular display of orange rock weathered into ... read more

Hey Paul, how's tricks? Work going well? It's the day after Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer here in the States and the official start of some seriously hot weather in Vegas. Temperatures are just today climbing into the 90's farenheit, though a run of luck at the roulette table and way too many margaritas last night means I'm a tad under the weather as I write. The U.S. truly is the land of the free. So far we've found free cookies, free coffee, free internet and free loos. No more desparate holding on as we search vainly for the peso it costs to perform one of life's more basic though necessary functions. We even get free booze here in Vegas, a sly ploy by the casinos to both keep you at the gaming tables ... read more