As you might have noticed, I have been very happy to put up with, shall we say, a variety of accommodation arrangements in the last few months. (I described one type of overnight arrangement as "basic camping", promting the question from one friend, "what's more basic than camping?".) However, I could not really expect Colin to enjoy other than a reasonable amount of luxury when he flew out to join me in Namibia for a snatched nine-day vacation at the end of August. And, it must be said, I didn’t resent the five-star treatment too much - though I found it interesting how much less comfortable I felt in the company of the majority of my fellow four/five-star guests than I had with my co-travellers and co-volunteers in Namibia to date. The trip started and ended ... read more

Sitting here in Luanda watching the fiasco that is the fourth day of the England -v- Pakistan test match (how I came to be here will be revealed in a later blog), I’m struggling to work out how to write up what have undoubtedly been a couple of the most interesting weeks of this year. Where to start? The beginning? Well, I suppose this’d be a reasonable - if slightly old-fashioned - option… When I took a year out in 1993-94, I looked into doing voluntary work abroad, but ran into a brick wall with VSO, the only option I believed was open to me, on the basis that they wanted at least a couple of years’ commitment, and someone with more useful skills than an ability to list the top ten cases on recoverable financial ... read more

After the non-stop thrills of the Northern Adventure with the camping and early-morning starts, it was nice to get a night’s sleep in a real bed without a tent companion - however well Yvonne and I had got on as tent buddies. The evocatively-named Rivendell Guesthouse in Windhoek (though I was disappointed that there was not an elf in sight, let alone an Orlando Bloom look-alike) also provided space and time to re-pack and re-organise my somewhat tired-looking backpack. So, by the time Sunday dawned, I was raring to go on the Southern Swing (I’m still a bit dubious about the name, but there you go). This time, Yvonne, Veerle, Lisa and I found ourselves with only three additional companions: a Connecticut biology and chemistry teacher, a retired NHS Englishwoman and a Belgian “teacher of teachers”, ... read more

Who could fail to be intrigued by the romance and mystery in place-names such as Kaokoveld, Damaraland, Sossusvlei and Swakopmund, Windhoek, Otjiwarongo, Etosha and Marienfluss? By a country that boasts its own ghost town, and whose ports are all wedged uncomfortably between the desert and the South Atlantic? A country much of whose coastline is known as the Skeleton Coast after the multiple shipwrecks it has seen, and where diamonds could once be collected as easily as shells on a beach? Namibia has been high on my travel-target list ever since I saw photographs of some of its highlights when Colin and I were invited to go on an overland trip there out of Johannesburg. As it happened, we’d had to decline because the time commitment was just too great for two stressed City lawyers to ... read more

A little known fact about my family is that the three brothers, of which my father was the oldest surviving, went in very different directions. OK, so you could say that being a solicitor in Edinburgh (my father) is not a million miles away from being an academic lawyer at Cambridge (my younger uncle), but - to my mind - the most interesting brother and his family ended up on the Isle of Lewis where two of my three cousins still remain. (For the geographically-challenged, the Isle of Lewis is the northern-most island of the Outer Hebrides, a little further from Edinburgh than Edinburgh is from London). In the capital, Stornoway, one of my cousins, Moray, runs a pub/nightclub/pool bar, but is better known in the family for having appeared on the front page of various ... read more