The second half of the Northern Adventure was to get more cultural as we left nature for anthropology and a visit to a Himba village near Kamanjab in Damaraland. This village has been developed by Jaco Burger, a South African known as the “white Himba”, who has adopted the ways of the Himba and was appointed head man of this particular group of Himba. The Himba people continue to lead a traditional way of life, with cattle at the centre of their lives, and move around between villages as the seasons and the cattle’s grazing requirements change. It was a privilege [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Soweto. The name conjures up a myriad of images and thoughts: the long dusty road along which the schoolchildren marched in 1976 to protest against the use of Afrikaans as the medium for their education; the "black hole" of Johannesburg (forgive the expression) to which the Blacks were forcibly removed from as early as 1904 and where Whites feared (and perhaps some still fear) to venture; endless "matchbox" houses and squatter camps; the birthplace of the New South Africa; the home of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu, shebeens and high crime rates... I could go on and each of us will [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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I was in two minds as to whether to add a blog entry for a skiing trip. After all, skiing isn't Travel in a purist's sense, it's Holiday. And Austria didn’t seem to be exactly exotic, at least from a Brit’s point of view. On the other hand, for non-UK-based folks and for UK-based non-skiers, the photos, at least, might be of passing interest. In any event, by popular demand (= my sister, representing the latter group), here I am. My apologies in advance to my fellow skiers: I considered changing your names “to protect the innocent”… but didn’t. We' [View Full Entry]

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Before my "real" adventures start, I decided that I needed some serious R&R. A week with friends in Nottinghamshire in February hadn't provided quite the necessary chilling-out experience, thanks, largely, to my picking up a cold (or, to quote one of my former colleagues, "man 'flu", given the alleged propensity of the male of the species to exaggerate his ailments!), and dealing with the remains of a stomach bug and an odd dose of backache. And I thought I'd done so well in avoiding the zillions of bugs, etc., doing the rounds while I was still working.... In any event, it [View Full Entry]

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