Waiting in the car park that doubles up as a bus stop in Manzini, Swaziland, I passed an entertaining hour watching a master class in packing, with the luggage destined for Mozambique slowly, and seemingly quite precariously, being piled higher and higher. We'd left the hostel around 6.30am, catching a minibus that took us as far as the next main minibus stop, and from there we'd squeezed into another van heading for Manzini. There the van driver waved us off with instructions to 'head for the old KFC' - of course life would have been far to easy if the bus to Mozambique actually left from the bus station we'd been dropped of at! And that's where, having been astounded when those directions actually got us to the bus, we watched the packing spectacle. In addition ... read more

I'd stopped at St Lucia on the northern coast of KwaZulu Natal mainly because I wanted to see the Hippo's that live along the estuary here - so a few hours after arriving in town I found myself down at the jetty, clambering onto a tour boat and trying to decide on the best place to sit. What I'd somehow managed to miss when I was reading up on St Lucia is that in addition to the Hippo's these wetlands are also home to rather a large number of crocodiles. We'd only moved a few hundred meters when the captain suddenly slowed down and veered off towards the bank.... with no Hippo's in sight I was a bit confused until, just before the front of the boat nudged the bank, I finally realised what we were ... read more

Lesotho translates as the land of the people who speak Sesotho; the people of Lesotho are called Basotho. It's a small land locked country - at @30,000 sq/km it's completely surrounded by South Africa and lies entirely above 1,000m - its lowest point is 1,400m, with over 80% of the country above 1,800m. And of its 2 million population around 29% have HIV/AIDS - recent estimates for the average life expectancy are @36 years old. I had just one day in Lesotho but soon realised I could easily have stayed much longer - like many tourists I was on a day trip from South Africa. The scenery here is stunning, quite barren at the time of year I visited but stunning nevertheless. My lasting memory of the country though would have to be the people - ... read more

After three very entertaining weeks down the east coast I finally found myself back in Sydney needing to make a few decisions about where to go next. The original plan had been to head to Tasmania, maybe find some work in Melbourne and then go over to the west coast for a while. But part way down I'd started to have a bit of a rethink.... the timing of which probably coincided fairly well with my first rainy day and I began to question whether going further south in the middle of winter was one of my better ideas. In fact I was pretty convinced it wasn't so I cancelled my flight down to Melbourne and figured the rest would work itself out. In the mean time I had to meet up with Helen who was ... read more

The bus ride from Mission Beach to Airlie lasted about 8 hours and for most of it there were only 10 of us on the bus - having two seats to myself was luxury! We had a couple of of breaks on the way down and as most of us were staying on until Airlie I soon ended up chatting to a few people and trading travel stories with a Scottish guy called Harry. We arrived in Airlie to see the most amazing sunset over the harbour... by the time we actually got off the bus 10 minutes later it was dark and pouring with rain :0( I'd tried to call ahead to book a hostel for the night but was told there was no need to book because they always sent a minivan down to ... read more