We have made it to Bangkok. The journey was very long. I think it took just over 20 hours between us leaving our house to us arriving at our hotel in Bangkok. This was not helped by the fact that the plane was delayed for over an hour. We had already been at Heathrow for hours when we found this out. The flight wasn't too bad though and they let us sleep all the way without keep pestering us with food and drink. Managed to fit in one film in during the 11 hour flight as the rest of the time was spent trying but failing to sleep! By the time we arrived last night there was pretty much time to get some food before falling asleep. Today we decided to do some sightseeing and try ... read more

It's true! The honeymoon is indeed over and we are back in the UK. After driving over 4300KM around Namibia without any CDs to put in the CD player and no radio stations to receive on the radio and only our own singing to amuse ourselves the trip is over. We saw (and ate!) springbok, kudu, gemsbok and ostrich. We saw (but obviously didn't eat) elephants, zebras, lions, black faced impalas, rhino and meerkats amongst other things. Tim drank 25 bottles of Windhoek larger and 15 glasses/bottles of Hansa/Tafel. I drank 22 glasses of wine. We ate more food than you can imagine! A mouse ate my shoelaces! Our trusty Toyota Corolla made it round and officially had "no new damage" which was a relief considering the rattling noises it was making at one point! We ... read more

Today was another long drive, over the normal 4 hours! The road from Luderitz was mainly tarred so it was an easy drive. We stopped on the way to see some Desert Horses; these have evolved to go without water for up to 4 days, far longer than Tim can go without a cold Windhoek lager on this trip! We arrived in time for lunch at Canon Lodge, one of the most attractive places we've stayed, it's lots of bungalows built around huge rock boulders that sometimes are partially built into the rooms. We spent a lot of time watching the Rock Hyrax (also known as dassies) which are related to Elephants but look like fat Guinea Pigs. After a trip through the Valley of Salads (their name for a salad buffet!) we went to bed. ... read more

After another 4 hour drive - it takes at least 4 hours to get anywhere round here - we are at the Desert Homestead. Like most places it is in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere in this case is on the outskirts of the Namib Naukluft park and near the tallest sand dunes in the world. The journey here did have one highlight and that was that we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. There was a huge sign to inform us of this fact so needless to say we had to get out to take a (well several) photos. Today we headed to Sossusvlei in search of the dunes and after a slight bit of driving in the wrong direction we found them. They were huge - over 300 metres in places. As well as seeing ... read more

Seals are smelly! I did already know this from NZ where a small number of seals made a terrible smell. This was NOTHING compared to the stench of Cape Cross. There are 200,000 seals here and they all smell! When we first got out of the car it was pretty overwhelming. You did get used to it pretty quickly though. The seals were amazing though mainly because there were so many of them. They were as far as the eye could see. It was like being in a BBC documentary! The only not so pleasant thing about it all was the fact that there were loads of black backed Jackals about waiting to prey on any unattended seal pups. Once we had finished at the seal reserve we went back to our very nice accommodation for ... read more