LuBarnham

My 6 day Maharashtra mission has been excellent. It's 30 degrees and muggy out here, and while Mumbai is having sudden violent bursts of monsoon rain, here in Aurangabad it translates to a rather demure drizzle. I have visited four sets of caves - Elephanta, Ellora, Ajanta and Aurangabad caves - and have been loving the fierce renditions of Shiva, and the many carvings of the demon Ravana shaking Mt Kailash. To see it all fully I have even forsaken vanity and worn my budget, men's frame glasses so as to study them properly. Next thing you know I'll get all sensible and by an umbrella. For some reason, despite unusually high levels of planning and organisation on my part, I have managed to book trains and planes that leave in the dead of night and ... read more

Night time, sitting on some stone steps overlooking Maputo Bay, listening to and observing the sea as it crashes in and out a few metres below us. Little kids play chicken with the waves, climbing to the lowest step then shrieking as the water lashes their feet before they have a chance to leap away. We have just eaten our fill of local prawns drenched in garlic butter, and have bought a cold beer each from an outdoor beer stall. Gangs of people drink and talk along the water’s edge. Some of the male groups are loud and drunk, but families are strewn among them. This is the Marginal, a long avenue that runs north of the city of Maputo, along a palm fringed shore. It is probably considered dangerous for foreign travellers to hang out ... read more

The bus journey from Windhoek to Livingstone was one of the smoothest, most sanitised, most organised journeys we had taken in Africa, and we hated it. Carrying 90 per cent tourists, running to an actual schedule, making toilet breaks that weren’t just pit stops by the side of a field, it was a highly efficient affair. Gap year backpackers chatted and flirted and swapped travel stories as our double-decker coach roared through tiny villages. I wrote in my notebook, ‘Good God get me of this f**king bus.’ The girl in front of me was one of those great people who fully recline their seat for the entire (24 hour) journey, occasionally readjusting it in order to catch me by surprise with a sudden recline, smashing my knees further. ‘We’re in Central Africa!’ the girl next to ... read more

When the last of the DRC officials had checked our passports and waved us on, we found ourselves in a big dusty square, where a group of guinea fowl pecked the remains of a soldier's sandwich, and a few sleepy shopkeepers eyed the newcomers. The Angolan immigration team were friendly, if serious, and they taught us how to say 'hello' and 'thank you' in Portuguese. I had not really turned my mind to the practicalities of travel in Angola. For days my brain had been awash with will-we-won't-we get the Angolan visa, will-we-won't-we make it through the DRC without incident... now we had, and we were here, and it was a bit like waking up after a strange dream. As taxi drivers made their furtive approaches, reality suddenly hit home. We had been granted five-day transit ... read more

The plunge into Central Africa brought us to a string of exotic-sounding places I’d never heard of in my life; places like Oyem, Ndjole, Lambarene, N’dende, Mila-mila, M’banza Kongo,Benguela and Lubango. The few that I had heard of - Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Luanda - did not fill my heart with delight, though there was a little buzz, a small flush of excitement, connected with each, because they seemed like cities of the imagination, places that had seen hard times, were or had been hard to live in, and were visited only by intrepid explorers, coffee swilling journalists and wary expats. The sense of adventure was with us as we headed south, though for me it came with some sleepless nights. Gabon was easy to travel through until we hit the equator, and the paved jungle road descended ... read more