I arrive in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city, for a spot of 'sorting stuff out' before moving on. Home to 5 million people, Ahmedabad is a sprawling, noisy city, but one with history hidden in amongst the chaos. The old town contains some beautiful old mosques, the Teen Darwaja ('triple gateway') and a bustling bazaar. I wander amongst the market stalls, and my overriding impression is of a friendly city... the people are very inquisitive and polite, and on the backstreets, children vie for the attention of my camera lens (which, I should point out, is now in a fairly bad way... it won't focus properly and has attracted an army of bits, which I can't shift, creating a resident flock of birds in the sky of any photo I take!). After doing my sorting of things ... read more

It's 2.45am and I've just got myself down onto a bed which my feet hang off the end of. Lonely Planet reckons that some of the rooms in the hotel I'm staying in 'flirt with pokiness', but mine is already having intimate relations... if I try, I can just about touch all four walls at once, it's stuffy and humid, and all I can hear is the continual beeping of car horns. I'm in Mumbai, and it's been a rude awakening coming from South Africa. I left my hostel with a pool in Johannesburg on Wednesday morning, and had the fortune of being upgraded to business class for my 9 hour flight... something to do with me being 6ft 5in (too bloody right I should get more leg room!). So after enjoying South African Airways' finest ... read more

The St Lucia Wetland Park is located on the Elephant Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, north of Durban. I was staying in the small town of St Lucia, located on a small peninsula at the mouth of the St Lucia Estuary. My day began with a kayak safari in the estuary, home to crocodiles, hippos and an abundance of birdlife, including fish eagles, kingfishers and numerous others I don't know the names of. My guide and I set off in our two-person kayaks, and headed straight away to a group of hippos resting in the shallow water near the bank. Resting our kayaks on a sandbank between us and the hippos, we sat and watched as they did what all hippos tend to do... nothing. More active were the 4 or 5 crocs, some about 2 metres long, ... read more

Leaving J-Bay by coach (16 hours, overnight, crap!), I make a detour to Durban to fix my wide angle lens, which I dropped onto tarmac trying to get a photo of a whale's tail at Mossel Bay... all v. annoying! I decide to hire a car to travel up to the Drakensbergs and then east through KwaZulu-Natal and Swaziland to Kruger Park, so I collect Guppy (named in accordance with the Chris and Tracey Parkin car naming rules) from the airport and head north towards Pietermaritzburg and on to Underberg. I'm heading here to travel over the mountains and into Lesotho, a small country totally surrounded by South Africa. I arrive at Sani Lodge, just north of Underberg, in the late afternoon, just as the setting sun is spreading an orange wash over the Southern Drakensbergs, ... read more

Our remaining time in Cape Town is spent enjoying the views from Signal Hill, strolling around town and visiting the District Six Museum. As a town planner, urban renewal is a familiar subject, but the forced relocation of a multi-cultural community in Cape Town’s central area (known as District Six) during the apartheid era is something altogether more important. Formerly a neighbourhood occupied by a poor and diverse but culturally rich community, District Six was requisitioned for habitation by whites. The residents were forced to move, sometimes with no advance warning, and their houses and shops were demolished. Despite this mass clearance, few buildings were built in their place, aside from the ugly and sprawling Technikon, which remains once of the only buildings amid the district’s empty streets. Work is now underway to repopulate District Six, ... read more