Rwanda: the land of smiles (and a thousand hills)

We were loving Africa and didn’t want our time there to end so we booked a flight to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda in eastern Africa. The freedom we have to just change our route on a whim is amazing and I will be sad when it’s over. The country is mainly known for the…

Mountain top moments in South Africa

Today we have a guest post from our good friend Vicky who joined us in South Africa alongside Simon, Ally and Karina. Over to her: I’ve been asked a few times what my South African holiday highlight was.  It’s a really difficult question to answer. Perhaps it was the table top views from Table mountain….

Seeing the magnificent big cats in the Kruger National Park

“What is that!?”, Becki asked the guide as we passed a tree with what looked like a carcass hanging high from a tree. On further inspection it was the hind legs of an impala suspended from a branch. He answered with just one word: “Leopard”.  This is what we had hoped to see in the…

Self-drive safaris, shakedowns and Swaziland

A 700km stint took us from Lesotho back into South Africa and on to St Lucia, on the coast a few hours north-east of Durban. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the Caribbean island of the same name but it did feel pretty darn tropical after the chill of the mountains; wth pineapples for sale on the…

The mountain kingdom of Lesotho

Within South Africa sits the independent nation of Lesotho (population 2.2m). It shares no borders with any other country, nor has any coastline. This mountainous country (the highest in the world as measured by having the highest low point at 1,400m) is tricky to get around without a 4WD, so we approached it from both the…