If you have been to a safari park at​ home then you will have an inkling what Etosha National Park is like, although you need to add a unhealthy dose of steroids!Etosha is over 22,000 square kilometers in size which is about half the size of Switzerland. The distance between the two entrance gates (Von Lindquist and Anderson) that we used was over 200 km with the Namibia Wildlife Resorts (NWR) at Namutoni, Halali and Okaukuejo spaced at pretty much 75 km interv...

The drive from Windhoek to Tsumeb was around 430km on tarmac roads and pretty much all of it on the main north/south highway, the B1, in Namibia. If honest the scenery was not stunning but impressively baron/desert bush like and there was a lot of 'big sky' moments on the drive north. Fortunately I am now fully up to speed driving on the left (as we do in the UK) so keeping to the 120 kph speed limit on mainly straight roads with the odd junction and roundabout ...

It has been some time since we have been outside of Europe as we have concentrated on visiting places closer to the UK in order to use some of our remaining free rail travel coupons - it is nice to be back travelling on a 'long haul' trip!Our good friends Simon and Linda very kindly offered to take us to Birmingham Airport in order to catch Emirates flight EK42, the 09.40 Birmingham (BHX) to Dubai (DXB), which saw us boarding a Boeing 777-300ER aircraft for this...

After the leisurely journey from Warsaw on board the PKP (Polish National Railways) service we had a ten minute walk from the main station (Gdansk Glowny) to our hotel in the old city area. Again we were in a three star hotel, the Wolne Miasto Hotel, and it was a really good clean place for the price and included a decent buffet breakfast too - our rooms were on the third floor so you did need to be a little bit careful of the sloping roof! Prior to dinner there ...

For some time my mum had mentioned that she would like to visit Poland having seen some of the photographs from our previous visits. Having found some well timed (and keenly priced) flights from Birmingham to Warsaw on a Thursday morning and back from Gdansk to Birmingham on a Sunday afternoon the trip was on! Flying from Birmingham to Warsaw (Modlin) with Ryanair we had a delayed departure of about thirty minutes due to air traffic restrictions. This delay in tu...