With Angela not getting any younger, we decided to take a leisurely journey up the mountain and desert region of Namibia to recover from our uncharacteristic burst of exercise on the Orange River canoe trip. On our travels we’ve met people who have done Botswana and Namibia in 2 weeks and have heard of a guy that did Cairo to Cape Town in 21 days. We won’t be setting any records for our trip (we’ll be back in the UK in 2025 at this rate!) bu...

Orange River Canoe Trip “Help, I can’t breathe, I’m going to die”. These words gasped out by Gareth, one of the river guides on our 3 night 4 day Orange River canoe trip, were a surprise to say the least. Up to that point we’d assumed that the blue liquid Gareth was spitting all over our first night’s campsite was part of a joke. It transpired that he had drunk chemical toilet cleaner or “blue juice”, helpf...

Alexander Bay Apologies for the continuing scatological tone of these postcards but I do have to mention the sheer unadulterated pleasure that going through the "normal motions" gave me after 5 days of pebble dashing sundry toilets! Confident that I could keep the hatches battened down or rather up, we took a day trip to Alexander Bay, the western most point of South Africa and the estuary of the Orange River. It may have been partly due to the...

We've moved up to Springbok, the capital of Namaqualand, Northern Cape, South Africa. In Aug/Sept this place is a carpet of wild flowers, right now it is a very hot sandstone desert with it's own beauty, but not one we can explore in these temperatures! We may head to the coastal town of Alexander Bay, once a restricted diamond area, to see the birdlife at the Orange River estuary but right now we are staying close to flush toilets! Springbok is a stra...

Couple of pieces of advice about Lamberts Bay. First, if you want to take a photo of a gannet flying overhead it helps to have a free day, bags of patience, at least a 2GB memory card and no sense of smell (the latter because the guano generated by 23,000 fish eating gannets is a little intoxicating, nothing to do with Angela this time). Second, don't have the shrimp cocktail at Isabella's harbourside restaurant. Not being aware of the second piece of...