Free Travel Articles
Explore our library for stories of our personal experiences while driving the back roads of Southern Africa. We are still building this library to cover adventures in the remotest little towns to the wildest of places, always with a unique voice. We’ve even gone international (the overseas kind)! But what you will always get is: A different perspective. Quality. Authenticity. Originality.
Showing 1–16 of 39 results
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Tracking cheetah ain’t easy
$ 0.00Wildlife viewing got a whole lot more exciting when Mountain Zebra National Park acquired, first, four cheetah, then three lion, for its natural precincts. Thing is, this beautiful reserve is a massive sprawling territory — some 28 500 hectares — so even though the cat populations have increased, it takes some cunning sleuthing to come face to face with one.
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Zeitz MOCAA : Africa finds its voice
$ 0.00The art at the Zeitz MOCAA museum in Cape Town turns the Western perception of African art on its head, which of course was the intention of the 39 curators involved at this world-class centre. That’s of course not counting the unbelievably photogenic architecture of the converted old grain silos. The sliced-open hollow tubes that create ovals and circles and curvatures wherever you look were once giant storage cylinders.
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Why visit Kimberley’s Big Hole?
$ 0.00Led by our guide, we tuck ourselves like sardines into a rickety lift. With much creaking and trembling, it descends amidst a din of shouting voices and loud rattles for what feels like an interminable interlude. We’re going down 800 metres, our guide grins at us. When we come to a juddering halt and we escape from our unstable confines into a series of darkly lit tunnels supported by steel rods, he admits we’ve only moved 5 metres.
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Malgas Pont & De Hoop NR
$ 0.00A nature reserve whose name comes from a farm that once bred Andalusian horses… Repository of 1,500 species of limestone-adapted ericas and pincushions and leucadendrons… A place of vleis and flamingos and fish eagles, of miles of bone-white sand dunes, of lobtailing whales in the ocean and planing Cape vultures in the sky. De Hoop is about nature and conservation and peacefulness.
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Hippos in Hanover, Bo-Karoo
$ 0.00Take 1 Bo-Karoo farmer with a bakkie-load of perseverance and patience. Give him 6 years in which to exercise that perseverance and patience … and voilà! You have hippos again in a river called the Seekoei — in the Karoo, mind you — after more than 2 centuries. But this stoic farmer, PC Ferreira, hasn’t simply stopped there. He now has visions to reinstate some of the wildlife species that, before the white colonial hunters arrived, used to roam the Karoo scrublands in great numbers.
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Gamkaberg Nature Reserve
$ 0.00Gamkaberg, the first conservancy visited in our week-long, 875-kilometre, off-road circular trip through three Cape Nature reserves… Think nicely appointed tented camp (rented out privately to a single group), gas and solar power (plus eco compost loo), birdsong to wake you and to serenade the sundown, long and short hikes, a 4×4 trail.
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Anysberg Nature Reserve
$ 0.00Anysberg, the second conservancy visited in our week-long, 875-kilometre, off-road circular trip through three Cape Nature reserves… Think simple but characterful labourer's cottages, a pleated rim of mountain slopes as backdrop, a reservoir to swim in. Walk on the reserve, sign up for an overnight guided horse trail, try the 4×4 route, or enlist a guide to show you the stars through a telescope.
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Grootvadersbosch Nature Reserve
$ 0.00Grootvadersbosch, the third conservancy visited in our week-long, 875-kilometre, off-road circular trip through three Cape Nature reserves… Think innovative wood cabins with a double-volume entertainment space that opens up on three sides to the surrounding woodland. Walks and hikes in fynbos and rare Tsitsikamma-style indigenous forest
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Victoria Falls in September
$ 0.00Did you know that Makgadikgadi Salt Pans are the remnant of an ancient lake (paleolake) produced by geological uplift which blocked the course of the upper Zambezi ꟷ and this lake eventually created the Victoria Falls? The damming of the river redirected the flow away from where it once met the Limpopo.
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Spain-Portugal Road Trip Map & Highlights
$ 0.00It was the second week of May, just ahead of the Spanish summer, when we touched down in Madrid to embark on a road trip, a kind of pear-shaped circle, around Spain and Portugal. It was our first time in this part of the world (although it had been a long-standing place-marker on our wish list), we were armed with only a cryptic guidebook or two, with no expectations.
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San Sebastian Spain
$ 0.00It’s named after a saint. It’s on the Bay of Biscay in the north of Spain. And it’s near the French border. That’s San Sebastián. Europeans love the city for its powder-sand beaches. When the sun shines, the sea is the colour of Indian turquoise. So, yes, there’s kind of a surf culture here. But there’s also a gentle elegance to San Sebastián with its Belle Epoque flourishes.
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Bilbao Guggenheim Spain
$ 0.00When you mention Bilbao, most people think immediately of the Guggenheim Museum designed by Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry. It is quite awe-inspiring. Daring. Almost architecturally impossible with its supple metal curves gleaming gold, copper, silver, depending on how the light strokes its surfaces. And, indeed, this building was what really lifted Bilbao out of its bleak industrial slump of the 1990s.
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Haro Rioja photo essay
$ 0.00Haro (silent ‘h’) is all about Rioja wine … those luscious, juicy Tempranillo, Grenache and Carignan (among other cultivars) reds. Hey, Ernest Hemingway liked it enough to hang out for a while. And where else is there a yearly Batalla del Vino, a battle of wine, staged on a nearby mountain where the townsfolk dress in white, then raucously lob fermented red juice over each other from buckets and wineskins?
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Porto, Portugal
$ 0.00It’s the funniest thing … the towns I got the least excited about are the ones that have turned out the best (and the longest) as photo essays. What gives? Perhaps in Porto’s case, it was the miz grey skies that got me down — but when I look at the pictures, the city didn’t hold back from offering up offbeat photo opportunities in every corner.
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Salamanca Photo Essay
$ 0.00Ah, Salamanca. I can think of no other city with an identity so entwined in learning and graceful university architecture and boisterous student life … the one simply doesn’t exist without the other. Certainly, we’re talking of the Old Quarter here, but that’s where the soul and heart of Salamanca lie.
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Coimbra Portugal photo essay
$ 0.00Coimbra has had a long complex history. Celts lived here. And the Romans. So did the Barbarians (those non-Greek-speaking invaders of abroad). Then came the Moors, and later the Spanish. But most guidebooks focus on Coimbra as a university town; tour buses consider it worthy of half a day, disgorging their travel troupes there for just a morning or an afternoon.
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