After filling our boots at the Billabong factory outlet shop in Jeffreys Bay, we drove to Port Elizabeth airport and hopped-on a short flight back to Cape Town to spend our last night in South Africa. Tomorrow we head north-east into a different country and continent — the United Arab Emirates in the Middle-East, Asia. […]

When we first announced to our friends, family and fellow travellers that we intended to travel independently through Southern Africa for just over three months, we were met with a lot of questions about personal safety, exotic illnesses, scary creatures and dire transport. As our trip loomed ever closer, we ourselves were apprehensive about these […]

Squiffy had a really authentic local experience the other day. We reached Morogoro bus station and we needed to buy tickets for our onward journey. Doing this whilst wearing our backpacks makes us obvious targets for the inevitable touts, so instead we have devised a cunning system to increase our agility and reduce our exposure […]

We had been nearly a month in Tanzania and it was time to move on to countries new. Rather than take the seemingly direct road to get from Moshi in the north, to Mbeya in the South we were advised to dog-leg back via a place near Dar Es Salaam instead; because the apparently ‘straight’ […]

We’re heading out of the Tanzanian tourist loop now (Zanzibar-Mt. Kilimanjaro-Serengeti). I expect the travel to get more tricky from hereon. Additionally, Internet access becomes more scarce and certainly more expensive — our Lonely Planet pegs a hour’s Internet access at $10/hr for some locations we are due to vist over next couple of weeks […]

Anyone that has worked with me knows that, for reasons unbeknown to me, I go through trousers like hot dinners. (‘Work’ trousers tend to have the highest failure rate.) My previous travel trousers had already been crotch re-stitched three times, so before coming to east/southern Africa I decided to buy a couple of high-quality replacement […]

So after enjoying a meal in a busy restaurant, I raised my hand, caught the attention of the waiter and did The International Symbol for The Bill. You know, the one where you sign your name with an imaginary pen onto the palm of your other hand? The waiter brought me a pen.

Compared to The West, one of the many cultural differences that we’ve noticed in Tanzania is the acceptance of ‘customer multitasking’. Whilst we recognise that organised queuing is a uniquely British pastime, in my opinion it is far preferable to the African equivalent in which the server invites everyone who approaches their counter to make […]

After another exciting night camping under the stars amongst the lion poo, this time on the misty rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, we descended over six hundred metres to the volcanic floor. The Crater is the usually reserved for the final day of a short safari; even if you hadn’t seen any wildlife in the […]

Our day in the Serengeti was my favourite of the safari. The plains are endless, the wildlife varied and the sunsets beautiful. My highlight of the day was spotting a cheetah under a tree in the distance and waiting patiently to see if it moved, only to discover there was actually a group of three […]