Travel stories, quotes and fun facts

Guinea-Bissau has a maze of islands

The Bijagos archipelago has around 88 islands, most uninhabited, and is a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

The jeepney route

Routes are painted on the side and fares are passed forward hand to hand from the back. Nobody loses a coin. Nobody keeps the change.

Liberia was founded by freed people

Liberia was established in the 1820s as a settlement for freed African Americans and declared independence in 1847.

Move, eat, learn

If you're twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel as far and as widely as possible.

Island hopping fuel stop

The boat stopped at a beach with a hut and a barrel of diesel. The refuelling took twenty minutes and the swimming took the rest of the afternoon.

Sierra Leone means lion mountains

Portuguese sailors named the peninsula for mountains whose thunderstorms sounded like roaring lions.

Togo is narrow and long

Togo is only about 110 kilometres wide but stretches 550 kilometres inland from the Gulf of Guinea.

Typhoon week

The ferries stopped for four days. We ended up in a fishing village with four other stranded travellers, learned to play a local card game badly, and were sad to leave.

It seems that the more places

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realise the world to be.

Benin has a lake village on stilts

Around 20,000 people live in Ganvie entirely on stilts above Lake Nokoue, moving by pirogue.

Angola has waterfalls few visit

The Kalandula Falls drop about 105 metres across a 400-metre curtain and see a fraction of Victoria Falls' visitors.

Bagan by e-bike

There are two thousand temples and no rule about which one to climb. We picked one at random, sat on warm brick, and watched the light change for an hour.

Namibia protects its whole coast

Namibia was the first African country to write environmental protection into its constitution, and its entire coastline is now protected.

Open your mind

Travel changes you. As you move through this life you leave marks behind, however small.

Sossusvlei's dunes are among the tallest

Dunes here reach over 300 metres, coloured deep red by iron oxide that has been oxidising for millions of years.

The teahouse ledger

Every teahouse on the trek kept a paper ledger, and the prices went up predictably with altitude because everything had been carried on someone's back.

Deadvlei's trees never rotted

The camelthorn trees died around 900 years ago but the air is too dry for decomposition, so they still stand black against white clay.

Ten days to base camp

The mountain is not the hard part. The hard part is the fourteenth consecutive dinner of dal bhat and the discovery that you would happily eat a fifteenth.

Namibia has the world's largest meteorite

The Hoba meteorite weighs about 60 tonnes and has never been moved from where it landed roughly 80,000 years ago.

Don't tell me how educated

Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.

Botswana's delta flows inland

The Okavango River never reaches the sea. It spreads into the Kalahari and evaporates, creating a vast seasonal wetland.

A porter's load

He carried thirty-two kilos with a strap across his forehead and overtook us on every climb. At lunch he asked, politely, whether our bags were really that heavy.

Botswana has the most elephants

Around a third of Africa's savanna elephants live in Botswana, concentrated in the Chobe region.

Travel in the younger sort

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.