Travel stories, quotes and fun facts

South Africa has three capitals

Pretoria is administrative, Cape Town legislative and Bloemfontein judicial, a compromise dating from 1910.

Wind towers of Yazd

We stood under a badgir on a 42-degree day and felt actual cold air coming down. It was built in the fifteenth century and has never needed electricity.

Table Mountain has its own cloth

A flat cloud called the tablecloth pours over Table Mountain when southeast winds push moist air up the slope.

Invited three times

We were invited home for dinner by strangers three separate times in one week. Refusing politely is a whole art form and we never learned it.

Cape Town's mountain is a plant hotspot

Table Mountain alone hosts more plant species than the entire United Kingdom, part of the tiny Cape Floral Kingdom.

The purpose of life is to live it

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly for newer and richer experience.

The Cradle of Humankind holds early fossils

Caves northwest of Johannesburg have produced some of the richest early hominin fossil finds anywhere.

The Petra shortcut

There is the main path and there is the back trail with eight hundred steps. Take the steps at seven in the morning and the Monastery is empty when you arrive.

Lesotho is entirely above 1,000 metres

Lesotho is the only country whose entire territory sits above 1,000 metres, and it gets snow most winters.

Travel far, travel wide

Travel far enough and you will find that the strangest thing about strangers is how quickly they stop being strange.

Eswatini changed its name

Swaziland officially became Eswatini in 2018, meaning land of the Swazis, partly to avoid confusion with Switzerland.

Floating badly

You cannot swim, only float, and you must not get it in your eyes. I got it in my eyes within ninety seconds. A stranger walked me to the shower.

The Kalahari is a thirst land, not a desert

The Kalahari receives enough rain to support grass and trees, so technically it is a semi-arid savanna.

Desert camp silence

After the generator went off there was no sound at all. Not wind, not insects, nothing. Six people sat in the dark for an hour and nobody spoke.

Africa has over 2,000 languages

Estimates put the number of living African languages between 1,500 and 2,000, roughly a third of the world's total.

Two roads diverged

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.

Swahili is a trade language

Swahili grew along the Indian Ocean coast blending Bantu grammar with Arabic vocabulary from centuries of trade.

Jerusalem in four quarters

We crossed between quarters six times in an afternoon and the smell, the language and the music changed each time inside two hundred metres.

Africa is bigger than it looks on maps

The Mercator projection shrinks Africa. In reality the United States, China, India and most of Europe would fit inside it.

The Rift Valley lakes are alkaline

Some rift lakes are so alkaline they can burn skin, yet flamingos thrive on the algae that grow there.

Miles to go

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

The Beirut corniche

Fishermen, joggers, families, and a man with a coffee cart doing better business than any cafe. At sunset the whole city seemed to be walking in the same direction.

Timbuktu was a university town

Sankore in Timbuktu was a centre of learning in the 15th century with thousands of students in residence.

Saharan salt still moves by camel

Salt slabs are still cut in the desert and carried by camel caravan, though trucks now do most of the work.