After a stop over in the city of Nelspruit – albeit to leave people off at hostels and hang around in a shopping centre car park, the final leg of my African experience of 2011 was upon me. I had been lucky to get to visit an Irish Pub in Nelspruit, O’Hara’s where a fresh…
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Mbabane! The capital city of….which country? You’ll ask me. Swaziland! And indeed another of those capital cities that I didn’t visit. I have a habit of missing capital cities. I haven’t been to Brasilia, Ottawa, Kabul, Sucre, Washington DC, Baghdad, Geneva, Cape Town, Mbabane and a few others from the countries I’ve visited. So…
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Having spent a few amazing days in Soweto and Johannesburg, I had made up my itinerary and rough plan for the rest of my time in southern Africa. In South Africa itself, I would make do with visiting just four cities (Durban, Soweto, Johannesburg and Pretoria) and I would cross into two of the other…
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The thought of drinking Guinness or finding an Irish Pub in Africa never occurred to me. Luxuries like that seem a world away, and besides the culture of the local pubs I was in far outweight those experiences spent indoors in a bland Irish themed pub. I was in Shebeens in Soweto. I was in…
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If you don’t understand the horrid history of South Africa, then a trip to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg is a must when visiting the country. I knew a bit about it, but going to the museum added a lot of details, facts and stories to my knowledge of the black and white divide in…
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Cramming so many things into my adventures means I often cut things short, without wanting to. I had to say farewell to Botswana on my third day. I had basically only decided to go there as I was staying in the north part of South Africa so close to the border that it would…
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A mid-day sun was shyly beaming through the clouds as I left the city of Pretoria behind. I arrived at Pretoria’s Main Railway Station by taxi for about 40 Rand from my hostel in Sunnyside. From Pretoria I had booked myself a cross-border bus the night before all the way to Gaborone, Botswana. It was…
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Soweto is drenched in more history than your average “neighbourhood.” From the Soweto uprising of the 70s, to the return of Nelson Mandela, to the current open atmosphere which is present in this massive “township”. Settling in there was one of the most friendly and easy experiences in life. It felt instantly like a home,…
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Travelling alone is not always ideal and not always easy, as relying on yourself can mean if you get something wrong, then you’re screwed. And of course things go wrong when you travel, ultimately this makes things more exciting. But forget all that, my “In Of Africa” experience ran almost as smooth as a Mark…
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It is possible you’ve never heard of Doha, it hardly advertises itself to you in the same way as New York, Paris and Buenos Aires do. But this, is a special, “sleeping giant” capital city of intrigue. It was my first ever trip to the “Middle East” (itself an oxymoron) and came about in…
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