Category Archives: Travel

It’s mesmerising: sitting in a rustic wooden boat, gliding across pristine emerald waters through a jaw-dropping karst landscape while listening to the gentle splash of the rhythmic rowing. The tops of the mountains are shrouded in cloud as a gentle rain falls. Bai Tu Long Bay in North Vietnam was designated a National Park in 2001. It adjoins the UNESCO World Heritage-designated Halong Bay […]

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Getting out and about in the “wilds” of Canada’s Vancouver Island is always such a joy. Truthfully, we are not really in the wilderness; we’re parked on a dock with two pubs and two restaurants within walking distance. Hardly roughing it! But as our ability to access internet has been patchy at best, I do feel […]

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Hong Kong has to be one of my favourite cities. The harbour, the skyline, the street markets, the parks, the culture, the shopping… Exotic and “oriental” while having all the familiar comforts of a large cosmopolitan city, Hong Kong buzzes with excitement, oozes with money, and, at the same time, feels accessible and safe. This sense of […]

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One of the nicest things about going to sleep on the water is waking up on it. I love waking up on a boat, well away from ‘civilisation’ in the middle of ‘nowhere’ – provided there is coffee! It was the morning of our second day on a beautifully fitted-out oak- and teak-finished Chinese-style junk, […]

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It was another 4:00am wakeup call: we were expected to break camp before 5:00am so we could drive back into Namib-Naukluft National Park and catch the sunrise colours over the sand dunes near Sossusvlei.  Sleep, as they say, is over rated. We were aiming for Dune 40 – 40 kilometres past the Sesriem gates on the road to Sossusvlei, […]

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