This week’s 1001 Travel Tales podcast with Maria Hart of Travelling with Hart includes volunteering in Namibia, monkeys who hitch rides, and an oryx with a wonky horn. You can listen here on iTunes or Stitcher, or click on the image below to listen on SoundCloud: I hope you enjoyed the stories Maria Hart told…
Livingstonia: a glimpse of Malawi’s colonial past
Perched high on an escarpment overlooking Lake Malawi, Livingstonia was established by missionaries from the Free Church of Scotland back in 1894. The story goes that they tried several times to establish missions down on the shore of the lake, but kept losing missionaries to malaria until they moved up the escarpment to higher, less…
Malawi’s Nyika National Park
Nyika Plateau, a little-known park in the north of Malawi, is one of my favorite places in the world—and I’ve seen a lot of the world. In terms of landscape, Nyika is often compared with Scotland: gently rolling hills covered with grasses—green in the rainy season, brown in the dry season—as far as the eye…
Badagry, Nigeria’s Slave Past
It took me a whole separate post just to describe driving to Badagry in Lagos, Nigeria. Badagry was the “Point of No Return” in the Nigerian slave trade for 400 years. We were met in Badagry by our guide, Simon Stone Eyanam, who introduced himself as a reggae musician (You can see him under the name “Cornerstone”…
Driving through Lagos, Nigeria
I did a lot of driving on my recent visit to Lagos, Nigeria. Or rather, I did a lot of being driven. Lagos isn’t your usual tourist destination and, indeed, I didn’t go there as a tourist. I had agreed to lead a workshop at an International Baccalaureate school for two days. If I was…
125,000 YouTube views!
Did you know that I have a video on YouTube that’s had more than 125,000 views without my making any effort at all? I wish this blog had that kind of numbers! I recorded it back in 2009 when I visited Burundi with Edukans, an organization that promotes education in the developing world. A group…
Thoughts on my Burundi Adventure
I’ve been putting off writing this blog entry, and I’m not sure exactly why. I feel that I need to post something as a sort of summing-up of my Burundi adventure, but I don’t know how… I guess I’ll start with looking at what, if anything, the project achieved. The part of the project I…
Street Children
Kirundo, Burundi, August 9 Street Child There are a lot of street children here. They wander around town, dressed in rags the colour of the earth, and beg for money. So, of course, we’re a major attraction for them. They follow us around, begging for handouts, or sometimes just stand and stare. When we’re leading…
Twa Pottery
Kirundo, Burundi, August 9 On Friday we were taken to visit a potter, with one of the English teachers, named Claude, as our guide. On the ride there, which turned out to be very short, Claude told me that pottery is only produced by the Twa in Burundi, never by the Hutu or Tutsi. I…