Photo shows a lone male elephant on a road in Kruger National Park we encountered in October 2012. We weren't sure at the time what the intentions of the elephant were!


It seems hard to register that we have now been in Australia for nearly six whole years, with only 2 relatively short side trips to New Zealand, just across the turbulent ditch. This long period has of course been partly extended by Covid rules and maybe the very size of Australia has meant that we have been kept busy exploring new places whenever we could.

Now we are flying away, with Sundari safely tucked away in Hope Harbour, while we pass through Perth en route to Cape Town. We are hiring a car to drive east along the Garden Route and the Wild Coast as far as KwaZulu Natal, then north past Eswatini / Swaziland and into Kruger and then off to Johannesburg.



Anchored in the Broadwater for the next few days before flying off to Africa!

From there we will fly up to Entebbe in Uganda on the north coast of Lake Victoria, and visit the area south west of Uganda's capital, Kampala to look for chimps in their last remaining forest habitats amongst other Ugandan wildlife refuges. Finally, our African odyssey will take us to the city of Arusha near Mount Kilimanjaro and we will hire a 4 x 4 to take us to Tarangire national park, Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. We should be back in Brisbane ready to sail north in mid June after a short stopover in Kuala Lumpur.

It's not the first time we have been in Africa, of course. We were last in South Africa in 2012 when we spent five weeks in the eastern half of Africa's most developed country. We sailed up through the Red Sea in 2010, visiting Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, while in 2013, we spent time in Morocco and Cape Verde, off the West African coast. And on our long trip from New Zealand to Britain in 1979 we spent several weeks in Kenya, hitch hiking around the country and dropping into Mombasa on the coast where my (Geoff's) Dad was working.

Years before that, I lived in East Africa for five years with my family. My time there as a developing teenager, living in two equally developing young African nations, only just emerging from the shadow of colonial rule, was probably the most influential of my life.

It was where my life-long hatred of racism originated and an awareness of glaring socio-economic inequities. It was also where I discovered just how amazing the world of nature was, with the rich experiences of bountiful birdlife, amazing underwater coral ecosystems and mammalian megafauna.

It was where my mother died and was buried in a now overgrown cemetery on the outskirts of burgeoning and bustling Kampala. It was also where I learned to drive, and where I had my first taste of a job, albeit a volunteer one, on the border with the Congo in Queen Elizabeth National Park, working with and amongst that magic park's elephants, hippos, buffalo, lions and hyenas.

We don't expect to see an Africa unchanged. Nowhere else in the world has stayed the same. Africa generally remains near the bottom of the global statistical heap in terms of life expectancy, access to clean water, adequate housing and food supply. The continent is huge, of course, and diverse, and we will have too little time to make any meaningful analysis of what lies ahead for Africa's human population as well as what remains of African nature.

Climate change is just as important a challenge for Africa as it is here so far away in Australia. Only in the last few weeks, detailed aerial and underwater observations have revealed yet another depressing coral bleaching event, this time stretching well into the southern reefs. If wealthy Australia can't do enough to look after its natural marvels, and do its share in reducing emissions, who can blame poverty stricken African governments for not doing enough?



Route in South Africa from Cape Town to Johannesburg



Route in East Africa from Entebbe in Uganda to Arusha in Tanzania

* "Tunasafiri Kwa Africa" - Kiswahili for "We are off to Africa". Kiswahili is a lingua franca language across East Africa, especially Tanzania, where it is the national language, and Kenya. It is actually the native language of the Waswahili, the people of the east coast opposite Unguja / Zanzibar. Kiswahili is not so common in Uganda and not spoken in South Africa where Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Zulu and other African languages are the official languages.