Nelson Mandela: black or white?

That's not such a stupid question. It's worth considering now that he is finally at rest, after such a long time with death hovering at his elbow (this photo of a life-size beaded statue of him was taken at Johannesburg airport way back in September, while he was at home elsewhere in the city after nearly dying in hospital). Not everybody in South Africa is a total fan, I was surprised to learn while I was there.

Although I wasn't living in New Zealand in 1981 when the Springbok rugby tour was on, it was well reported in England and I watched the news in astonishment, seeing my peaceful country torn in two with protests, riots and bloodshed. If I had been there, I would have been one of the protesters, marching against the Rugby Union's self-centred, tunnel-visioned, denialist and stubborn refusal to admit that inviting the Springboks to tour was to support apartheid. I would have been cheering when the Hamilton game was cancelled. And I would have been amongst those chanting "Mandela! Mandela!"

When he was released from prison after that incredible 27 years - twenty-seven years! - I was delighted, and in 1994 when he was elected I was thrilled. It was all black or white to me. But when I went to South Africa this year I met lovely, educated, enlightened, generous people who, while they acknowledged what Mandela had done for their country and his countrymen, have not forgotten that the ANC that he led was a terrorist organisation, responsible for the deaths of innocent people, and that he had co-operated with dictators. They regret that their current government is self-serving and corrupt, and that their children - white, expensively educated because public education standards are worse today for all children (as I saw for myself) than back in apartheid days - are now a near-unemployable underclass.

Mandela himself never claimed to be a saint. He did great things, and made a huge difference, and South Africa is the better for his actions - but he's neither black nor white, and the country still has a long way to go. If I hadn't travelled there, I wouldn't know that. Consider my mind broadened. Is yours?

Yebo, Phinda!

Dutifully watching the TV news last night, it was a novelty, though not a relief, when the gloomy focus moved away from Covid, prison riot, road toll etc to Africa. Not just Africa, but South Africa. And not just South Africa, but Phinda Game Reserve, where I've been. Twice.

The topic was the poaching of pangolins - inoffensive, cute little creatures covered in scales which the Chinese, despite being clever in so many other fields, insist are a vital ingredient in traditional medicine. Like rhino horn, it's just keratin, same as fingernails, and just as inert and useless; but so convinced are the Chinese, and so eager to acquire it, that the poor pangolin is the most poached animal in the entire world.

One ranger interviewed reckoned that the weight of the annual haul of rhino horn, elephant tusk and lion bone, horrific though it is, would have to be multiplied hundreds of times to equal the tonnage of pangolin scales. Incredible, and so sad. I'm guessing it helps that they're so much easier to catch than the other animals. I'm also pretty certain that, with tourism currently so diminished, there are a lot of unemployed people out there busily poaching for an alternative income.

Rescued pangolins, which survive, are released to safety in places like &Beyond's Phinda, a private game reserve where they are very energetic about protecting endangered species. It's a lovely place, with a choice of six environmentally different lodges (mountain, grassland, forest, rock), all of them gorgeous, luxurious and staffed by real enthusiasts. I had such a wonderful time there, and got so close to the animals - bumping along behind cheetah running down a nyala, being looked at by a lion walking right past the open Landcruiser where I was sitting, rushing in reverse away from a black rhino that was pawing the dust before it launched into a charge. 

I didn't see any pangolins though. Sounds like that's getting even more unlikely, now.

One less reason to go to San Diego

It was too cold when I was in Chicago in October for the Lincoln Park Zoo rhinos to venture out. I went three times to see if they'd emerged, but though I could hear them thumping around inside their stable, they stayed tucked away in the warm. I sympathised - I was finding it pretty chilly myself - but it was disappointing, especially as they had a baby black rhino.

I have seen, and had my toes sucked by, babies before, in South Africa at an orphanage that takes in the survivors from poaching attacks. Sometimes they have to have wounds dressed from being slashed at with the poachers' machetes, to keep them away from the mother, while the horns are being hacked off her face to send to China and Vietnam for huge sums of money to make pretend medicine. The babies wail, and it's a heart-breaking sound.

It's a noise that's echoed through the African bush more often this year than ever before. In 2000, for comparison, just six rhino were killed by poachers in South Africa. That was the end of the good times for rhino. Last year the toll was 1004 - and this year, so far, it's reached 1116. That's a lot of wailing, and not just from orphaned babies. There are so many people working so hard in all the African countries that still have rhino populations, to protect and preserve them, and it's getting more and more difficult not to see it as a losing battle.

Don't be fooled by the apparently big numbers: 20,000 white rhino still alive in Africa, and 5,000 black rhino. The tipping point has now been reached, where reproduction rates can't cancel out the poaching losses. It's all downhill from here, unless something more is done. Just the other day, at San Diego Zoo, one of the last 6 northern white rhino, a sub-species, died of old age. Now there are only 5 left in the entire world, all of them in zoos, and all getting older and older.

There is a plan to take 100 rhino to Botswana - where they have a shoot-to-kill policy with poachers - to keep them as an insurance policy against their loss elsewhere. There's even a project, still in its early stages, to do the same thing in Australia. How strange it would be, to see rhino grazing in the Outback! These are immensely expensive undertakings, and it's heartening that people are prepared to take them on - but they're stop-gap measures. What's really needed is to halt the demand from the end markets, to make it harder, physically and socially, to be a poacher, and to strengthen the protection already being given to rhino in Africa (and Nepal, and Java, and Sumatra).

All those things are happening already, but it costs money. Can you send some to help? I have.

Capital crime

With thanks to Adventure World for this tailor-made holiday.

There’s nothing quite like being picked up in a BMW with leather seats and being chauffeured to a Tuscan mansion. Slightly dislocating for this all to be happening between Johannesburg and Pretoria, but I’m not arguing, even if the contrast between yesterday’s brutal and horrifying Soweto tour and today’s high-end luxury is somewhat guilt-inducing.

It’s actually a pretty typical South African vibe, as our driver was describing, same as our guide did yesterday. Extremes of rich and poor, it’s the African way, so far, it seems – and Zuma has done nothing but perpetuate it for his own benefit. I realise Nelson Mandela is a hard act to follow, but still…

Taking a private tour with Johan, politics were unavoidable. They are in any capital city, of course, but even more so here, where they impact so much on everyday life. To begin with, though, there were beautiful, if razor-wired, leafy mansions; an unseasonably dry nature reserve complete with blue wildebeest, zebra and a mongoose; and long views over the even leafier city with its universities, government buildings and monuments. The Voortrekker Monument is pre-eminent on its hill, literally (for a long time, no building was allowed to be higher) and tells an exhausting story of effort, struggle and battle. The Great Trek it commemorates, of the Dutch away from British colonisation, is aptly named.

The downtown area is full of lovely Victorian stately buildings heavy on the turrets and pillars, but also of loiterers who make wandering around with cameras a bit of a dodgy undertaking, so we didn’t. We drove instead up to the Presidential offices on their hill, surrounded by neat gardens and overlooking the 9m high Nelson Mandela statue, arms widespread and friendly grin on his face. It seemed a shame that the conversation with Johan begun at his feet was all about how difficult life is in South Africa, especially from the downtrodden white person’s angle. The pendulum has swung too far, and the country truly is the worse for it. It’s such a shame.

And then we drove away, past black men pushing a trolley full of spinach, and awkwardly carrying three wooden ironing boards, back to Waterkloof Ridge with its elegant high-walled mansions, to the Castello di Monte’s echoing halls and antique furniture. South Africa is full of ironies.

All hail the travel agent

I hate this woman. Or, rather, I hate the TV ad that this actress appears in so much that I can't grab the remote fast enough to mute her whiny voice. What is even more alienating than that though, is what she's saying, which is dissing travel agents for being lazy, ignorant and incompetent, unable to access flight information that this clever woman can use WebJet to discover instantly.

I think travel agents are wonderful. To be able, as they do, to bring together so much disparate knowledge about places literally all over the world, from nuts and bolts to aspiration/inspiration, tailor it to the client, organise it all into a simple format, and then be there as back-up in case of unpredictable hiccups or even out-and-out disasters - well, that's so very admirable. I've worked with both high-end operations, like World Journeys, World Expeditions and Adventure World, as well as your literal high-street outlet like House of Travel, and have been impressed every time.

This year, for example, it was Marlene at Adventure World who put me in a place and at a time to experience the entire year's most unforgettable moment: standing just metres away from a wild elephant which was straddling the path between the restaurant and the bar at Royal Zambezi lodge in Zambia - a country I'd never even thought of visiting, until she slipped it into my South Africa itinerary.

Travel agents have in the recent past taken me effortlessly to Galapagos, Easter Island, Kakadu, Iguassu Falls, Machu Picchu: the travel so enjoyable because it was so stress-free. I knew I was in the hands of experts, and that everything would go smoothly. And it did.

Compare that with the trips I did this year that were DIY. They were only around NZ and to Tahiti and Hawaii, but the time and effort it took to piece them together, coupled with my perpetual mistrust in the value and workability of the final itinerary really did suck away a lot of the enjoyment of the trips. Instead of being proud of having done it all ourselves, I was suspicious of how much better - and, yes, more cheaply - it all might have been, if done with more inside knowledge and expertise.

So, out of this year's trips - horse-riding the Coromandel Peninsula, self-driving around New Zealand, ditto with exponentially higher stress levels in Louisiana, attending a conference in New Orleans, swanning through South Africa (and Zambia), sunning myself in Tahiti, swimming in Hawaii - it was the ones that were sorted by travel agents that were by far the most satisfying and the most fun. Suck on that, WebJet.

A Bantam to save a rhino

How I do love it when this happens! Trawling through a whole notebook of crabbed-written notes on the South Africa trip, as well as transcribing three hours-plus of interviews, I went off on a bit of a side-track to find out more about the NZ-built Bantam that was referred to by Lawrence, below. He's the operations manager of ZAP Wing, which flies surveillance over 24 game reserves and responds to incident call-outs (read: ambushing rhino poachers armed with guns). It's one of their two fixed-wing aircraft, supplementing two helicopters, one of which I flew in.

Now, the Bantam is another of those heart-warming stories of Kiwi ingenuity that I also love so much. In this one, Max Clear got the flying bug as a boy from a passing crop-duster that waggled its wings at him, and went on to build his own planes. When he fancied something completely different, he couldn't find any plans to suit, so he designed it himself, and so the first Bantam was born. It became hugely popular, and he built and sold over 300 of them, of which almost half ended up in South Africa being used by farmers and game rangers to keep an easy and close check on their land and stock; which is how ZAP Wing came by theirs.

And here's the connection: Max died in 2011 and the business was taken over by Croydon Aircraft at Mandeville, where I went this January. Booked to fly in the yellow Tiger Moth in the background of the (supplied) photo above, I didn't notice the Bantam at all - but if I had, and had read the info board displayed inside the hanger, I would have learned all about its use in the fight against the rhino poachers. The people who own Croydon are on board with the cause, and there's a chance that I've been able to bring together people who could really make a difference to the rhino's looming extinction. So that's an even better kind of link.

In a bit of a whirl, here...

It's a confusing time right now. I'm reviewing Thailand and Kakadu to decide whether I've written enough stories about them, so that I can go back to June and catch up on some UK material - the Forest of Bowland, for example, or maybe Lindisfarne. Meanwhile, another bit of my brain is thinking about what I need to pack for South Africa next week, and how I can avoid overlapping with stuff I need to take to the US on the day after I return from Johannesburg, because I don't want to be lying awake for those precious few hours in my own bed listening to the washing machine whirring away. It's all a bit much, especially on top of also trying to organise tradesmen - and the Council - to sort things in the house and garden so that we can sell it as soon as we get home. Too much mental activity altogether. It would be a relief to go outside and just dig clay for a few hours (don't ask). Except that now it's raining.

Occasional messages are arriving from the Firstborn, currently cruising in the Galapagos Islands, consistently raving; "Holy moley! This place is AMAAAAZING!!!" along with pics of iguanas and tortoises. Of course she's having a wonderful time. It is an amazing place, and she's got the luxury of 10 days there to explore it all, twice as long as I had, sigh. The Baby, meanwhile, is disporting herself (well, actually, working) on a billionaire's yacht in Italy, where I've hardly been at all, though I've been trying to get back there. It's very frustrating, having got an actual commission for a story, and not to be able to persuade an airline to take me there. What's that? Buy a ticket, you say? Have you NO understanding of how this travel writing thing works?! There has to be some compensation for being paid peanuts.

And finally there's Scotland in the news, about to decide whether to vote Aye or Nay, so I'm remembering being there in June (getting sunburnt!) and seeing the posters and the badges everywhere. Meantime the All Blacks are being talked about because they're playing South Africa here tomorrow and, though I'm so not a follower of them, I've been preceding them a bit this year, to Newcastle's stadium where they're playing in the RWC next year, and to Chicago where they've got a game at Wrigley Field against the US in November. Somebody in Chicago actually offered yesterday to set me up with an AB interview. Puh-leese! (But I'm not above using them to try to sell a story...)

Africa, à la Adventure World

                      With thanks to Adventure World for this tailor-made holiday.

This morning began with another yummy (French toast today) sociable breakfast – conversation topics included rank v platoon firing in battle, and how to do the two-handed finger snap used so effectively yesterday by Mphiwa – and then we said goodbye to the cheerful staff at Fugitives’ Drift. We drove our (freshly-washed) rental car the four hours back to Durban, past traditional villages and gradually bigger towns like Babanango, Melmoth and Ballito, finishing up back at the King Shaka Airport to begin our long journey home.

Most of this trip was organised for us by Adventure World: partly as a prize I won, and partly as a demonstration of what they do, for me to write about. What do they do? Well, as much or as little as you want, right up to "Everything, please". They have a wide range of group tours that they run throughout the year to many countries all around the world. Or you can go bespoke, as we did. Having decided it was Africa we wanted to go to, we made an appointment with their African specialist at their office in Auckland (you can also work with them through a travel agent), and had a chat about the sort of things we wanted to do and see. It was pretty vague: Cape Town, glamping, a train, and wildlife, especially plenty of elephants, all to be fitted into about a couple of weeks. We could, of course, have been much more specific.

We were emailed gradually more definite itineraries for our feedback, and when it was all finalised, we went in again to pick up the hard copy with its booklet of vouchers, and to ask any last questions. Everything had been organised: flights, accommodation, activities, transfers, and we even had some help putting together our personal travel at the end. And then we were away.

It all worked beautifully, almost. There was one hiccup with a missing transfer, which was handled very efficiently by the company Adventure World was working with in South Africa, with prompt action and reassurance from Marlene back in New Zealand. All the rest of the flights, pick-ups, hotels and so on went perfectly, which is very reassuring in a place like Africa: it's a bit of an edgy destination and not somewhere I’m brave enough now to tackle completely on my own. I certainly noticed a big increase in nervousness when we were finding our own way around, driving ourselves and feeling much more vulnerable.

And the places we went! Hotels that weren’t just fancy, but full of personality; private city tours; the fabulous other world of the Rovos Rail experience; the foray into Zambia to fly in our own little plane to Royal Zambezi Lodge for truly unforgettable wildlife encounters including a surfeit of elephants… it was all brilliant. And so, so easy. Don’t believe those stupid TV ads that sneer at travel agents and tell you to do it all yourself much more efficiently, and cheaply, on the internet. I’ve done that too, recently, and it’s been a nightmare, honestly. Do yourself a favour and leave it to the professionals, like Adventure World: you’ll be glad you did.

PS: All this, and responsible tourism too!

Dream job's dream destination

There are dream jobs, and dream jobs. Quite honestly, when I was Stationery Queen at the primary school across the road, paid to pore over catalogues of shiny pens and staplers, ordering card and paper, whiteboard markers and dusters, and gleefully unpacking the delivered boxes, I really thought I'd found my metier. And when the time-and-motion people brought in by the Board of Trustees decided my job should be expanded to include resources and the library, well! I was stoked. Until the BOT immediately decided, on reflection, to dispense with my services altogether, informing me of my redundancy just hours before the combined staff-board Christmas do. Bitter, me?

But then I blundered my way into the sort of occupation that is envied by more than just other stationery fetishists: travel writer. Flying, often business class, to overseas destinations, to stay in fancy hotels, be taken out to dinner, shown around and looked after; or, equally desirable, going on adventures, like walking the Inca Trail or kayaking along a croc-infested river - all for free? And then to be paid (a pittance, admittedly) to write about it afterwards for newspapers and glossy magazines? Now that's what you call a Dream Job. The fact that, as I keep whining, it's not actually a holiday, can be exhausting and frustrating, and has very little freedom, is really neither here nor there. Who wouldn't rather do this than make laminated passive-aggressive notices to stick on the staff fridge and microwave?

Even though I sometimes get a bit blase about it, possibly slightly jaded from time to time, I love doing my job. I've been places, done things, met people I would never have dreamed of and certainly could never have afforded myself. But the more I do, the more I realise just how huge our world is and how impossible it is to see everything, or even a fraction of its best bits. And one of the better bits, for someone like me who loves to see wildlife, is Africa. I've never been! I keep saying, "perhaps this will be the year I get to Africa" but, not yet having been particularly proactive about it, that year hasn't yet arrived. So how exciting was it to open a random email last week which asked, "Would you be interested in an all expenses paid trip to South Africa next month?"

Pretty damned exciting. Especially since it's to go on safari to follow a campaign to prevent rhino poaching (elephant poaching would have been a bit closer to my heart, but I have nothing against rhinos, and any animal's extinction is a heinous sin). Proper bush camping with hyaenas scavenging around the fire in the night, walking through the bush, and heaven knows what kind of toilet arrangements... glorious! And it's just this minute been confirmed. I'M GOING TO AFRICA!!!

Buzzing

"More addictive than heroin - and more expensive, too" - that's what Peter the chopper pilot's first flying teacher told him about what he was launching himself into, and nothing about what he's experienced since has led him to disagree. Me neither. I was making my 6th flight today, 20 minutes that felt like 10 on a circuit over Auckland. That's how time works, in helicopters, in my experience: I did 90 minutes buzzing over the South African veldt looking for rhinos last year that I would have sworn was half an hour, tops.

I've hopped across Lake Wakatipu, I've done a sunset flight in Australia's Red Centre, a loop around Mt Taranaki, a swoop above Iguassu Falls in Argentina/Brazil, a dusk flit around Long Island and now this birthday buzz over Auckland. And apart from being trapped in the centre in the back on the Iguassu flight and able to catch only glimpses of the falls between the professional snapper's big camera on one side, and another writer's (spit) iPad on the other, they've all been brilliant ways to see the scenery.

Iguassu, in those snatched images, was truly spectacular; South Africa was amazing because for the guys in front this was their daily job and they were so matter-of-fact about the whole deal (also, you can never beat seeing a rhino in the wild however you come at them); Kings Canyon is a piece of work from any angle; so is Manhattan; and this country's not too shabby either, scenery-wise, and I wouldn't like to have to rank Mt Taranaki against the Remarkables - but despite all that, there's something very special about seeing your familiar surroundings from 300 metres up, everything recognisable but at the same time so strange. It all fits together so neatly - who knew?!

The whole experience was soured, however, by Peter's saying at the end that in a couple of days he's piloting a couple of Germans with tons more money than time on a 3-day chopper trip that will include a Tauranga winery, Huka Lodge, Rotorua, White Island, another fancy lodge somewhere further south, and Abel Tasman NP. Spit. I was just writing about that White Island helicopter trip this week for an inflight magazine, and I had to do it third-hand because, for once, I hadn't done it myself. Double spit.

First world problems

I don't know if this is going to last, but travelling around rural South Africa and going into schools and communities has given me some perspective on things that loom a bit too large for so many people in our world. My pinot noir on the plane last night didn't come till I was halfway through my boeuf bourgignon, and it was too cold; and my seat on the long Joburg-Sydney leg would recline only a couple of inches. But that was nothing, having just seen the thin reed mats that poor people sleep on, on the ground, and having stood in the dormitory of a school bush camp hearing how the kids had to be shown how to use a bed, how to flush a toilet, how not to scald themselves in a shower. And how these same kids had to get up really early in the morning at home to carry water - a 25 litre jerry-can weighs 25kg, remember - before walking up to 15km to school. And then the same again at the end of the day.

The people tutting with irritation over the slightly messy organisation for boarding the Auckland flight should get over themselves. It's not "shocking", having to wait 10 minutes to get onto a plane. What's really shocking is children wearing their shoes undone because they're far too small, but it's a matter of pride not to go barefoot to school. It's shocking that there are so many child-headed households because the parents have died of Aids, and these kids can't go to school at all because they have to look after their younger siblings.

And everybody in New Zealand today, cast into gloom by the failure to win the America's Cup after such a long and emotionally-gruelling struggle, should remember that actually it's just a race for rich men's toys; and that even though Team NZ pushed themselves to the limit, it's all pretty trivial really when you consider facts like 95% unemployment, like an elephant being killed every 15 minutes, like rhino horns being hacked off with axes while the animals are still alive, left to bleed to death. So cheer up! In Africa, things are so much worse!*

*"The floggings will continue until morale improves."

From pond to Phinda

Phew! It's hot work, hanging motionless over the pond in the baking sun, waiting till my golden bell frog tadpoles are lulled into revealing themselves so I can see how many legs they've got now. Game spotting: that's my focus for the day, specifically writing about Phinda's Rock Lodge, where I stayed for just two nights during my trip to South Africa last September.

I didn't have much opportunity to blog about it at the time because it's full on while you're there: up at 5.30am for tea and rusks before the first game drive of the day, then back for a full breakfast three or four hours later. Then, before the afternoon drive and dinner, you could go and laze in your room and wallow in your private plunge pool, or use the provided 'gym in a bag' or the yoga mat - but that would be to miss the chance to do other animal-spotting activities elsewhere in the 23,000 hectare private reserve with its seven separate ecosystems.

We went to see cheetah being fed in a boma, or enclosure, where they were being kept before being relocated - Phinda has a great record for breeding cheetah. Of course it's in their interests to keep game numbers up, but these reserves have a genuine commitment to preserving species and increasing their numbers, and they really are doing a great job. If only it were just about ensuring that they have sufficient space to keep the gene pool stirred up - but sadly it's even more important to keep the poachers at bay, and though Phinda has a man keeping an eye on their rhino, as well as other systems of intel and protection, they recently lost two: a white rhino and, even worse, a black rhino cow which not only had a calf at foot, but was pregnant too.

I heard baby rhino orphans wailing when I went to the Centennial Centre at iMfolosi Reserve - they sounded like whales. It was heart-breaking. One of them had scars on his face from being beaten away with machetes from his mother while her horns were hacked off.

Being an animal in Africa is hard enough already - I saw that on the afternoon game drive when the gaunt mother of three gawky and useless cheetah cubs finally got the chance to run down a nyala for them all to eat, which they started on before it was even dead - without people making it worse purely for money. Bastards.

Getting catty about Africa

 
For a trip that was meant to be all about the rhino, I'm happy to say that I came into contact with an awful lot of cats during my 12 days in South Africa. Not 'awful' at all of course: they were just beautiful, even this one, Moya, at the Endomneni Cat Rehabilitation Centre, who after being totally relaxed about being patted and petted by a series of slightly anxious tourists, suddenly swiped at one man's face, drawing blood. A bit more rehabilitation needed there, it would seem. There were caracals and servals too, and African wild cats that looked just like domestic moggies, though rather more fierce, even when they were playing.

Then there was a leopard strolling around camp at night, where our group had been blithely moving through the trees between our cabins. There was a genet there, too, with its long, long tail, prowling around the braai at the edge of the circle of lamplight, pouncing on thrown scraps of meat.

I saw lots more cheetah at Phinda: a couple of cubs with their mother in the dusk, another two in a boma, or enclosure, awaiting relocation and which I watched from the back of a ute nearby standing alongside an impala carcass the same as the one they'd just been thrown. Cheetah eat fast, as they're prone to attack by leopard and lion (there's no solidarity in the African cat world) and always on the watch. They start at the rump, because that's got the most meat, so if they have to run, they'll at least have had decent a chance for a good feed.

They also tire themselves out when they run down their prey, so that it's not unusual for the actual kill, which is by strangulation, to take longer than anyone would like because they haven't the strength left to grip really tightly. That's how it was when we watched a hungry quartet, a mother and her male cubs, catch a young nyala antelope. It's pretty gruesome (actually not pretty at all) to watch an animal literally being eaten alive, and wailing.

And then there were lion, a pride of five staring back as I stood nearby in that ute still with the bloody carcass at my feet; and later a fabulous muscled single lion with what looked like a combed mane. Then, finally, there was Missy, who staked out my bed as her own at the family home I stayed in for the last night, and who I would happily have brought back with me to my own home. If the present incumbent here would ever have allowed it.

Close encounter

You'll have to forgive the several photographic failures of this shot - slightly blurred, not centred, tail cut off - and instead appreciate that it got taken at all. This lion, looking straight at me in a very appraising sort of way, was as close as he looks. In fact, closer: after I clicked the shutter, he passed right by where I was sitting in the open Landy, less than two metres from me. And while that's not rare in the usual run of things at Phinda Private Game Reserve in South Africa, this is a newly-acquired lion and still an unknown quantity.

He was so close that had he decided that I was worth investigating as prey (something that vehicles and their contents generally aren't) our ranger Bruce in the driver's seat right in front of me would have had no time to get his gun out and instead would have had to face the lion down, trying to look big, and yelling at him. Apparently this does happen, occasionally - "It's why you sign a disclaimer," we were told cheerfully, afterwards.

But this time our close encounter was simply thrilling, and a perfect way to end our too-short stay at Phinda, itself the perfect finish to our rhino crusade to Zululand. This last early-morning game drive was followed by 3 hours on the road to Durban airport, an hour to Joburg, 11 hours to Sydney, and a bit over two hours back to Auckland and home. Plus all the bits in between, that's a long journey, but so very worth it, in every way, and one I'd make again anytime. Africa.

Waiting

Discussing the Gallipoli 2015 expedition with a travel provider today, he commented that it had taken some time for all of my stories to be published from the last trip he'd facilitated for me - "But that's what happens, when you're working with freelances," he finished, with a refreshing understanding of the situation. The upside, to which he also referred, is that freelances produce far more stories from a famil than does a journalist tied to just one publication. Swings and roundabouts, in other words. It was such a relief to hear him say this, because one of the awkward things about being a freelance travel writer is the understandable eagerness of the PR person at the tourism operation who naturally wants to see a return on their generosity as soon as possible once a trip has been completed.

Sadly for them, and for the freelance caught in the middle, once the story has been filed, it's entirely up to the editor as to when it sees the light of day. It could be next week, or it could be next year, literally. It all depends on advertising, space, budget, themes and what other stories have recently run, and nagging the editor achieves very little other than building up a bad association with seeing your name in their inbox. (It's not just the tourism people who are disappointed: it's an inconvenient fact that writers are generally paid on publication, which means a long time between meals.)

So it was a pleasant surprise to hear from my #1 editor today that he's decided to concentrate on clearing out all the old stories that have been sitting in his files. I don't know about his other writers, but he's got a dozen or so stories of mine, the oldest of which date back to June and July 2012 - so long ago that I'd forgotten them entirely, and when I went back to re-read them it was almost as if someone else had written them. It'll be good to see them in print, hopefully within the next couple of months: the Gawler wilderness in South Australia and the Norfolk Broads, plus the Hump Ridge Track, Juneau, Alaska, South Africa, the Rockies, the Catlins, Queensland... The PR people will be happy at last.

Consider me spiced

There's certainly no shortage of variety in my life at the moment. Today I've been writing about machine guns, diggers and dancers in Las Vegas, as well as tweaking another story about a Hitler tour in Munich. I'm getting emails about walking through the Outback in South Australia (starting from the Dig Tree of Burke and Wills fame, which I just happen to be reading a book about). Someone else is wrapping up loose ends from my airline disaster in Tahiti, which is the destination I'm writing about next. Meanwhile I'm organising a house-sitter and liaising with the PR people from Visit England and Visit Scotland about my trip there next month; answering questions about Hobbiton from someone in Kuwait; and going green with envy at the countdown for my South Africa buddies to their epic car rally from Namibia to Zimbabwe. Oh, and getting stuff together for another stay on Waiheke Island at the weekend while messaging a daughter in Chile.

It's hard to imagine what it's like to be my dear old aunt, who has no desire to travel whatsoever and has rarely ventured beyond the county borders of Surrey. It's not that she's uninterested in what the rest of the world is like: she just doesn't want to go there herself. There are still people like that around, in every generation. I met a young man yesterday who's lived in Auckland for years and has never been to Waiheke; the car hire girl at Townsville airport has never made the 20-minute crossing to Magnetic Island, either. "I get sea-sick," she protested. Well, pft. Pathetic.

Not wanting to go places, being perfectly satisfied with just seeing them on TV or in magazines, is really missing out, I reckon. It's literally 2D, and nothing like being there, feeling the heat or cold or humidity on your skin, smelling the frangipani or curry or drains, hearing the wail of the muezzin, the racket of galahs at dawn or the roar of millions of litres of water pouring over Iguassu Falls. You don't get the buzz of being somewhere famous, or connecting with people who on the face of it are very different from you but turn out to be pretty much the same after all, or doing things that are a bit challenging and scary.

It's sometimes tempting, as you squeeze yourself into the middle seat in a crowded plane with every overhead bin crammed with outsize bags, to remember the glory days of the '70s, when fewer people were travelling and you could get whole rows to yourself, and to regret that everyone seems to be on the move these days. But actually, it's just great that all those minds are being broadened. Now, if only the bodies that go with them could be a little less so...