Wandering Gaia

Unlike almost every other river on Earth, the Okavango river does not encounter any sea or ocean on its 1430 kilometre journey from its source in the hills of central Angola to where it spills into a vast wetlands even further inland in northern Botswana. Around 97% of the Okavango waters evaporate in the delta [...]

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“When I was a child we didn’t think about apartheid; it never really occurred to us. We didn’t know what it was. I only ever saw white people, except for our maid and my friends’ maids. We thought there were really very few blacks in the country. Blacks needed a pass to go anywhere. They [...]

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I used to have a competition with my flatmate about who would be the first of us to get a donated item into the very weird – sometimes creepily so – window display of our local charity shop in Greenwich. (This was before the area’s re gentrification, when Greenwich was still full of odd shops. [...]

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Mozambique does not exactly charm the visitor on arrival. After a long and tiring journey from Senga Bay in Malawi, involving 7 different forms of transport, one bus breakdown, one matola with a punctured tyre, one police fine for being in the back of a pick-up truck and a fight with the border taxi mafia, [...]

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Felt another earthquake tremor this morning – Lake Malawi is firmly lodged in the geologically active Rift Valley. In parts the bottom of the lake is nearly 800 metres below sea-level. It’s fed by more than 600 rivers, but only one, the Shire River, flows out of the lake. Climate change is heating the water, [...]

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Sam, our glamourous Zimbabwean campsite owner, explained the origins of the beautiful community library she built, today – which fortunately seems to have survived the earthquakes and tremors we keep getting here. It’s a great example of how villages can improve their educational faclities, so I thought I’d retell it.
It started one day in 2006, [...]

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It rained hard all night long and this morning the green lawn is carpeted in red petals from the jacaranda tree. The low sun is already hot and the lake seems to be perspiring – cormorants and hammerhead storks flying through steam. Fishermen are pulling in their catches, balancing awkwardly on rough-hewn heavy log canoes. [...]

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The power outage in Zanzibar has persisted for three weeks now and, rumour has it, is set to continue for at least another month. It’s a huge problem for the islanders at their busiest tourist season. Everything has to be brought from the mainland, even water, because the bottling factory on the island has shut [...]

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We’re met at Budongo forest by Joyce, our first ever female wildlife guide, who looks a little like Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, managing to carry off a beige all-in-one boiler suit with grace that makes her all-male colleagues look jungle-clumsy and uncomfortable in comparison. Jackie comes from a village on the edge of the national park [...]

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We take a bus from the heart of the Serengeti westwards to Lake Victoria. We pass trees hung with beehives, like bongo-drum fruit, Masai herding cows, small mud hut villages and people planting crops from bananas to rice. Lake Victoria shimmers under a seeting sun. It’s the largest in Africa, second largest in the world, [...]

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