I’d also got to the point where I was running out of chirpy anecdotes about life on board.  I have no idea if that was because my brain was gradually reducing itself to something resembling fudge after nine days of the same conversation, and one day started to resemble the next. I did start to wonder if there is such a thing as cerebral repetitive stress injury?

Some respite was to be had on day 10 when we docked in Barcelona prior to the long “silent” slog back up to Southampton.  My good friend Erica discovered the true meaning of the term verbal diarrhoea when we met for lunch and I quite literally decompressed over a couple of very large glasses of wine.  I think those two hours were what gave me enough strength to face the next three days at sea.

I am pleased to say though that I did discover a way of disconnecting temporarily from all that was going on around me.  I’m not sure I would ever have picked up ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ had my situation not required extreme measures, but it proved to be the perfect antidote as I finally slumped into a free sun lounger on Day 11, wrapping myself up in three hoodies in the process as the ship rolled through a force six and up towards the Bay of Biscay and onto the home straight.

Take today’s activities for example. If we didn’t want to take the tender ashore and part with our well earned holiday cash in Cannes, we could stay on board and take a course in how to play the slot machines better (thus parting with our well earned holiday cash in the casino), or perhaps take in an interesting talk on the sparkling properties of Tanzanite (funny, they have a special anniversary collection of Tanzanite for sale in the on ship boutique). Maybe we would like to go line dancing with the lovely Linda (who doesn’t appear to have seen an up to date hair magazine since 1987), or join the daily (well, on port days anyway) ‘sail away’ party around the pool with DJ Keith… and then get constantly reminded of what fun we are having.

I would like to think that not everyone is voluntarily taking part in DJ Keith’s poolside capers, rather they have just been rendered incapable of moving from their sun loungers due to the fact that they are wedged together like sardines (and have been ever since they bagged the spot at sunrise), and nobody can actually get out of the sun-bed squash until the fat bloke and his Kindle, and the little old lady doing still doing battle with the Sudoku from last weeks Sunday Express, who are sat closest to the edge, finally release the bottleneck and let the others go free.

Meanwhile down on the prom deck the tumble(sea)weed is moving around quite freely.

I am still blindingly optimistic that at some point Cap’n Phil will come over the tannoy and tell us to look out over the horizon to see what a pretty pink the sky has turned as the sun goes down, and how the evening light catches the bridges of the other ships way out yonder making them look like sea stars, or indeed how many different colours of blue there are in the wash generated by the mega big propellers, or how awesomely soothing the roar of the water is when you stand aft at full throttle (day or night, and only on the prom deck, any higher up it doesn’t count), and that really, it’s a damn sight better than listening to some has been that never was of a club singer belting out a particularly painful rendition of Phil Collins – Su-su-sudio (yo-hoh-woah-oah) down in the ‘understated elegance’, (think eighties neon meets eighties neon and has a baby), of the Manhattan bar.

Blindingly optimistic indeed…

Docking days present their own set of challenges. Like what to do with two elderly parents who have no clue where they are and absolutely no desire to explore the wherever it is they are. I spent the whole of Wednesday explaining that we weren’t in Dubrovnik (or Guildford for that matter), but, in fact, Gibraltar. The Dubrovnik slip is understandable, it’s a syllable thing.. but Guildford??, search me!!.

They seem quite happy to sit in a bar and watch the world go by, which is fine by me, but not for eight hours! Unlike on board where I can leave them for a while as the possibilities of losing them are actually fairly limited, once ashore it’s a bit like herding cats, and anyway I have discovered that if I disappear for more than five minutes Dad is on the phone.

Throw into the mix the fact that Dad seems to think that Great British Pounds are fine anywhere, the following conversation is fairly typical.

‘no Dad, you need Euros’
‘oh well I’ll get them on the ship’
‘no Dad, you need to go to a bank and get Euros now if you want to spend any money here, or in Italy, or in France’
‘oh OK, where’s the bank’

arrive at cashpoint..

‘what are we doing here?’
‘getting Euros’
‘what for??.. we can get them on the ship’
‘yes but you need them now’
‘no.. they’ll take pounds here I’m sure, stop trying to bloody organise me I’ll get the bloody Euros on the ship!!’

I backed off, knowing full well that I will have the same conversation (but in reverse) once we are back on board.

The ‘fuckoffometer’ is hitting new records on a daily basis… wears a bit thin after a while!!

I’ve only managed to loose Mum & Dad a couple of times (at current time of writing, they have been temporarily mislaid), trying to find two old people in a sea of old people is decidedly hard. It would appear that all the little old ladies have been to the same hairdresser and all the little old men wear only navy blue. (I am thinking of buying matching fluorescent pink t-shirts for them to wear). I just work on the basis that they can’t go too far, they will almost certainly be close to a bar, and if I don’t find them Dad will at some point remember to look in one of the three pockets where I have put a slip of paper with their room details on it in, and I’ll see them there.

Worst case scenario I get a message over the tannoy asking me to come and retrieve them.. that’s provided they both remember I’m here!!

I could just be being a little optimistic, but this might not be as trying as I expected! The night at home and the seven hours in the car on the way to Souhampton were really not too much trouble at all. Granted I had to repeat everything every five or ten minutes, and listen to the same conversation over and over again, Mum telling me what a good driver I was every time I overtook someone. This was usually shortly before proceeding to tell me to ‘fuck off’ about something else (her Tourettes is coming along nicely!) and then telling me how much she loved me in the next breath. She only had one real paddy at Luton services when she decided that she would rather be at home and was heading back. When asked how she intended to get there her quick retort was ‘I don’t know but I’ll do it on my back if I have to’. I chose not to conjure up that image.

The funny thing now is that on some occasions, Mum is the one who is reminding Dad of the short term stuff and not the other way round as it has been for so long. He struggles more with the day to day stuff and every now and again it’s Mum who has to remind him. Although as soon as we reached Southampton, Dad knew exactly where we were going, and guided us straight to the hotel on the quayside, and then to the oldest pub in Southampton for dinner.

I can see one of the Azura’s sister ships moored up at the dock from my bedroom window as I write this. We set sail this afternoon, and I have to say I’m starting to feel mildly excited about the whole thing.

Not entirely sure how easy it is going to be to post once aboard, as communications are limited (or expensive). But will keep plugging away!!

Back in January, after a seemingly endless period of going down numerous blind alleys trying to make a go of things freelancing I finally had to put the photography dream on hold, climb back on the corporate hamster wheel and go look for a 'proper' job.

As a parting shot and a last ditch attempt to keep myself gainfully employed shooting things, I applied for a job as a Cruise Ship Photographer with P&O. I thought I would have at least a fighting chance, as they asked for someone who not only wanted to develop their photography skills but was also very customer focused. OK, so my seventeen years corporate commercial experience may have been a little bit more than what they were looking for, but the speed that my application was dismissed out of hand, I could almost feel G force in the email that came back in return. But how the hell do you dress down that level of experience without growing a nose as long as .. well, a P&O Cruise Ship for example!

So back in June, when big sis proposed that I might like to perform my share of daughterly duties spending two weeks on a cruise with mum and dad (as opposed to a week in grey Hartlepool), the words 'gift', 'horse' and'mouth',* sprang to mind. Not because (as we have already established) I have a burning desire to go on a cruise, but because it would give me a chance to do a proper documentary photography project. The way I see it, documentary is the toughest kind of photography that exists, (and unfortunately in this day and age, one of the most underrated), you can technically be a genius, but being able to get a message across with one single shot or a limited series of images is a different thing altogether.

I've heard the same bit of advice on numerous occasions by several different photographers of this tribe. The first being that you don't have to cross the globe to find a story, very often the story is right under your nose, and secondly, that you should never go looking for the photo, you should sit, wait patiently, and let the photo come to you. When I started randomly shooting Mum and Dad on my visits home a couple of years ago, I didn't have much of an idea about which way I was going as up until now I have never been able to put form or structure to their story. Of course when I started, Dad was in perfect health. The cruise gives me the perfect opportunity to do just that. Not that my subject matter is anything new, or that the story I'm trying to tell is any big deal in the world of documentary photography, old people and illness are pretty much a right of passage for anybody who is into documentary. The big deal is that the story makes sense to me, which is always a good starting point, if anyone else chooses to climb aboard (I swear the nautical references aren't always intentional) and join me on the journey, then thats fine by me.. I'm going anyway.

But life has a way of coming up and knocking the wind out of your sails when you least expect it, and sometimes the tears can’t be joyful. A phone call from Dad today (the fifth in two days), all of a sudden brought into very sharp focus the reality of what is going on. It also brought home what little sis, the one who lives close by, is having to deal with on a daily basis (but ten-fold). It’s not that I didn’t already know how things are, but distance makes it easier to keep things parked in a little corner of the mind to be dealt with when necessary. But today, after explaining (again) the basic logistics of the travel arrangements to a man who, for all his life has kept everything together so effortlesly, it hit me square between the eyes, it bit me on the bottom, it blindsided me.

A flashing moment of ‘fuck, Dad, your head really has gone, I’m not ready for this, and I don’t mean the cruise, I mean, I’m really not ready for this other huge thing that is no longer looming on the horizon but right here with us, right now, the big ‘A’. I am so not ready for this, there are still so many times I want to sit on the kitchen back step with a glass of the awful wine you insist on buying and recite Kipling’s ‘If’ with you. I am so, so not ready for this. There are still so many more times I want to sit in the Small Crafts Club, or the Cricket Club* and reminisce with you and your friends, (fishermen or otherwise). Will somebody please come and make your head better because really, I am so, so, really, really, not ready for this!!’

A fleeting Kleenex moment followed, before I pulled myself up straight, (tears in the office has never been a look I’ve been particularly fond of – but thank you Susana for coming to the rescue). The floodgates opened again when I got home as the stark realization of what’s up ahead really, really started to bite.

* I must point out that Dad hates cricket, but it’s the closest bar to the house for a night time stroll. He is nothing if not practical!

I did spend a couple of hours idly assessing the on-board amenities (and trying not to have anxiety attacks at the same time). I went into the FAQ to find out the possibilities of jogging around the deck.. partly out of curiosity to see how many kilometres a full circuit would be and partly to see whether I will be able to run round fast enough to reach escape velocity and fly away from the confines of matching bar stools, programmed entertainment and glitzy spas for a while (90 f*****g quid for a facial!!.- I’m coming from poor Spainland and only have my 50 quid early booking voucher to redeem in the whole trip.. and I have to pay for my wine!!).

I really don’t buy into this ‘everything designed to make your stay the perfect experience’ thing .. as I really don’t like being told what ‘perfect’ is.. I’m sure my idea will not coincide with the other 2999 passengers, but ho hum.  It seems that jogging round the deck is actively discouraged as there is a wonderfully conditioned gym to do my physical jerks in, and it is suggested that perhaps the deck might be a little too narrow for jogging round, (these guys clearly haven’t run around the streets of your average Spanish pueblo)!!  But what if I want to suck up some sea air whilst exercising? I personally don’t want to be sweating in a hermetically sealed box looking out to sea when there is a possibility of a seagull shitting on my head as I clock up my kilometers.  Weird I know, but hey.. I’ve got a shower in my billy no mates bunker.

I’m sure it will be a weird sensation to be standing on the balcony and watching quayside gradually get smaller and smaller, just as I have stood and watched from the quayside as mum and dad turn slowly into little dots on many occasions. I’ve never quite got my head round just how big these ships are, and how small we look when up alongside them.  And I’m sure my worries about claustrophobia will be unfounded.. so long as I can find my quiet corner.

1. Friday – Catch plane from Madrid, Spain (home for me) to Liverpool
2. Drive hire car from Liverpool to other side of country – two and a half hours away
3. Sleep at home (as in Mum & Dad home, where I grew up home)
4. Saturday – Drive with parents for six hours (dementia in stereo) to Southampton, (little sis insists that it’s only five and a half cos her in laws just did it in that time, but, like half an hour is going to make a difference to my mental state at the end of it)
5. Dump hire car and sleep at hotel in Southampton making sure Dad doesn’t wander off to the boat show and making sure he remembers he’s there to go on a cruise..
6. Sunday – Board P&O Alzheimer .. sorry.. Azura, get my ‘all the food you can eat , but the wine is extra, and, by the way, hang your imagination up at the door’ pass
7. Spend three days at sea before docking at first port of call in, ahem… Spain

well … we dock in Gibraltar, which technically isn’t really Spain, but we won’t get into that debate right now… you get the picture…

Next port of call is Cartagena (so that really is Spain.. ), then we head off for Italy, (Rome and Florence), France (Cannes), before heading for home making the last stop in Barcelona on the way.

All these nice ports of call aside, I’m still getting my head round the three days at sea thing.. (and I have to do it twice, on the way there and on the way back) Hell, I’ve done 26 hours on an Andesmar bus, rolling through the wilds of Patagonia with only my navel to contemplate, and a cockroach to pull faces at (I thought he was waving at me with his antenna things… I put it down to too much Malbec). I enjoyed every last second of those 26 hours, but this three days at sea thing is filling me with utter horror.. (I’m exaggerating of course.. for dramatic effect). I kinda like my navel sessions, so long as I can look out of a window and have the sensation that physically I’m getting somewhere, difficult on a big ship as nothing really seems to ‘whizz’ by. And on a bus (or plane for that matter, even though that too lacks the ‘whizz by’ factor), there are only two or three people at any given time who have the option to talk to me .. if they so choose. The thing is that on a plane or bus it is perfectly acceptable to let your head roll around and dribble a little bit to discourage people from speaking to you… on a boat with 3000 passengers and half as many crew, I’m not too sure I’m going to be able to carry that look off! Well certainly not for more than a couple of hours, when it could perhaps be put down to a little too much wine and overdoing it on the Karaoke.

So my autistic moments may well have to be relegated to my bunker below decks, no windows for poor singletons, (there will be more on that at a later date when I have fully been able to appreciate my fate..)

Or of course I could just do what I normally do.. find a corner in a bar, put on my best ‘do not disturb’ face (which unnervingly seems to get interpreted more often than not as ‘come here and tell me everything’).. and just get on with it!!

So on the one hand you have Dad, a fairly straightforward case of Alzheimer’s and going downhill steadily. Other bits of his body are getting creakier but his mind is the creakiest of all.

On the other hand you have mum.. who is a magna cum laude when it comes to matters of the mind. My earliest memory was visiting her in a psychiatric hospital when I was four years old. She hopped and skipped from one side of manic depression to the other for many of my teenage years, until they rebranded the condition as bi-polarity so she took up alcoholism instead. There were times when the two things ran in parallel too, but the alcoholism prevailed until a bad fall down the stairs (alcohol fuelled of course) and a big bang on the head knocked her mind out of whack forever.

So yes .. the name of the blog is justified.. it is how it is, the cold bare facts.. I don’t claim to be an expert on any of the above.. and don’t ever intend to be, I’m not sure having more facts really makes it any easier to deal with on a day to day basis! and this is where this whole blog thing starts.. the first few posts are like warm up laps to get my mind into writing mode again after so much time (too much time .. but I haven’t been idle).. going in cold just wouldn’t work.

Now anyone that knows me knows that for starters a cruise is about the last thing I would choose for a holiday. The idea of being shipped (literally) from one port to the next, regimental fashion, everything timetabled to the nth degree is sure to bring me out in a rash. The idea of sharing that experience with 3000 other people, who actually appear to relish the idea of all that time tabling, makes me feel positively queasy… and I haven’t even boarded the ship yet.

But this year it’s time to play my part as dutiful daughter as Dad starts his steady decline into dementia it is probably, realistically the last opportunity he and Mum will have to go on a cruise. Of all the people I would choose to go on a cruise with, Dad, the old seadog, is at the top of the list. I use the word old and it seems wrong, but indeed over the last twelve months, he just got old.. from someone who, for 76 years has been more or less invincible, indestructible, the decline has been dramatic. So whilst I have consciously been creating opportunities to share quality father/daughter moments over the last couple of years, they have been fleeting, squeezed into rushed trips home, which have heavily featured me watching both parents sleep soundly with the telly full blast, awaking only to venture to the kitchen for more scooby snacks. (them not me.. I hasten to add)… I only ventured out to top up the wine.. (never a good idea when Dad has bought the bottle….)

Somewhere in all of this blog I’ve gotta work out a way of featuring both parents, otherwise the title would lose it’s meaning really wouldn’t it?? but I haven’t even figured out which way it’s going to go just yet.. it could all be a stream of consciousness, verbal vomit type thing, or I could even try a bit if editing for once in my life… hmm … the jury may be out on that one……

And part of the story telling process is a self imposed photography project, an attempt to document the demise into dementia, with humour (I like to set the bar high after all) capturing the fundamental parts of the two human beings who are as much themselves as I am them.. it’s a project I started unconsciously two years ago well before Dad’s dementia was diagnosed, well before the first symptoms even appeared, at that time I was probably more interested in capturing Mum’s little puddle of mental pickle… given that she has been there for a much longer time. The excursions with Dad were more just like trips down memory lane, but somewhere along the line other dots started to join up… and a different story started to emerge…

but then it dawned on me.. the real difference apart from the abundant lack of free wifi connections  (amazing how it curbs creativity), is that i have barely been alone in all the time i have been here..  no self imposed solitary confinement or endless overnight journeys in quiet contemplation putting my thoughts together as i have gone out of my way to make sure i have had someone to do stuff with at all times… not that i was antisocial in Argentina.. i just had a lot more freedom of movement…

Wherever you go here you are reminded not to go anywhere alone.. to the point where you wonder if it is fear generating fear, they could be over egging the pudding just to avoid any kind of bad publicity… shit happens in every big city (and small town) in the world, but here the warnings are verging on the paranoic…  and to some degree it has hampered my enjoyment of what is a stunningly beautiful country with a fascinating (if at times very uncomfortable) history .. and amazing contrasts…

There is no denying that South Africa still has a long way to go to get through the hangover of her extremely complicated past, and i’m not just talking about the apartheid years… but there is some amazing stuff going on everywhere you look, not all townships are created equal and you get the sense that almost everyone wants to see this country prosper and flourish … more than anything there is a huge sense of hope at every turn….

So I was almost disappointed to find myself alone in my dorm the first two nights… until I realized it meant I had not one but four hot water bottles to warm my bed up… slightly uncomfortable but ever so cozy!!

In the last four weeks i have been hot, cold, wet, dry, blown away… sometimes all in the same day, especially in Cape Town… and in Hermanus I left a puddle in a restaurant as my clothes dripped dry after getting caught in a ridiculous scooby doo rain downpour whilst trying to do a spot of whale watching …(it was too wet even for them!!!) but mostly Ive been cold.. and despite my emergency shopping expedition at the start of the trip there are days when I just haven’t been able to get warm regardless of how many layers of clothing I’m wearing… its amazing how much you take central heating for granted…and it’s not like the temperatures are sub zero.. it’s just the kind of cold that penetrates the bones

…. as I write this I’m sat in front of a roaring fire in the backpacker (thats what they call hostels here) but all I can feel is the cold draught behind me.. it won’t be the first night I go to bed fully clothed having warmed up the bedclothes with my hairdryer!!!

So instead of trying to regurgitate my (at the time) inspired musings I’ll do my best to sum up the last couple of weeks in a couple of short paragraphs… difficult as I have seen so much… So here we go …most of these will need wikipediaing for visuals (except perhaps no.10 … but its ok i have my own photographic evidence for that one!!!) but I’m working with basic resources right now

1. ticked off the last of the big five… the rhino (smiley and wearing an oversized tunic… check out any pic of a rhino you’ll see what I mean)
2. got blasé about seeing giraffes and zebras etc… but the ox picker birds that live off the zebras tics will always make me smile because they look like a five year old has drawn them (ditto.. pic)
3. feel completely humbled when visiting a typical Zulu village with no running water but kids who will walk ten kilometers to school every day (even on a Sunday)
4. Marvel at the arrogance of my forefathers when visiting the Zulu battlefields…
5. Survive the untelevised version of ‘Big Brother’ on wheels… 14 days in cramped conditions in ‘Princess’ the trusty Toyota Hi-ace, hotbed of human emotions and testy tempers with 9 (at the start of the adventure) complete strangers… ages ranging from 16 to 47
6. spend 5 days catching up on 35 years with a cousin who i havent seen since Queen were no. 1 with Bohemian Rhapsody
7. experience first hand the harsh realities of life in a Durban township
8. marvel at the resience of the human spirit when visiting Robben Island, ex leper colony and home to thousands of political activists (including Nelson Mandela) during the apartheid years
9. climb a mountain
10. see a Spanish man knit

… so taking all of this into account it should be no surprise that my head is a shed and I need to go to bed ….
and be ready to catch the ‘BazBus’ and go watch whales tomorrow….

The Royal Kingdom of Swaziland ( if you haven’t already sussed it out by the name), is a monarchy, and the current King who has been in power for the last 14 years gets to choose a new wife every year in a ritual where thousands of scantily clad teenage virgin
girls come and dance for him in the hope that he might pick them and they too might get the chance to go off on million dollar shopping sprees in Dubai as previous wives have done… some might say its a win win situation!!

So here are some rather more stark facts about Swaziland… 80% of the population live below the poverty line but if the King were to share his personal wealth among his 1.2 million subjects each one would have about 100.000US$ to play with (a thought provoking calculation if nothing else)… And 40% of the population are HIV positive…a fact that is brought home to you when you cross border control and there are boxes of free condoms everywhere you look… average life expectancy is 37 (which makes me ancient in Swazi terms… ) and billboard signs advertise air conditioning units for homes, shops, offices and …. mortuaries.

… I rather suspect that our two night stay at a remote hilltop lodge and a couple of short hikes really didn’t give us a picture of the real Swaziland … the rolling landscape of infinite undulations gave me the opportunity to further test my camera’s capabilities (and my limitations as a photographer), but the only taste of real life was a visit to a local craft market on the way out of the country… dozens and dozens of little shacks selling carvings, fabrics, bangles and beads strung out along the side of the highway like a brightly coloured bead necklace as far as the eye can see…. each stallholder offering a very good price, in fact their best price for being the first customer of the day… then whispering in my ear ‘please, please Sissi (sister) just buy one little thing..’ As I walked away with my miniature carved hippo and elephants and a couple of little trinkets that I neither wanted nor needed having haggled the price upover (and still managing to spend less than 15€) I was reminded once again just how lucky I am.

… But if you fail to be impressed by the sheer majesty of the big boys you have no choice but to marvel at the mad/bad design of some of the other animals that roam the park… Giraffes just made me giggle as they flutter their eyelashes coquettishly and wrap their unfeasibly long tongues around the leaves of the trees to feed themselves, all the grace of their gainly gait is lost as they splay their front legs to get low enough to drink from the watering holes. …the warthog was also somewhere at the back of the practical design queue as he kneels on his front legs to get to the juicier parts of the grass and he looks nothing short of comical as he runs with his tail straight up in the air (surely that can’t be very aerodynamic)…. Hyenas really do appear to be sneering at you and there really only exists one word to describe vultures…. Ugly!!

.. an hour in and i discovered just how quickly i could move whilst zipped into a sleeping bag as a lion strolled nonchalantly up the road in front of our truck before heading back into the bush.. nonchalant being the equivalent of warp speed when you are simultaneously trying to manoevre your sleeping bag AND get your camera focused and on the right setting… maybe a safari isn’t the best time to get to grips with the manual settings on an SLR. Needless to say my pics of Leo are somewhat blurred and underexposed and I don’t think i got his best side but hey ho… he was a pretty impressive beast!!

.. but what i lost out on with Mr. Lion, i more than made up for with Mr. Leopard.. and in the grand scheme of things spotting a leopard (excuse the pun although if i am going to be pedantic they are rosettes not spots) is a much bigger deal as they are such solitary creatures… and in a park that covers 2.2 million hectares (about the size of Wales) not including Mozambique and 3.3 million if you do.. although i don’t think the animals really care which country they are in…, there are about 3000 lions and about 2000 leopards..

so imagine just how much of a treat it was to find ourselves spending the best part of half an hour just after sunrise watching a leopard wait patiently to see if the two lions that had chased him from his freshly caught prey were going to leave him any scraps.. we had missed all the action by only a couple of minutes but just the spectacle of seeing one so close and be able to observe him for so long was good enough for me…. and of course it is caught on camera on every possible setting available!!

.. the challenge in Kruger (apart from getting your new fangled digital SLR on the right setting from the get go.. animals don’t tend to wait), is to clock up sightings of the ‘big five’… the traditional BIG prizes in game hunting… lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino.

two hours in and we had already notched up two of them… a couple of crusty old buffalo (their horns really do make them look like they are having a permanent bad hair day), and a really big herd of elephants which were way too up close and personal for me, we narrowly avoided getting boxed in by them… it doesn’t help when a friend has had an all too recent, extremely scary experience with a charging elephant.. (forget cute little Dumbo… these fellas are huge), so with the first sight of flapping ears i decided i had seen enough and was subsequently immortalized on video panic stricken trying to convince our guide Adrian that it really would be a good idea to move on…. Adrian (who i suspect has considerably more experience of elephants than i have), remained calm and eventually reassured me that the warning signs are pretty clear and all was fine…. but needless to say  i have been living that one down ever since!!

… so needless to say as I stepped on south african soil for the very first time and an extremely fresh wind whipped my face, my first thought was ‘shit…. I need to go shopping’ … a mantra I repeated several times over during the course of the first day as I realized just how much of a luxury central heating is here… God I was spoiled in Argentina!!!! …despite the warmth of my hosts and fellow guests at Bobs Bunkhouse I spent my first night fully clothed and under two duvets and three blankets before decamping a day early to the (heated) hotel where my trip departs from… sometimes throwing money at the problem is the only option…

So why South Africa…? to be honest I’m not really sure why, especially as since I booked the flight all anybody has managed to tell me is how dangerous it is so I have subsequently spent the last month shitting myself about the trip.

Initially I really wanted to hotfoot it back to South America and ‘do’ Colombia, Peru and Bolivia after my amazing initiation into independent travel in Argentina and Chile, but decided to park that idea for the time being and do something completely different. So with family in Durban, some of whom I havent seen for 35 years, and the prospect of gaping in awe at/finding suitable superlatives for, even more big scenery (I’ve downloaded a dictionary/thesarus application onto the iPod, so I should hopefully come up with a few good ones) … i decided to continue with my Austral adventures. I also needed an excuse to buy a digital SLR camera and shooting big game (in the photographic sense obviously) fitted the bill perfectly… in my own little pretend world I’m convinced that one day I will be of National Geographic calibre… without ever having properly worked out how to use the damn thing!!

So this trip is going to be a bit different… for starters for the first two weeks I’m on an organized overland thing taking in Kruger National Park, Swaziland and the Drakensburg mountains which means I have to be friends with the same people for a whole 15 days…. and I can’t just up and leave when the mood takes me. After that I have a few days in Durban catching up with family and friends, and it’s only in the last three weeks that I will be making it up as I go along as I head down the coast to Cape Town on the Baz Bus.. and all being well im going to be working a bit (allbeit unpaid) on this trip, gathering information and doing a bit of groundwork for a project that i have been invited to be a part of… watch this space….

I have no idea how regularly I’m going to be able to update the blog, the first ten days it will be nigh on the impossible as I’m going to be in some pretty remote places and I’m sure lions have little need for wifi… but hey … I’ll scribble my ruminations away to my hearts content and post as and when I get the chance… can’t say fairer than that!!

… oh and the photos will come later… so far I’ve not really seen that much… so you’ll have to make do with the nice pics of Argentina on the flickr link…