Nine different countries in 2010 - all destinations not stop-overs!

What a year it’s been! From Botswana’s Okavango Delta to Tanzania’s Ngorogoro Crater, from the Festival of Masks in Burkina Faso to Paris, from New York to Mozambique, from Guatemala to Uganda and Mexico -  it’s been a year of non-stop travelling.

Highlights - mind you every separate trip had its own highlight - including an excruciatingly hot night in Dédougou, Burkina Faso, West Africa, when ancestral spirits clad in traditional costumes of straw, leaves and mud, danced frenetically to the sound of beating drums and flutes (catch the upcoming March edition of Africa Geographic for the full story); another kind of flute - The Magic Flute - at New York’s Metropolitan Opera; Tanzania’s oh-so-remote Selous Game Reserve, the second largest game reserve in the world after Greenland with its teeming wild game; the tiny - 1km long x 500m wide island of Medjumbe in Mozambique’s far north Quirimbas archepelago; and watching over 100 southern right whales breach and blow in the Cape’s De Hoop Bay.

Of course, there were many, many more wonderful moments and memories - if you contact me I’ll send you copies of some of the articles I wrote for South Africa’s Sunday Independent.

Already lined up for 2011 are Japan, two of India’s top tiger reserves, Ecuador and the Galapagos, Botswana’s Linyanti region north of Chobe and of course…every year the annual family trip to Kruger Park.

 And my favourite place? Home, of course!

Click to blog.southafrica.net to see my regular South African Tourism blogs

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