Dan's Adventure

Alongside climbing table mountain, at the top of my list for things to do whilst in Cape Town were seeing penguins at Boulders Beach and visiting Cape of Good Hope, the most south western point of Africa. What I didn’t realise was that both are a bit of a distance from Cape Town. This left me with only two choices, either pay for a rather expensive tour or hire a car and drive. Once four of us decided to go and we calculated that hiring a car worked out to …

Table Mountain is notorious for having a layer of cloud obscuring the summit, some call it a table cloth as it appears to drape over the edges. When the clouds are covering it, the cable car is closed and it is not deemed safe to climb up either, the views wouldn’t be up to much anyway. On arrival in Cape Town we all noted that Table Mountain was cloud free, it was too late to climb, so we all settled for a trip up in the cable car.
The views from …

For the last 6 weeks I have been travelling through Africa with Acacia Africa. I joined their Kenya to Cape Town tour in Nairobi and continued to travel south through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and finally South Africa. When researching companies to travel Africa with I found it very difficult to find any information on them other than the marketing stuff that they put online, no actual experiences from people that had travelled with them previously. Even forums such as on Lonely Planet and Boots’n’All, information from people …

Five minutes after chumming the water the first Great White Shark of the day appeared by the side of the boat. It circled around the boat whilst the first group piled into the cage to catch a glimpse of the shark under water. The rest of us remained on the top deck watching as the shark sniffed out the fish head being used as bait. The water is chummed with a combination of fish oils and blood to attract the sharks from over a kilometre away and the fish heads …

I’ve never been the biggest fan of wine so I hadn’t planned to do a wine tour whilst in South Africa. The chance to do a wine tasting at one of the campsites for the grand sum of £5 was however to good an opportunity to pass up. The wine tasting took place on our final night of the Acacia Africa tour from Kenya to Cape Town at a campsite called Highlands which is owned by Sparky. I drank a bit too much to remember the brand name or the …

Fish River Canyon is the largest canyon in Africa and second largest in the world. In total it is around 160 km long, up to 27 km wide and in places almost 550 metres deep. We started our walk along the rim at the point from which hikers can enter the canyon to walk along it over a period of 5 days. Our tour guide Jaques wants to be the first person to complete the walk bare foot. After our walk we were once again surprised with champagne to enjoy …

As the tent shakes I can hear JP cheerfully calling “Good morning, good morning”. Its 5.30am and still pitch black, but that doesn’t matter as we’re heading off to see the sunrise from the top of dune 45, the world’s most photographed dune. Everyone is on time and we’re on the truck waiting for the campsite gates to open at 6. Forty five minutes later we arrive at the foot of dune 45, the sky is brightening but the sun still hasn’t risen. We’re first to arrive so the dune …

Following on from sandboarding I decided to go on a quad biking adventure the same afternoon. Three bikes were on offer, a fully manual, a semi automatic which didn’t require the use of a clutch and an automatic. The engine size of the automatic was half that of the manual and semi automatics, so obviously wouldn’t be able to go as fast, I therefore ruled it out straight away. Having never ridden a motorbike before I was not familiar with how to change gears, so the semi automatic seemed like …