So, I didn’t spend that long in South Africa, maybe a week in total, but I travelled across much of it from north to south. It’s a big country, and I pretty much only scratched the surface of it, but I’m sure I’ll be back. Consequently though, this means any overview posts I write about it will be purely my initial observations, and shouldn’t be ( Read more... )

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Burkina Faso is not the most common destinations for tourists. In fact, I’m fairly certain the average person in the UK has never heard of it, let alone know where it is. According to easy-accessible stats, just over 180,000 tourists visited in 2014 (the year I visited), mostly from neighbouring countries; the only two countries outside the region ( Read more... )

I made four border crossings in West Africa on my adventure - I wrote a specific blog post about one of them, crossing from Benin to Togo when I almost lost my luggage. To be honest, the other three were no less impressive.

Ghana - Burkina Faso; crossing at Hamile/Ouesso.

This was the first border I’d encountered on my adventure, and it was, shall ( Read more... )

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See, I grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s. Hard times in a rough city; it had a dubious reputation for crime and wouldn’t have been high on the list of tourist destinations. Yet at the time we still felt thankful we weren’t Glasgow - a similar city but somehow even worse.

But then, in 1990, Glasgow was European City of Culture. We were all very ( Read more... )