For more than 35 years I’ve been on the road across Southern Africa, watching landscapes quietly change people. This year I started turning those days into a 12‑volume book series: A Year in Motion – 365 Days in Southern AfricaOne book per month. One chapter per day. Each chapter a single, real moment. Some chapters follow journeys with guests; others come from days alone on the road. All are real. No fiction. Just the country as I’ve seen it from the front seat, the stoep, t

In 2001 I stepped off a Russian cargo jet onto a runway made of ice. Until then, getting from Cape Town to the Antarctic ice took a month by sea. We did it in about six hours. The aircraft was an Ilyushin Il-76, and we landed on the blue ice at Novolazarevskaya in Queen Maud Land. Two days later, we were home in Cape Town. Even now, that difference is hard to take in. A month at sea against a few hours in the air. It changed what was possible for anyone who needed to reach th

Most people who visit Cape Point leave believing something that isn't true. They stand at the lighthouse, look out over the water and say: this is where the two oceans meet. It is a lovely thought. It is also wrong. The real meeting point lies about 150 kilometres further east, at Cape Agulhas. That is the true southern tip of Africa, and it is where the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean officially meet. Cape Point is dramatic and beautiful, and it deserves every visitor it gets.

There is a man in my town whose job is to shout about whales. When southern right whales come into Walker Bay, the Hermanus whale crier walks the cliff path and blows a kelp horn. Each call is a code. It tells you where along the shore to look. He can tell you where. Whether they surface is up to them. I live in Hermanus, and I have guided this coast for more than thirty years. I have walked that cliff path more times than I can count. It still surprises me how a simple horn

1999. Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse, in the Kamberg Valley below the Drakensberg. That is me on the left in the photograph, standing with Richard Poynton beside his famous blackboard menu. Twenty-seven years later he is still there, still cooking. And Cleopatra is still one of the most memorable places to stay in South Africa. I look at this picture and see someone paying close attention. I did not know then how much a few nights in a mountain valley would shape the way I thin