My Top 10 Road Trip Experiences of 2025
For me (and for many others), 2025 was a strange and sporadically horrible year. I spent much of 2025 feeling anxious and depressed for various reasons, and I blogged less than I have in [...]
Towns of the Karoo: Nieu-Bethesda
At the end of my recent trip through the Karoo, after a stopover in Philippolis and an Inventure in the desert, I spent two nights in another tiny Karoo town: Nieu-Bethesda. A kilometer or [...]
An Inventure in the Great Karoo
17 May 2025 The day starts with walking across the freezing river in the dark with bare feet and a head lamp. Fuck this shit, I think, as we toil up a nearly vertical [...]
The National Arts Festival: It Changed Me.
I recently returned from a weekend at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), where I was invited to participate in the Standard Bank Art "Be Part of the Arts" social media campaign. [...]
Quirky South Africa, Part 3: The Garden Route
Read Quirky South Africa Part 1, about padstals, and Quirky South Africa Part 2, about Bethulie and the Gariep Dam. I was talking to some South African friends about my visit to the Garden [...]
Quirky South Africa, Part 2: Bethulie and the Gariep Dam
As described in my previous post, my mom and I took a road trip from Joburg to the Garden Route and back. Along the way we stopped over in Bethulie for a journey through [...]
Quirky South Africa, Part 1: Padstals of the Platteland
My mom came for a visit and the two of us took a weeklong road trip through the South African platteland (Afrikaans for countryside). We drove from Joburg to Bethulie, Bethulie to the Garden [...]
Cruising Along the Eastern Cape’s Route 72
There's a beautiful stretch of coastline in the Eastern Cape, about halfway between Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) and East London. Sometimes referred to as "the Sunshine Coast", this area stretches along Route 72 and [...]
Pilgrimage to the Big Pineapple
I'm not sure when I first saw a photo of the Big Pineapple. It might have been in a blog post, or maybe somewhere on Instagram. But I do know one thing for certain: [...]
A Visitor’s Guide to Bathurst
Last year, before the pandemic, I started a campaign called #10SouthAfricanTowns. I planned to visit ten small towns all over South Africa during 2020. Bathurst, 20 kilometers inland from Port Alfred in the Eastern [...]
Phyllis Drives the Blogitects to the Eastern Cape and Back
Thorsten and I decided to take a long road trip from Joburg to the Eastern Cape, down through the Free State to the Sunshine Coast and back. We were super excited and had everything [...]
Five Cheetahs and an Aardvark
We tiptoed along as the sun lowered behind us. The wind howled. Tendai pointed ahead and we could just make out the body of a large animal with three small, spotted heads bobbing around [...]