A Three-Day Break in Simonstown
Recently, after a couple of weeks playing tour guide for my dad and his partner, I spent three days at an Airbnb outside Simonstown. Simonstown (also known as Simon's Town), about 45 minutes southeast [...]
4 Days at Santa Nature Reserve in Dullstroom
This is a quick photo story about a fantastic long weekend we recently spent at Santa Nature Reserve, a privately owned nature reserve/fishing estate in Dullstroom. Dullstroom is a tourist town in Mpumalanga province, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Exploring Eswatini and the Barberton Geotrail
I’ve been to Swaziland many times. During my early years in South Africa, Swaziland felt almost like a second home to me. But I hadn’t been to Swaziland since it was renamed Eswatini in [...]
Meandering Through Mpumalanga: The Panorama Route
In December, the Blogitects embarked on an 11-day journey across Mpumalanga province (with a brief interlude in Eswatini). We spent the first few days in the southern half of the Panorama Route. Thorsten standing [...]
Photos From Braamfontein’s Indwe Park
I've been dreadfully uninspired lately, struggling to think of anything I want to blog about despite having a long list of great ideas (many of which you, my readers, provided in September). I'm finding [...]
My Top 5 Moments in the Great State of Maine
Given this week's political nuclear bomb blast, it feels like a weird time to publish a light-hearted post about my recent (pre-election) jaunt through the United States. But I'm hoping you've have had enough [...]
Two Days in St. Lucia, KwaZulu-Natal
St. Lucia, the tourist town along South Africa's northern KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) coast -- not to be confused with St. Lucia the Caribbean island -- has near-mythical status among South Africans. The town is completely [...]
The Blogitects Roadtrip to Augrabies Falls
As mentioned previously, Thorsten and I (a.k.a. "the Blogitects": one blogger + one architect) recently got back from a roadtrip to the Northern Cape to celebrate my 50th birthday. I had never properly explored [...]
Hunting for Fossils in the Cradle of Humankind
I recently learned a bonkers statistic: Around 40% of all of the hominid fossils ever discovered were unearthed in the Cradle of Humankind. In other words, close to half of all the known fossils [...]
Hiking the Drakensberg’s Spectacular Tugela Gorge
The Drakensberg Mountains fly under the radar in South Africa's tourism scene. Everyone goes to Cape Town and the Kruger and the Garden Route, but the Drakensberg doesn't often make it onto that "must-see" [...]