Photo of the Day – Tour d’Afrique

by Stephen Greenwood on

The 2011 Tour d’Afrique is officially underway! Just three days ago, more than 120 cyclists set off from Cairo, Egypt on a four month, 7,375 mile race across the world’s most exotic and alluring continent. The competitors will pedal through Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia before aiming to arrive in Cape Town, South Africa on May 14th.

If you have the urge to drop everything and join them, you can sign up to complete one of the eight partial sections ranging in distance between 1000km and 2000km.

Today’s Photo of the Day from localsurfer isn’t of the Tour d’Afrique, but I think it’s a great illustration of how important bicycles are as a mode of transporation and heavy lifting throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. So much in fact, that a series of social enterprises are now popping up to help local African entreprenuers by building and loaning inexpensive but durable bikes.

If you have a snapshot of some heavy lifting or local ingenuity, we want to see it! Submit it to our Gadling Flickr group and it could be our next Photo of the Day!

Shootouts kill five rhino poachers in South Africa

by Sean McLachlan on


Five rhino poachers were killed in two shootouts with South African police this week, the BBC reports. Three were killed in Kruger National Park, one of the most popular game reserves for safaris in South Africa. Two others were killed near the border with Mozambique. Poachers often cross borders in an attempt to evade the law.

Two rhino horns were found among the poachers’ belongings.

Poaching is a serious problem in Africa, with South African rhinos, especially white rhinos, a favored target. Last year 333 rhinos were killed in South Africa. Police have been clamping down on poachers but their activities continue and the heavily armed criminals often get into gunfights with police and park wardens. African nations are having mixed results fighting poachers. Some countries have managed to reduce illegal hunting, but other nations are still struggling with the problem.

[This beautiful shot of two white rhinos is courtesy JasonBechtel via Gadling’s flickr pool. It was taken in Ohio, of all places! At least these beautiful animals are safe there.]

Daily Pampering: The Nelson Mandela Platinum Suite in South Africa

by Melanie Nayer on

When you’re one of the most revered men in the world, your own suite at one of the top luxury hotels in the world is just part of the package that comes along with being you. In the spirit of sharing and world peace, however, this particular suite named after Nelson Mandela is available to the general public.

The intimate Saxon Boutique Hotel, Villas & Spa, located in Johannesburg, South Africa, features the Nelson Mandela Platinum Suite as its top tier accommodation. The 400-square-meter suite is located on the second level of the hotel, with access via a private elevator and/or staircase. The suite is decorated with sophisticated African flair, and consists of two inner-suites, a guest powder room, an open plan lounge and dining room, a fully equipped kitchen (with its own butler’s entrance).

Guests of the Platinum Suite are afforded complimentary round-trip airport transfer via a Mercedes sedan, and VIP assistance on arrival, including meet-and-greet at the airport via the diplomatic channel around passport control. In the suite, guests are treated to Champagne on a nightly basis, complimentary minibar with soft drinks, waters and a selection of beers, replenished daily. If that’s not enough, a housekeeper and butler are on hand to cater to your every whim.

The cost of this peaceful palance? Rates start at ZAR 35,000 per night – approximately $5,103 USD.

Want more? Get your daily dose of pampering right here.

Reflections on a round-the-world journey

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Several nights into our journey, as we were speeding along dark roads en route to our guest house on the island of Lifou in New Caledonia, I felt a bolt of irrepressible excitement of the sort familiar, no doubt, to most travel enthusiasts. We’d just spent several nights in big, bold Sydney, a bona fide world city, well-organized and self-evident. Sydney was exciting, but, truth be told, not unlike many places I knew well. The quiet island of Lifou, with its hybrid French-Melanesian culture, provided a novel contrast. There were few people around, and few streetlights. The air smelled sweet. Occasionally a car overtook us during our 40-minute journey, and headlights once or twice revealed women in bright clothing walking along the side of the road.

We had made it to an unknown place. I felt myself caught up with that familiar emotion known to all who love travel: teeming excitement, tied to a lack of knowledge of what was to come.

Taking stock of a five-week trip after the fact is perhaps unavoidable, but it’s also fraught. You don’t want to put too much energy into second-guessing what you did on your journey, perhaps in particular because a specific round-the-world itinerary is unlikely to be repeated. Simultaneously, you also want to learn from the experience.

Here’s what we planned well and what we might have executed differently if we had the trip to do over.Good planning.

• Hotels. Our hotels were well chosen, all in the $95-$175 range. In terms of value, we did especially well by scoring a room through Hotwire at the Hilton London Docklands for just under $100 per night. Most of the hotels we chose are well-located, or close enough to secondary attractions to feel central.

• Open-ended approach. Our general lack of planning as far as activities are concerned was also beneficial. This approach gave us time to relax into each destination and pick up inspiration on the spot. Our approach perfectly fit my neighborhood-based strategy of urban exploration. More tourist sight-oriented travelers might find this approach to be less satisfying.

• Variety of destinations. Another plus was the variety of our itinerary’s destinations. By including big vibrant cities and out-of-the-way insular idylls on our itinerary, we were able to enjoy a range of experiences in a relatively short period.

So-so planning.

• Johannesburg. As I detailed in an earlier post, our brief Johannesburg stay suffered from poor planning. In retrospect, it turns out that I’d simply consulted the wrong sources. Several friends and acquaintances popped out of the woodwork following the publication of this blog post with tips. I’ll be better prepared for my next visit to Johannesburg. Lesson: always get feedback from your trusted contacts and carefully contextualize reports of a city’s security situation.

• Tanna Island. I’m a big fan of picking a base and then fanning out to other places. I wish we’d taken greater advantage of this approach to spend a few nights on Vanuatu’s Tanna island. I read about Tanna, an ecological wonder of nature, in Lonely Planet’s Vanuatu & New Caledonia guidebook. It is fairly easy to visit Vanuatu from New Caledonia.

• Rodrigues Island. Nine nights on Mauritius was perhaps two too many. A jaunt to the country’s far flung Rodrigues Island, 350 miles to the east, would have provided a fascinating cultural and physical contrast with the main island.

This is the final Capricorn Route series installment. Check out other stories in the Capricorn Route series here.

Round-the-world: Long layover in Johannesburg

by Alex Robertson Textor on

A journey from Melbourne to Mauritius on Qantas and its oneworld partners is no straight shot. It requires a very early morning flight to Sydney, a long 14-hour jaunt to Johannesburg, and then a flight on to Mauritius. It’s over 11,000 kilometers (almost 7000 miles) from Sydney to Johannesburg, 14 long hours by plane. During the very long haul flight, cloud cover limits views of the polar regions, though about six hours in the captain mentions that subantarctic ice formations can be seen from the left side of the plane. See above.

We overnight in Johannesburg. We did cursory research and booked a guest house in Sandton, described somewhere as a good place to stay. Further research revealed that Sandton is the richest area in Johannesburg.

The strange thing is that I don’t remember a thing about the research process, how I came up with our $185/night guest house (the priciest of our trip) surrounded by a sweet-smelling garden, morning birdsong, and high walls. Our guest house is quite luxurious, a roomy suite with a fruit plate for breakfast and plush beds.

On the ground, Sandton is sort of shocking. Every abode is hidden behind walls topped with electrified wires. There is security company signage on the walls, some of which promise armed response. Our guest house, the aforementioned and lovely but deserted 6 on Westbrooke, sits in a neighborhood guarded by a security booth. In addition, it has its very own gate and security booth. The guard takes our keys from us when we walk out of the guarded neighborhood for dinner at a friendly if not particularly good restaurant and returns them to us when we get back. We walk along dark roads. Cars race by. There are very few pedestrians.

It’s difficult to square the extreme security measures in Sandtwon with the information we’ve received from locals and frequent visitors to Johannesburg, who claim that the city is actually quite safe. The security apparatus makes me feel terribly unsafe, far more than general precautions or guidebook warnings might. I ask our very friendly cab driver about the security measures. Are they necessary? He tells me that they are, given Sandton’s wealth.

Sometimes long layovers are unavoidable. This was one of those times. But the situation we found ourselves in was not the automatic consequence of a long layover. Frankly, we did not plan well. What we should have done is locate a funkier area with an immediate restaurant district. My one contact in Johannesburg, a journalist, happened to be away during our visit, though this is no excuse.

Even travel writers plan badly. I won’t dwell on this planning mistake, though I will hope that, years from now, after having visited South Africa a few times, I’ll marvel at how easy it is to navigate one’s way around the country.

Check out other posts in the Capricorn Route series here.