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I’m chuffed to say I won Travel Trade Feature of the Year at the Caribbean Tourism Organisation’s annual media awards last week. I won the award for the Jamaica feature I wrote about Bluefields Bay!… Continue reading

The daily blogs I wrote while in South Africa earlier this year are now live on the Telegraph.co.uk site… Click here to read about my six days of training to be a safari guide, and 24 action-packed hours in Johannesburg.

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Blogs from my recent trip to the New Forest are now live on Greentraveller.co.uk, as part of an in-depth guide to sustainable tourism in the New Forest district:

A Q&A with Anthony Climpson OBE, tourism manager of the New Forest

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Canoeing in the New Forest

Strawberry mountain

I loved Chelsea Flower Show last year so was keen to go along when the Bermuda Department of Tourism invited me. Last year, most of my favourite gardens were big show gardens outdoors, but this year I made more time for the exhibitors inside the floral marquee, and found lots of interesting smaller gardens. Here’s the 10 I liked best overall this year (in no particular order):

1. The tunnel of clematis of all different shades of purple and… Continue reading

My feature on greentraveller.co.uk, highlighting holidays on which you can spot bluebells, daffodils and more in bloom, is now live… Continue reading | 1 Comment

White-fronted Bee-eater

Leading on from my first blog on South Africa, here are the birding highlights of my recent trip with Eco Training. The Mukaleke concession has some of the best bird life in the whole Kruger National Park, and I was lucky enough to see and learn about all of the following (click each image for a larger pic):

Blacksmith Lapwing - which makes a noise like the… Continue reading

I’ve just got back from an incredible trip to South Africa, where I spent a week at a safari guide-training facility in the northern-most tip of the Kruger National Park. Eco Training is South Africa’s leading training provider for safari guides, and has trained more than 3,000 guides in southern Africa and beyond.

It has three camps in South Africa, but what makes the camp I visited at Makuleke special is that it’s within a unique part… Continue reading

I was in Jamaica last week for a tourism conference and spent a fascinating day down on the south west coast, learning about a marine sanctuary project at Bluefields Bay.

More destructive fishing methods and growing unemployment have led to greater and greater pressure upon Jamaica’s fish stocks, and it is now the most over-fished country in the entire Caribbean. In 2009, the Jamaican government agreed to create nine marine sanctuaries around… Continue reading | 5 Comments

My feature on dive holiday suggestions for 2011 is out in the January issue of Diver magazine….including some great new volunteering opportunities – Biosphere Expeditions in Maldives,Blue Ventures in Belize, and Montserrat Reef Ball project in the Caribbean… Continue reading | 4 Comments

Here’s a rather delayed report from the tiger conference I attended at the Royal Geographical Society in December….

Experts from the Born Free Foundation and other bodies met in London following the International Tiger Forum in St Petersburg in November. It was interesting to hear their take on the outcome of the international forum, and how we must now proceed if we’re to stand a chance of saving the 3,200 tigers remaining in the wild.

Debbie Banks… Continue reading