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My feature on Jarvis Smith’s family trip to Australia, including crocodiles, koalas and eco-conscious hotels. From Green magazine, Spring 2012… Continue reading

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.

&nbsp… Continue reading

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

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

I was interested in the story from Conservation International on scientists in Borneo discovering a teeny tiny new species of frog – the Microhyla nepenthicola is about the size of a pea and lives in pitcher plants which hold pools of water.

When I saw the photo, I thought surely this must be the smallest frog in the world?

Au contraire – it’s only the smallest species discovered in the OLD world .

They’ve found even… Continue reading

I went for a lovely lunch with a Peruvian hotel group called Inkaterra today, at a restaurant called Bumpkin in South Kensington.

Inkaterra has some of the most exciting, sustainable hotels in Peru. It all started in the 1970s with Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica right in the Amazon jungle. Next were La Casona in Cusco, part of the super-luxury Relais & Chateaux collection, and Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel right by Machu Picchu. Inkaterra has now launched another sister brand… Continue reading

[This article first appeared in TTG]

Despite a thorough explanation from instructor Derek on how to hold my paddle and how to slow down and change direction, I was still concerned about losing control and smashing up my kayak on the rocks. But Derek assured me the kayaks were practically indestructible. “You might hit into each other, though – the kayaks have got magnets in them,” he warned us.

I’d have thought magnets would make the… Continue reading

I enjoyed this piece on Mother Nature Network which listed 10 animals that are bad for the environment…

I knew about the impact elephants can have, tearing down vegetation.

I’ve read about the impact of cattle and invasive species like cane toads and crown-of-thorns starfish too.

But it was news to me that the common carp is also a bad guy! Apparently they uproot vegetation and can majorly affect their environment. They… Continue reading