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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

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

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

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 was at a holiday park in Cumbria on Saturday as part of Haven’s Big Green Weekend, and got chance to speak with environmental campaigner David Bellamy, who was there to host a wildlife ramble for kids.

Bellamy has come under lots of criticism for his controversial views on climate change – he’s said previously that he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming, and that glaciers are actually advancing, not retreating.

I certainly don’t agree with him on this, but the Green… Continue reading