I ended a year of almost non-stop travelling with 3 very different destinations – Mauritius, Japan and South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve.

It would take pages to take you through all my experiences, but let me highlight just a few.

I stayed at Long Beach – Mauritius’ newest, daringly different resort. Forget thatch and desert island architecture. Long Beach is in-your-face modern, linear, minimalistic.

Somehow this unconventional island architecture all works brilliantly. There are rectangular spaces, stone steps, a black and white chequered floor in the central piazza, square stone arches that frame sea and sand views, straight lines and almost severe buildings that complement rather than clash with the indigenous gardens and tropical paradise views.

And I went parasailing for the first (but definitely not the last) time.

Japan was another world. Waking up in Tokyo was like waking up on a different planet. Rampant consumerism meets fragmented old-world tradition. It was autumn, and I have never experienced such gorgeous autumnal colours. Outside the cities, the countryside is breathtaking. 70% of Japan is covered in mountains, and the weather was so perfect – sunny and bright – that a full rare view of Mount Fuji was spectacular.

A visit to Kyoto’s geisha district was also memorable, where I met and chatted (through an interpreter) to a 17-year-old apprentice geisha.   

A vist to Japan must be on any serious traveller’s itinerary. When you go there you will understand why.

And finally – Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa’s North West province. It’s malaria-free, teeming with game, and if you stay as I did, at Jaci’s Safari Lodge, you’ll be assured of superb game viewing, one of the most friendly, efficient and charming staff I have ever encountered, and – if you have children – this is the place to take them.

Families – as you can see – are truly welcome. 

First stop was the Western Cape.

Vast blue skies. Red sandstone boulders scattered over rocky hillsides. Golden sandstone sculpted by time and weather into fantastical shapes. Green lawns and indigenous gardens of such astonishing beauty that they complement not compete with their wild-growing neighbours covering the kloofs and valleys. Not a sound save for a soft early morning conversation between two laughing doves and a bokmakierie singing its heart out from the top of a spreading acacia tree.

It’s dawn at Bushman’s Kloof in the Cederberg. This tranquil wilderness paradise has recently been voted No. 1 hotel in Africa and the Middle East, and No. 2 in the world earlier this year by Travel + Leisure World’s Best Service Awards.

Beauty of another kind is waiting at Steenberg Hotel situated on the Cape’s oldest farm in Constantia. Its buildings, lovingly restored, are now a National Monument, a far cry from the days when a feisty young 22-year-old Dutch widow, Catherina Ras, arrived here 10 years after Jan van Riebeeck, and found herself a husband and more importantly, land. She had more luck with land than with husbands. Number 1 was killed by a lion, Number 2 murdered by a Hottentot, Number 3 was trampled to death by an elephant. History does not record the ends of husbands 4 and 5, but in the process Catherina acquired lots of valuable real estate.

Over three hundred years later, Steenberg is a multi-award winning leading hotel of the world. It has a vineyard that produces award-winning wines. The night before I arrive, I learn that it has won the 2011 Conde Nast Traveler US Readers’ Choice Awards as the Top Hotel in Africa and the Middle East. That award comes hot on the heels of scooping the 2011 Best Luxury Hotel in Africa by www.TripAdvisor.com.

On the final leg of my Cape journey I come to rest at Mont Rochelle and Mountain Vineyards in perhaps the Cape’s loveliest valley – Franschoek. After tasting his fantastic wines on our cellar tour I lunch at Country Kitchen with one of South Africa’s youngest winemakers, Darran Stone, and dine that night at the award-winning restaurant Mange Tout.

Aah, but the Cape is beautiful…

Ecuador may be one of the smallest countries in South America (with the most volcanoes) – about the size of New Zealand – but it has amazing diversity.

It’s one of the 17 most bio-diverse countries in the world. Why? Its long narrow territory is divided by the high Andes range; to the east is the Amazon basin and to the west the coastal plains and Pacific Ocean. Ecuador’s jungle has 1/6 of all the world’s birds and Ecuador itself has 10% of the world’s trees.

 And of course, 1 000km from the coast lie the famed Galapagos Islands where Darwin first started to think about the Origin of the Species. On our first walk on one of the islands – think black lava, white sand and weirdly shaped high cactus plants – we meet the Land iguana. Straight out of Jurassic Park, it blinks its hooded eyes and gazes dispassionately into the near distance.

Its sea-going cousins, the Marine iguana, huddle in large groups on some islands, before hurling themselves off the cliffs to dive underwater for marine algae.

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Many birds and animals are unique to the islands – the Flightless cormorant, the Blue-footed booby, the Galapagos mocking birds, the famous finches, the Galapagos penguin, the Giant tortoise.

You’ll find yourself in a world where time began and has stayed much the same for 1 000s of years.

Come with me now for a walk in the Amazon jungle. It takes 5 hours by boat and paddle canoe to reach Napo Wildlife Center, a beautiful lodge run by the indigenous Anangu Quichua community.      

From there we go by canoe deeper into the jungle, getting a fantastic sighting of the critically endangered Giant otters on the way.

Clad in rubber boots we trek through mud, water and layers of leaves. Thousands of trees and plants of so many species even our indigenous guide can’t name them all. Bright orange roots as thick as arms stretch across the path up to 200m from the parent tree. Our Quito guide Robbie, picks up a tiny frog the size of a fingernail with a bright blue stomach and red and black back. ‘One drop of this frog’s sweat’, he tells us, ‘could kill 40 people.’ We shuffle nervously. The leafcutter ants are everywhere, marching along with pieces of leaf to take back to their huge underground nests where they grow and harvest 80 species of mushroom.

Medicinal plants and trees abound – this one cures cancer, that one snakebite, the list is endless.

The birds around us call with strange cries and when we climb the 39m tower which rears up over the jungle canopy we see yet more – the Spangled cotinga, parrots and parakeets, toucans and trogons.

The complexity of the jungle is hard to describe. Mega, mini, nano symbiotic relationships between all living things. Remove a leaf or a whisker and the whole complicated eco-system could come crashing down.

Oil and the oilmen are destroying this jungle at the rate of knots. And Amazon rain forest can never be replaced.

So go quickly.

In June I went off to Central India to Khanya and Pench National Parks in Madhya Pradesh state. Pench is where Rudyard Kipling got his inspiration for Mowgli and The Jungle Book. I was a guest at the luxury jungle lodges of Banjaar Thola and Bagvhan owned and run by Taj Hotels India and South Africa’s Andbeyond. The accommodation, service and food were superb. The travelling was gruelling – Joburg to Dubai, Dubai to Delhi (where I spent a couple of nights catching up with Indian friends), Delhi to Nagpur (in the middle of India) by air, then 6 hours by road to Khanya. Not for sissies! But it was a wonderful trip – read all about it in South Africa’s Sunday Independent July 24, 2011, and did I find the tigers? Yes, I did! See the amazing pics my guide, Durshan Kumar Singh, took.

I experienced the full weight (and I mean weight) of the Indian monsoon in Khanya, but when I arrived at Pench, the rains had eased up and I saw lots of deer, a massive Gaur – the biggest bovine in the world which weighs in at 1000 kg – and some dole – Indian wild dog.

Back in Delhi, I stayed at the Park, Connaught Circus, a vibey boutique hotel which arguably has the best location in the city because from it you can walk almost everywhere.

India’s national parks aren’t teeming with game like our South African ones, but sights, sounds, vegetation, gorgeous birds and of course, the tigers, are an unique experience. 

A few days ago I stood in front of Cologne Cathedral- one of the biggest cathedrals in the world – and with its twin spires one of the most recognisable. There’s been a church on this spot in the middle of Cologne since Roman times in 330AD. Over 600 delegates from all over the world – tour operators and a 100 or so journalists and travel writers from America, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Europe, and of course, South Africa – were  gathered here for the 37^th German Travel Mart.

On a gorgeous early summer evening we were ushered into the cathedral through a line of young people dressed in traditional costume. Girls in embroidered blouses, very short dirndl skirts, long white socks, black strappy shoes and frilly white knickers and boys in tricorn hats and breeches lined the route. Inside we were welcomed by dignitaries of all kinds, the great organ played, and the Dean gave us a short history of this iconic cathedral as stone saints and stained glass martyrs gazed sternly down upon us.

I chose a pre-Mart ‘Music and UNESCO World Heritage Tour’ which took me to Leipzig, Wiemar and the enchanting little town of Bayreuth. Did you know that Bayreuth has the most beautiful opera house in the world? The 2o of us on the tour looked cynical at this news from our guide. She was right, though. Forget La Scala, Sydney, Convent Garden and the Met – this was it.  From the outside, it’s part of a long line of buildings on the street. Built in 1745 for the wedding of Elisabeth Sophie – inside it’s stunningly beautiful. Rococo deluxe with more golden scrolls, mythical figures, green jade columns, pale green walls, chandeliers, gilded boxes than the eye can possible take in. It’s truly breathtaking.

Then on to Wagner’s Opera House. Chalk and Cheese. Severe, uncomfortable, forbidding, cavernous, no aircon and 35 degrees in summer, the Ring Cycle, hard little seats that people pay up to R25, 000 for a season ticket (you wait 10 years to get one) and then it’s just Wagner and hours of the Ring Cycle. Our guide told us that ‘we are in the service of Wagner’s opera’. So concentrate. Superb acoustics and a totally concealed orchestra pit. I sit in Wagner’s own conducting chair (gasp!) and conduct the absent orchestra.

This part of Germany is all about music. Bach was born and lived in Leipzig where, in a medieval tavern an overly enthusiastic Cellarmeister quoted Goethe’s Faust to us for ages before we were given a  much-needed ‘drink of rejuvenation’.The Liszt house  is here with lots of 19-century contemporary pop star pix of the famous Hungarian pianist and a death mask. Women swooned when he played. Beethoven’s home was Bonn. 

Germany is a superb cultural and historical destination. Everything works, there’s a superb public transport system, the locals are friendly and there’s culture and history everywhere. Be sure to check out the Ludwig Museum in Cologne which has the largest Pop Art collection in the world outside of the USA.

Oh yes. The beer and sausages are good too.

This month – early March – I went off to the Okavango Delta again (one of my favourite places on earth) and then via Maun, flew on the Central Kalahari Game Reserve which at 5 million ha is one of the largest in the world.

I visited two fully ‘green’ camps in Botswana, first, Banoka Bush camp in the Khwai Community Concession. Situated on the northernmost finger of the legendary Khwai River, the camp is named after the River San or Banoka, the first settlers in the area. And then it was off to Kalahari Plains camp near Deception Valley in the Central Kalahari. Both camps are joint ventures between Wilderness Safaris and the local communities and it was a joy to see the commitment, enthusiasm and professionalism of the well-trained local staff.

What do I mean by both camps being ‘green’? They are both solar-powered, recycle everything, and totally self-sustaining other than some foodstuffs that have to be flown or trucked in.

Whilst in the Delta I spent a glorious two hours out on a small boat on waterlily-fringed lagoon in the mother of all thunderstorms. Lightning crashed, thunder rolled and the rain bucketed down. When the storm finally exhausted its pyrotechnics an elephant that  had been eyeing us curiously from the bank, decided he didn’t like us and charged our frail craft. Luckily, at the last moment, he changed his mind and rumbled off.

The Kalahari desert was green because of good summer rains, and huge herds of fat oryx and sleek springbok grazed the far-reaching pans towards seemingly limitless horizons. The great black-maned Kalahari lions roared round my tent every night, and in the early morning we found three lionesses drinking at a small waterhole in front of the camp.

But you can’t talk about the Kalahari without mentioning the stars – dazzling, pulsing, twinkling in the great canopy of the night sky. One night I slept out on my deck. Lions roared, jackals yipped, an owl called and the stars just blazed away.

How lucky I am to live in Africa…                       

What a year it’s been! From Botswana’s Okavango Delta to Tanzania’s Ngorogoro Crater, from the Festival of Masks in Burkina Faso to Paris, from New York to Mozambique, from Guatemala to Uganda and Mexico –  it’s been a year of non-stop travelling.

Highlights – mind you every separate trip had its own highlight – including an excruciatingly hot night in Dédougou, Burkina Faso, West Africa, when ancestral spirits clad in traditional costumes of straw, leaves and mud, danced frenetically to the sound of beating drums and flutes (catch the upcoming March edition of Africa Geographic for the full story); another kind of flute – The Magic Flute – at New York’s Metropolitan Opera; Tanzania’s oh-so-remote Selous Game Reserve, the second largest game reserve in the world after Greenland with its teeming wild game; the tiny – 1km long x 500m wide island of Medjumbe in Mozambique’s far north Quirimbas archepelago; and watching over 100 southern right whales breach and blow in the Cape’s De Hoop Bay.

Of course, there were many, many more wonderful moments and memories – if you contact me I’ll send you copies of some of the articles I wrote for South Africa’s Sunday Independent.

Already lined up for 2011 are Japan, two of India’s top tiger reserves, Ecuador and the Galapagos, Botswana’s Linyanti region north of Chobe and of course…every year the annual family trip to Kruger Park.

A Selous lioness brings down a buffalo

A Mayan temple

An Okavango sunset

 And my favourite place? Home, of course!

Click to www.beckon.co.za to see my regular South African Tourism blogs

A golden Karoo morning

1872 Vlei cottage at De Hoop Nature Reserve

De Hoop Nature Reserve

I recently travelled to Cape Town on the world’s most luxurious train – Rovos Rail. The train stopped at a siding 5km in the middle of the Great Karoo, and some of us walked through a golden Karoo dawn to the historic little town of Matjiesfontein where Olive Schreiner lived and worked. From Cape Town I travelled to De Hoop Nature Reserve at Cape Agulhas, where I watched over 100 southern right whales breach and blow in De Hoop bay – a never-to-be-forgotten experience.

De Hoop is one of the Cape’s best-kept secrets, with accommodation to suit all pockets from a glorious manor house to an 1872 cottage. The reserve is home to endemic animals such as bontebok, eland and grey rhebok, and has some of the world’s finest fynbos. Try to avoid public and school holidays, book early, and you’ll have a unique experience. I did.

This year so far I ave been in Kruger Park, still one of my favourite destinations, where a friend of mine and a couple of Oz tourists on an evening game drive were lucky enough to see a pack of wild dogs hunting. Even luckier, we were the only vehicle in sight and were able to stay with the dogs for quite a while.

In early April I stayed at the two new &Beyond lodges, Xudum and Xaranna, in the Okavango Delta, which is one of the world’s last true wilderness areas. To be poled in a mokoro along the papyrus-fringed waterways, across waterlily-studded lagoons, as a blazing sun sinks down into the crystal-clear water is one of life’s best moments.

Kate was a guest of Eurorail in September and travelled by train in Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium and then by Eurostar to London. She claims that she will never use any other form of transport when travelling in Europe in future. She was part of a group of international travel writers from all over the world, and has since had articles published about her in Kazaksthan and Argentina.