vacaciones: wildlife

    Goodwildlife trips are not cheap and will usually be in organised groups. Pick your operator with care, it's worth spending a bit more on an African safari holiday to ensure a really magical experience because, let's face it, this is probably going to be a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

The good times were in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, the bad were in Uganda and Tanzania and the blame for the latter can be laid squarely at the feet of our second tour operator who drove us around East Africa. Greedy, lying, cheating and using inferior infrastructure and uninformed local guides at all times, he was also hectoring and argumentative - and is now out of business! However, we are still happy to have done the trip, but it could have been better. Here are the photos: East Africa.

Hire a guide or travel with a tour if possible as they will know where and when to find elusive critters, when and how to protect you where necessary on game safari sand keep you comfortable. If available and affordable try a tented camp for the full safari mostly of night animal noises (you haven't lived until you hear a hippo grumbling and munching near your tent at 3 a.m.).

The great arid scrubland and salt pan of Etosha contains a massive concentration of wildlife, particularly huge herds of zebra, various antelope and wildebeest, but no shortage of elephants, giraffe or birdlife either. Predators are tricky to find and depend on luck and persistence.

There are three inexpensive, walled rest camps in Etosha, each with their own waterhole attracting animals. Namutoni is less successful, Halali's hole attracts a lot of elephants (picture above right) and giraffes, while Okaukuejois the hands down winner, with superb huts (3, 5, 7 have the best views) and a wonderful waterhole with endless action, occasionally even getting lion kills.

Drive-yourself safaris (gravel roads) visiting other waterholes are excellent, with varied, stunning scenery. Cars can be rented in the unattractive capital, Windhoek, about 5 hours drive away.

Cape Cross, on the Skeleton Coast also offers 100,000 seals that you can get close to if you can stand the smell, the monstrous red dunes at Sossusvleiare totally amazing and climbable - up to 600m high, and Swakopmund town is pretty and relaxed.

A bleak and blasted landscape but the local inhabitants are totally unaffected by human presence and easy to approach and photograph. Strangely it was the unassuming Galapagos finches that triggered Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

 15 actively volcanic islands that constitute a 'living laboratory' of mainly marine animals - sea lions, seals, iguanas, turtles, sharks (you can snorkel with them too) giant tortoises and penguins.