Cristy_nopod

While we didn’t enjoy our short time in Maseru, once we got out into the rest of Lesotho we had a wonderful time. The scenery is simply stunning and the people were very friendly.

Vegan food is hard to come by, however…

We arrived at Shaolin early on a freezing December morning. It was silent and empty. We wandered around with our packs trying to find somewhere to stay and something to eat.

Finally we located a guest house, but the owners were very unfriendly and there was no heating in the freezing cold room. The shower was located above a filthy pit toilet and we had to negotiate for some time in order to get an extra blanket for the bed.

We had similar trouble finding decent food during the day and it was priced more than any other food that we ate during our month in China.

We left Shaolin the following morning. It was our worst day in China.

I lived in Fernie during the 1998-1999 ski season. It is a very cute little town with friendly locals and a nice feel.

The mountain is fantastic. The snow is great, the runs are really varied and fun and it is not very crowded (because it is fairly out of the way). I had a great season – although it would be have been good if there were more females in town for the season…

I lived in Vancouver for half of 2000 while on exchange at the University of British Columbia. It was a wonderful place to live and I would happily go back.

The mountains, the ocean and the forest make such a stunning setting for a city. The atmosphere is also really relaxed and the locals are (by and large) very relaxed and outdoorsy.

I visited Johannesburg with my husband in order to carry out some field work for my PhD. It is a very interesting place, but it is also quite hard work and not somewhere that I found very relaxing.

We stayed in Melville, which was a good place to stay because it is quite central, feels fairly safe and has a good range of restaurants. Outside of Melville – when we were downtown or in the townships – it was quite difficult for us to find vegan food to eat. We ended up packing our own lunches from ingredients purchased from the Woolworths supermarket.

On a free weekend, we visited the Baby Lion Park outside of Johannesburg, where we were able to pat baby lions and a baby hyena and see a number of other animals from our hire car. This was one of the highlights of a our stay.