This is it

Wednesday morning my mum will take us to Cape Town for a last lunch, an embarrassment of tearful hugs, dinner and too much wine before we grumpily get on our 8am flight to London on Thursday 1 March.

Amanda's dad will no doubt rue his offer to pick us up from Heathrow in the 6pm rush hour, but we're very grateful and look forward to staying in his and Sue's house for a week while they rush around India and Nepal.

We've postponed reality for a week by skiing in France with Les Girls. So our new life in the UK officially starts on Monday 19 March - one in which we will eat only organic food, watch no television and ban the car. And probably do some good deeds and smile piously at cab drivers who knock us off our bicycles.

Good bye travels. The past 15 months have been the best of our lives. Thank you.

In full view

Elim dune near Sesriem in the Namib Naukluft National Park

Our second crossing of the Tropic of Capricorn - the first time was in Australia

Camping spot at Sesriem

The starkly beautiful Deadvlei (dead pan) in the Namib

Dune 45 (45km from Sesriem)

Kolmanskop, near Luderitz, where surface diamonds once were nearly as plentiful as sand. The diamonds ran out, the sand didn't and it's now a ghost town

Favourite passtime - in the garden of Hotel Helmeringshausen, Nowhereville

Luderitz, on the coast. A million miles from anywhere

Fishriver Canyon near the border with South Africa. A gruelling 5-day, 80km trek which is closed to hikers in summer

The end of the road as we know it

The sands of time are fast running out on our travels, but we're having a last good-time fling before bowing to the inevitability of having to wash every day and actually work for a living.

When we arrived in Cape Town on 19 December two and half months of indulgent luxury (viz clean, sit-down toilets, good wine and typhoid-free salads) expanded ahead of us. It would last forever.

It didn't.

Christmas and New Year with my family wooshed by as quickly as saying "more wine?"; the Boardman clan's three weeks in the White House of Onrus were over after three bottles of Newton Johnson sauvignon blanc (apart from four days of looking after 6-month-old Isabella and fabulous '2 and half, soon I'll be 4' Beth); and on the Whale Trail, despite our best efforts, five days caught up with us before the five of us could kill a box of red. (Mind you, we did manage to work our way through 12 bottles of white. Easy hiking.)

And now we're in Swakopmund, on the coast of Namibia, moaning about the slow internet connection and wondering what the big deal is about Swakop. It does touch the heart for its tenacious perch on the Atlantic Ocean in a desperate effort to fend off the marching dunes of the Namib desert. But it's flat, modern (apart from a few stodgy remains from the German era), and its grid-like layout reminds too much of Australian towns of similar isolation.

But maybe we'll be converted to the charms of the town when I frog-march Amanda down to the beach in gentle persuasion to swim with me in the Arctic.

Sesriem and Sossusvlei, on the other hand, blew us away, and will probably be on the podium when it comes to handing out Highlights of our Year awards.

Sesriem is the campsite and Sossusvlei the dry (now) pan with centuries-old dead trees, both in the desert of big red sand dunes of the Namib Naukluf National Park. Starkly, deeply beautiful. If it had had broadband internet one could have lived there. (And I could have uploaded a few pics onto this blog).

Our campsite is a large spot under an immense camelthorn tree, enclosed by a low-packed stone wall (like Voortrekkers in our kraal). Our braai spot overlooks a plain of vividly yellow scrub while, on the left, the dunes climb to 300m and, on the right, raggedy mountains change colour throughout the day.

We share it with birds at breakfast time, stripy field mice during daylight hours and jackals, who come for dinner, circling our enclosure. One even enters our tent while we have dinner around the fire. We fall asleep to the sounds of their high-pitched yelping, and once or twice during the night have to shoo them from our tent with our imitation of lion-growls.

Mrs and Mr F Mice impertinently invade our space (admittedly, we invaded theirs first) and fearlessly sniff around us, our tent and our food. Even my tent-pole-in-hand menacing stance and lion-growls fail to instill fear, so we succumb and spend the rest of the three days in perfect harmony with the local wild life.

And so we cling to our last days as we traverse this immense country of perfect gravel roads, painfully beautiful scenery and no people in our sissy city car (never before have I suffered such four-wheel drive envy). Soon it will be over.

The thing about India

Sunset over Khuri, in the Thar desert

We leave India for South Africa, via Dubai, with a mixed bag of sadness and relief.

It drives you mad

• It's a dirty country. The streets are a free-for-all of cars, motorbikes, rickshaws, people, cows, dogs, goats, pigs and tourists - all vying for space, business, food, sex, directions, sometimes simply for survival.
• It smells of pee. Sanitation (like road rules) is a vague concept - perhaps an unaffordable luxury - not rectified by the occasional "I am clean. Use me" sign on a public convenience. Men urinate where and when they need, everybody shits on the railway lines simply because there's nowhere else to do so and cows have carte blanche. Dogs, presumably, eat so little that they leave little behind.
• Every man, woman, child, cow and dog on the street wants and expects something from tourists: money, chocolate, pens (kids sell them for chocolate to stall holders, who sell them back to tourists to give to the kids) and food. The standard opening line "Which country, medem (or sir, infuriatingly, when they see only short hair and trousers) is a precursor to a persistent hard-sell of "buy in my shop, very cheap", "Rupee?", "Rickshaw, rickshaw?" Even the holy men ardently flog their blessings at a significant mark-up.
• Every man, woman and child (and sometimes, one suspects, cow and dog) is either a tout or has a secondary line of business which involves touting. From rickshaw drivers insisting on taking a detour to their brother/uncle's pashmina/crystal/leather shop to children begging for milk that can only be bought from a specific shop at a ridiculous price. (The scam being that the child returns the powdered milk to the shopkeeper in exchange for a commission.)
• While train travel is a pleasure (at least for us), buying train tickets is not. In the bigger centres, some train stations have special tourist quotas where foreign travellers huddle together in air-conditioned offices to buy tickets in orderly and peaceful conditions. But we feel guilty and, where possible, queue in the "Ladies, foriegners (sic), senior citizens" line. The ladies being young women who buy tickets for their (and others') men folk and the senior citizens very pushy, grumpy old men. The foreigners are polite tourists who wait patiently (but silently seething in the heat), sometimes for hours, while young ladies with immaculate timing and grumpy old men push in with impunity.

Amanda's steed

It touches the heart and makes you want to go back

• For all the rubbish lining the streets, nothing is ever wasted. What the holy cows and lowly dogs don't consume (rotting vegetables, discarded carton and plastic mostly make their way into some underfed stomach), end up on rubbish heaps where rag pickers meticulously find uses for everything unwanted. The mountain of empty mineral water bottles we tourist leave behind in our budget hotels are a welcome - if labour intensive - earner at one rupee for 100 bottles (8,000 bottles will earn you a pound).
• It soon becomes apparent that one traveller's beggar or tout is the next foreigner's businessman or entrepreneur who, just like everywhere else, is trying to make a living.
• The food is excellent. In dark and dingy kitchens, on street corners and in mobile stalls men and women practice culinary magic on little gas hobs and open fires. (Fortunately for the waistline, the wine industry is in its infancy and the result is mostly atrocious - Chateau Indage the closest to being vaguely drinkable.)
• The Times of India is a very good newspaper (probably better than anything we read in Australia), despite the sometimes idiosyncratic use of English. 49 people dying in a bus accident is not a tragedy but a "mishap". The lonely hearts section is a fascinating insight into caste, arranged marriages, wealth and education. (The first prize goes to a lady looking for "effeminate man or eunuch for marriage". We still wonder whether she found one.)
• One can have only warm feelings for a country where, in the 1920s, a Maharajah of Varanasi is awarded Belgium's Order of Leopold II for "his prowess in shooting tossed coins with a rifle". Or where our friend Mary visits her very ill husband in a Chandigarh hospital only to discover a monkey having a shower in the en-suite bathroom.
• And then there's Mr Singh, a Brahmin teacher in Jaiselmer, who, with no outside funding, opened a little cultural museum "to teach the children their heritage". He explains the importance of the kama sutra, without which many women "lay with their head turned away while their husbands satisfy only themselves on top".
• Luckily for us, we give in to Amerjeet Singh's request to "come to my house, see my children" as he follows us for about 10 minutes through the streets of Chamba. Back home Mrs Singh, an English teacher, grimaces only slightly as her husband brings home yet some more tourists to speak English to her and the children. We spend two hours with them, chatting and admiring photo albums. Amerjeet ever sends the servant to buy us some biscuits.

And there are many more such encounters with extraordinary people, funny people, serious ones, downright weird individuals and people just like us.

We hope India will welcome us back - we still need to get beyond the surface and understand it better.

* We're now in South Africa, not doing a hell of a lot and sad that the great adventure is over. We're booked on a flight on 7 February but may postpone the inevitable until the begging of March.

Ladies walking home with water

Dog in a coat in Delhi

School rickshaw in Paharganj, Delhi

Anger management

Jaiselmer fort

Aids Day in India

Jodhpur, the blue city

Pig in Pushkar

Udaipur City Palace

A lot on her mind

The view on the Lake Palace Hotel from our 'lets spoil ourselves' haveli in Udaipur, and the haveli, Jagat Niwas, below

And the view from the rooftop restaurant