I was looking for a photo to use as a test while I’m sprucing up Inside the Travel Lab – you know, washing behind its ears, dampening down tufts of hair and generally trying to get it to look its Sunday Best – when I found this.

The sight of

Alright, I admit it. I did agree with the description of Namibia’s adventure playground, Swakopmund, as “unimaginably dreary.”

I still do. Yet as I was leaving town, I drove along this street of, well, street art that lifted my spirits…

The Namib Desert runs for over a thousand miles in southern Africa, and at 55 million years of age, geologists feel confident that it’s the oldest desert in the world.

Yet on the road between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay, the authorities feel we may not have noticed…

The violence of the wind whips me with my own hair and spills tears down my frozen cheek. Somewhere in the greyness, the wind howls, screams and groans, ripping up canvases and kicking over dustbins like the soundtrack to a teen horror film.

My mind jumped to computer card games and Karen Carpenter’s warbling, but in Namibia, Solitaire is a place on the map. It’s also…

Desert. It’s a word that used to have two effects on me. First, it conjured up images of parched wastelands and a world of emptiness scorched into never-ending death and sand. Second, it triggered a paranoid rush to the dictionary

After Namibia, the London Underground took my sense of proportion, dragged it through the proverbial hedge backwards and then left it in a crumpled heap on an escalator. All while urging me to…

Go Beyond the Everyday
The latest in a run of very cool competitions I’ve been told about lately – this one comes from Land Rover and Biosphere and the prize looks well worth the effort.