I decided to act like a tourist in my own country, and booked an activity I’ve been wanting to do for the past year. A walking with lions excursion, I’ve been seeing a bunch of tourists enjoying this experience, so I though why not enjoy the fruits of my country. When I realized there was a place only 2hrs drive from home I asked a couple of people to come with me; and as these things go you either wait around for people or go on your own. And I am no stranger to doing things solo so I went all by myself.
I booked a session with Ukutula lodge and game reserve, where I got to walk with my favourite animal and the mascot for my zodiac sign the majestic lion.
Meet Zoro and his brother Milo, aren’t they so beautiful 😍😍
I do some solo travel from time to time and I thought I should share some of my favourite essentials.
First on my list is my favourite inanimate travel companion….my tripod, because pictures must be taken of course. Here’s my compact cellphone tripod.
Next on my list is my cellphone and an eSim because there is no getting around without data. Whether its getting around using Google maps, calling an uber or just uploading photos and videos onto social media data is a must. I highly recommend getting an eSim. I usually get one from Airalo. Here’s my referral code so you get a discount when using Airalo’s eSim OFENTS1830. Honourable mention goes to the powerbank because when travelling solo you cannot afford to have your phone battery die on you.
Another safety essential is a portable door lock, which reinforces the locked door, I highly recommend this to women travelling solo.
Then the miscellaneous travel bits-n-bobs: Luggage edition:
The expandable bag which works as my hand luggage and can be expanded to fit more stuff if the shopping gets out of hand and I need more space.
Then of course we have the compression packing cubes, these bad boys have made my life so much easier.
Then obviously I don’t travel without my motion sickness tablets, aspirin and ginger tea. Once I buy a decent one I’ll be adding a camera to the list, for now my phone camera will do; and it has served be well. Shoutout to Samsung for my phone I still use the Galaxy S21ultra.
It’s taken a while for me to post the second half of my mini Euro Summer which was another one of my favourite destinations Cote d’Azur, Nice to be specific. Honestly in a perfect world every one of my summers would be spent here. Nice is legit the perfect place, the people are friendly, the weather is great, the water’s so blue *in Beyonce’s voice* and you can hop on a train and be in an equally beautiful town or village. I would recommend it over and over again to anyone who will listen.
My first time in Nice was a solo trip and this time around I went with my bestie, so its safe to say it works great as a solo travel destination as well as a girls trip destination.
The sun sets were at 21h30 or so and I tried to capture the beauty.
Sunset
Nights at the beach were lovely.
I revisited Ezè village and Monaco.
I made it to Cannes this time around and the train ride was longer and hotter (you have been warned). Train ride aside Cannes is absolutely gorgeous and their beach has sand instead of pebble beaches in Nice. ( I do not care for the pebbles personally).
Checked out their walk of fame and walked up and down Les Marches du Palais(the red carpet stairs)
Even in my blogs I’m a maximalist here are a bunch of pics that I’m posting just for kicks.😉
I returned to Farago on the roof for Sunday brunch and the views were as lovely as I remembered (pictured above).
If you’ve glanced at my blog even once you will know that Paris is the love of my life. There’s nothing else left to say really as I’ve written many a love letter to this city. So this time I’m just sharing pics from this last trip to mon cœur.
Isn’t she lovely 😍
We also visited the gardens in Versailles, more loveliness.
No trip is complete without a visit to Gallaries Lafayette.
At this point we all know how trigger happy I am when it comes to taking pictures, but they just sit on my phone and a select few make it onto instagram and this blog. My friend and I used to talk about actually print our pictures out and I recently finally did and compiled photobooks. That kinda led to my new hobby digital journalling/scrapbooking.
Yeah I’m an ipad kid so it only makes sense for me to scrapbook digitally. Here are some pages from my scrapbook with my travel chronicles if you will. Chances are at some point I’ll print these out into a photobook.
I still have a bunch of photos that I took on this trip, so this is more of a miscellaneous post to share more pictures. Lets treat this post like tumblr back in the day when we appreciated pretty pictures. And Florianapolis serves a beautiful backdrop. So guys here is more of what I saw and what I got up to in Brazil.
Yeah I know you’re all like “Geez Louise Ofentse how many more Florianapolis posts are there?”. Well I was there for a month and you all know how trigger happy I get with the shutter button on my camera, so I’ve got a bunch of pictures and where else can I share them if not here 🤷🏾♀️.
This post is about what I consider to be the highlights of the trip.
Favela da Mariquinha Street Art Tour:
This was a tour of the favelas and the artwork in and around the Favela da Mariquinha which could be considered one of the largest outdoor galleries.
A ARTE SALVA VIDAS which means ART SAVES LIVES
Our tour guide Alex was born and raised in Favela de Mariquinha and is a community leader and all round Mr Congeniality (He knew everybody in the neighbourhood and they all showed love) . He is involved in various projects aimed at increasing visibility and making a positive impact on his community through teaching kids about art, soccer, surfing & jujitsu . Alex knows the stories behind all the paintings and is passionate about sharing them. Here are a few of my favourite paintings:
And the view of the city from the favelas was absolutely gorgeous
This view
* Check out Favela de Mariquinha on instagram @roledamariquinha
The next highlight was our visit to the Olodum Sul which is like a centre for the kids from the favelas. They have all types activities and programmes for the kids to learn skills from dance, to music, art and general life skills. It really is a great place they even have psychologists at the school. My favourite part is how they instilling a sense of black pride in the sense they teach the kids about black history and black pride which is very important as the region they’re in Santa Catrina is a predominately white area (80% white population). Being black is a struggle worldwide so having a space like this really is amazing.
We did a mini tour of the centre, did some dancing and we did capoeira with the kids it was so much fun.
Below are images of historic black people all over the walls as well as their new podcast studio, it really is so cool how they are teaching the kids all of this.
20 November is Black ConsciousnessDay in Brazil.
An honourable mention to the list of highlights for me in Florianapolis was without a doubt sugarcane juice (I miss it so).
Its safe to say most of us were today years old when we even heard of Florianapolis aka Floripa existed. For those who don’t know Florianapolis is the capital city of Santa Catarina in the south of Brazil and also where I spent the month of November. Here are a few things I got up to. I have no words and too many word simultaneously so I’m going to share a bunch of pictures with captions instead.
First up we have the Welcome Expirence at Itaguaçu where the beach(Praia de Itaguaçu) has boulders which legend has it were witches who have been turned to stone.
We walked through the witch’s portal
The beach was really pretty even if it was a bit too cloudy to see a proper sunset.
I have been in a not so great mental space this year, and I needed a change of scenery . I went to the internet in search of an escape for a bit. My default destination is Paris as that is my happy place but Paris in November is freezing and I was already depressed I didn’t need to be cold too.
I came across a YouTube video by Nikki Vontaya and she is on a 12 month trip with a travel group called Remote Year and her trip looked great so I looked them up. I obviously wasn’t going to do a 12 countries in 12 months trip that is pure insanity. But I did look them up and they do have a 1 month and 4 month travel option. Anyway I selected 1 month in Brazil because you know summer and beaches. So I booked a flight to Florianopolis, a town I’d never heard of until October this year.
I went for the Remote Year option because the trip planning was done for me, accommodation was booked for me, activities and attractions were organized and suggested for me, win win. After all of the airport drama I made it to my home for the month a place called Bewiki and I met the people I would be spending the month of November with, my fellow travellers :
From left to right
The Caipirinha Pusher
The Disappearing Man
Me (The Grumpy one)
Our City Manager
The English Patient
The Hopeless Romantic
And The Light Packer
I will break down whole trip in future posts as 1 month is too long for one post. So lets say to be continued…..
I made it to the airport hotel, which was called the Monaco Hotel (I took this as a good sign as I love Monaco the country). The hotel didn’t live up to its namesake but it was clean and dinner was still being served so I was good.
My room at the Monaco Hotel
Here is something about me, for the past couple of months I have been actively looking on the bright side but after missing my flight and not knowing where my luggage was, I allowed myself 30min of woe is me time, then I went downstairs for dessert (there was none, so I just had fruit).
The next morning I woke up early freshened up and booked my taxi to airport even though my flight was at 13h00, I wasn’t taking any chances. Also since my last luggage incident I pack a 2nd outfit in my hand luggage (shoutout to Nomsa). I got to the airport at 10h00 even though the taxi driver was trying to convince me to stay in Sao Paulo longer cause he felt I hadn’t experienced the real Sao Paulo because it was raining 🤷🏾♀️
Anyway, I went straight to the the LATM counter but there was no gate info yet coz I was early so I had time for a sit down snack. Closer to the time I went back counter and I ran into a LATAM person on the way there and she gave me my boarding gate number. I still went to their counter and the consultants gave me 2 other gate numbers I thought I was going to explode with anger at the airport 😡. I checked out all three gates turns out the first lady was right. I camped out at the gate for the remainder of the time. All of the announcements were only in Portuguese according to the guy next to me it was because it was a domestic flight (he was my Google translate because I had no network).
A quick hour flight later I landed in Floripa airport where everyone was nice and either attempted to speak English or patiently conversed through Google translate (yep even my network was better here). I got to baggage claim and the only person there worked with another airline but he called someone to help me (A completely different experience to the Sao Paulo airport) . Within 20 minutes I had my luggage . Also the Floripa airport is pretty as far as airports go, its small but airy like I can actually breathe there.
I found my driver easily and I was on my way to my mini sabbatical.
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