We had all been living in Cape Town, waitressing and bartending to support our lifestyle of going to the beach all day and partying late into the night. It was time to return to reality and face getting a real job and starting our lives after university. A thoroughly depressing thought and while pondering it over drinks by the sea one evening we decided to have one last hurrah before we returned home to Blighty and the US. We would join one of the many backpacker tour buses in Cape Town and spend a couple of months travelling round Southern Africa before heading home for Christmas.

We went for the cheapest deal, having scant money left, which seemed pretty good to us - we would travel through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe on a bus, stopping at all the big spots on the way, taking in some safari and the Okavango Delta, and all of this with a tour guide and a driver.

We met the rest of our group at 4am at the downtown Cape Town bus depot - not a place I'd hang out now in the middle of the night!! We were an eclectic bunch; there were a couple of seasoned backpackers, four very naïve and horsey girls from the Midlands, a couple of middle aged women, a man in his later years, and a young guy from London who was pretty similar to us (us being 2 girls and 2 guys all aged 23). Our bus was a revelation. It was an old US yellow school bus without any sides!! Our guide, Simon, had long blonde dreadlocks and a constant cigarette in his mouth, and had been ‘guiding' for 10 yrs.

So we set off for a beautiful journey up the West Coast of South Africa. After a couple of hours the people and the towns started to die away and we were left with endless vistas of fynbos and golden fields. After a couple of days we hit Namibia and the tarmac roads ended - suddenly our bus with no sides started to show its flaws. The sun blazed down on those of us on the wrong side of the bus and it was impossible to avoid one arm and leg sunburns. The wind blew the sand from the sides of the road into our faces, mouths, ears, everywhere. The bumps on the dusty, potholed roads made us groan constantly as our backs were jolted into our throats - and this for 8 hrs a day. Needless to say, Namibia was the low point of the trip! We stopped at a town on the Skeleton coast which stank of sulphur and went to the second biggest city where we saw about 10 inhabitants. It was over 40 degrees and there was little shade; but we did enjoy climbing the sand dunes and sitting through a sand storm (talk about sand in every orifice!) and the amazing number of stars you see sleeping out in the Namibian desert at night.

We moved on to Botswana, a beautiful country with a vast array of scenery - from the delta swamplands to the dry plains where we saw rhino, lions and elephants. We travelled on canoes down the Okavango delta spotting incredibly colourful, exotic birds and countless wildlife drinking from the waters. We stayed in a remote campsite run by a young English couple who sold us endless beers and grilled cheese sandwiches as we whiled away hours in the bar playing cards and backgammon as the sun blazed down. As we headed along the dirt roads to Zimbabwe our side-less truck decided to have a rest and broke down in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly our intrepid guide Simon became a quivering wreck and retreated into the cab to smoke dope while we helped the driver, Johnny, to fix the engine. Needless to say, we didn't treat Simon with the greatest of respect for the remainder of the trip - classifying him as one of life's failures - and he basically gave up his role and chain smoked his way to Johannesburg in the back of the bus, an isolated figure of fun.

Zimbabwe was fantastic. Hard to believe it now, but then it was one of the most advanced, wealthiest countries in Africa with a huge tourism industry. We stayed in Victoria Falls at a campsite with hundreds of other backpackers - the parties at nightclubs in town were heaving and we even ran into a girl from our university one night which was pretty amazing considering it was a small college of 3000 people in Virginia, USA - and 5 of us were hanging out in Victoria Falls. The Falls themselves were spectacular, endless drops of water creating a permanent misty haze of beauty. We treated ourselves to drinks at the very posh Victoria Falls Hotel where I had stayed with my family a couple of years earlier and felt very out of place in our dusty birkenstocks and backpacks alongside well heeled families in Ralph Lauren safari outfits.

It was time to leave Zim and set off for the last leg of our trip, northern South Africa. We spent a day at some hot springs where we relaxed in steaming hot water alongside a significant number of very large German couples in the middle of the night, freezing when we finally ventured out with pruned hands and feet.

We hit Johannesburg early one morning and if I thought the bus depot in Cape Town was menacing, it was nothing in comparison to this. We were petrified for our lives, not helped by seeing a group of teenage boys walking along the street brandishing guns - and made our way to the airport as fast as possible, eager to get out of Dodge as soon as we could! The airport was full of goodbyes; to the four English girls and the old man we knew we'd never see again to the young guy from London who ended up joining the same management consultancy as me and becoming a friend and colleague - and to two of our uni group who were flying straight back to the US for Christmas. It was sad and full of memories but as we got on the plane to fly to stay with my relatives in East London we looked forward to long hot showers, good nutritious meals and sleeping in a bed with a mattress!