In summary

1. South Africa is much more beautiful, welcoming and accessible than Richard had imagined. Anywhere in the world with a huge wealth gap is obviously going to have crime. People take precautions because of this and as did we (and Jo'burg may well be very different) but this part of the country felt no more dangerous than Argentina, Sri Lanka or even New York.

2. The people in the worst position over here are poor white people, looked  down upon by black and white. At least the poor black communities seem to be relatively self-supporting in their townships. The poor whites do not have this - the best example being an obviously poor middle aged white couple who, when we saw them, we're trying to hitch hike and had gone nowhere in 24 hours; people from the townships have such certainty of a lift they even seem to hitch hike to work. As our canoe guide, a reasonably educated black guy called Ricky, put it: everyone just says if you're poor and white, too bad, you had your chance.

3. On the surface black and white people seem to happily co-exist over here, but there is an underlying current of systemic racism: I do not think that (excluding tourists) I have not seen a mixed-race couple or person in our time here and whilst restaurants typically have fantastic, professional black waiting staff (or waitrons as they call them!) they invariably have a white manager and the manager will often be years younger than his staff. This seems to reinforce negative stereotypes and so the black staff seem to feel the need to be overly deferential to their white manager and, for example, a waitron felt the need to summon his manager to tell us there was a problem with their card machine rather than tell us himself.

4. Holiday in rugby-playing nations. They are just so much more civilised.

5. Wendy won the "guess the name of the bird" competition.  I will ensure that Clare brings back a suitable piece of undesirable tat from the next corner of the world we visit to commemorate this fact!