H: No of days out of the 5 we were in Italy that we didn’t eat pizza: 0 :D

Italy felt a bit more of a reverse culture shock than I had expected, and more than we've felt after any of our other trips. I guess previously we've either finished back in NZ, or in the UK with family. This time we were still on holiday but definitely no longer travelling. We were no longer a minority, the interesting different things that we have been seeing on streets is now graffiti, and the air is full no longer of the smells of cooking, but of cigarette smoke.

The sights of Rome were extremely busy but very impressive. And the gelato...

H: Today was the last day of the travelling part of this trip. I am bravely telling our very upset kids that it is better that we got to do this trip and to feel the sadness of it ending, than not to have done it at all. I try to encourage them to be grateful, but despite knowing this is how I should feel too it is a challenge.

It's been brilliant - every last part of it. The hot days, the tired days, the long days, the difficult days, the grumpy days - it's what makes the trip an adventure. It's a privilege just to have spent this amount of time with each other and to make all these memories together. I love that the boys aren't ready for it to be over. A small part of me worries about what travel-bugs we have created, but mostly I am just happy that they keep wanting to do it with us.

Now for the holiday part, a few days in Rome. It is only a few days as it is a place we absolutely cannot afford but it was a chance to meet my sister there (who has Long Covid and hasn't travelled for years) and also G's parents. And possibly more importantly, a chance to eat lots of gelato.

H: Number of bits of litter or graffiti seen in Doha: 0

We have swapped the church lined roads of Zambia for the mosque lined roads of Qatar. From a church full of singing and dancing and hollering (called ululation) to a prayer hall steeped in rules and tradition. From Sunday best to long robes. The three hour church service in Zambia are five short prayers in Qatar.

An American lady who now lives in Doha showed us around the Iman Abdul Wahhab mosque and explained some aspects of the religion which was really interesting. She explained about the five prayer times of the day, and that these can be done anywhere, but men more than women were expected to go to a mosque for them if possible. We learnt a little bit about the wudu - the washing of a person's face, head, arms and feet before these prayers. This is a physical and mental cleansing that prepares Muslims to approach God with a pure body and mind. There are no depictions of living beings, particularly of humans and the Prophet Mohammed, in Islam. This removes the possibility of worshiping an image, rather than the divine being.

I find the segregation of men and women very hard to get my head around and our quick introduction to Islam today hasn't helped me to understand this yet. The men wear a wide range of clothing - from long white robes (thobes) to the modern day jeans and t-shirt. A lot of women wear very traditional dress - often the abaya (which are long robes that are generally black) and cover their hair with a black head-dress called a shayla. Trains have separate carriages for women and families - the rest of the carriages are all for men. The streets are full of men, the women are much fewer in numbers. Women must wear the black abaya and shayla to enter a temple, a man can go in track-pants. A man is expected to go to a mosque, exceptions are made for women as it is much harder for them to leave their house and children. It is definitely something I'd like to learn and understand more about one day.

June is one of the worst months to visit Doha, high temperatures and high humidity making for a very sweaty 48 hours in the city. However we were flying through Doha from Africa to Europe so we took the chance to stop whilst we could. Having explored the souq and the mosque, we asked where else we could go where we could see the Qatari culture. The best recommendation was the mall! Apparently in these summer months that's where people go to socialise. Malls not really being our thing, instead we went to a cultural village. At midday in a summer month - too hot for most people (and us) and most things were shut. Instead we walked our way around finding all the underground vents that are firing air conditioned air into the desert air. Terrible for the environment but very nice for us!

It didn't take long to get tired of that so back to our hotel we retreated. An actual hotel, not a guesthouse - a very glamourous Premier Inn. The cheapest place we could find in Doha but with big comfy beds, lots of space, clean white sheets, thick towels, actual hot water, no power cuts and no ants. Easily the smartest place we've stayed in for years!

H: Volume of water going over the falls per minute at peak of flood season: 500,000,000 litres

19 years ago I was really excited to end our South American trip at Iguacu falls. It's a place that I'd wanted to see for ages. However 19 years ago there was a drought (in fact if you Google Iguacu Falls drought, the summer of 2006 is mentioned often!) and so the beautiful wall of water we've all seen in pictures was all but dry. To top it off, it also rained the day we went to see it so we got very wet.

We are in peak season for flow for Victoria Falls, but we had been told it was particularly high right now so we were happy our luck had changed. But sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

The flow was so great, that the view from about 80% of the viewpoints was just grey. The spray was so intense that you literally couldn't see anything but the wall of spray in front of you. Add to that the fact that that spray was coming down in some (most) places as torrential rain, and we were as drenched as we would have been if we'd had a swim in the bottom of the falls itself. We expected to get wet but I couldn't have possibly imagined the 'rain' that we were in today.

Mild disappointment aside, the bits we did see made an incredible sight and the roar of that water was immense. The local name for Victoria Falls is Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means "the smoke that thunders" in the local Lozi language. That's very much how we saw it!

H: No of times per minutes we get offered a taxi when walking the streets of Zambia: 25

Today we walked to Zambia. The lady at our guesthouse thought we were crazy - I guess not many people have asked about taking a local bus before. Instead she suggested we spend a fortune for a private transfer across the border to our guesthouse on the Zambian side in Livingstone. We stubbornly said we wanted to go the cheap way and once she realised we were serious she explained how we do it. First we got a local taxi to the start of the Kazungula bridge which links Botswana to Zambia. Then we walked 3km over the bridge and to the immigration building the other side. Our bags might have felt heavy by the end but it was so good to walk!

This border is a pretty neat one as it's the only place in the world where four countries meet - Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana. Actually I think officially there are two tri-country points within 150m of each other but I think whoever agreed that had lost their fun spirit that day as it would have been much better to have a single point where all four met.

Anyway, from the Zambian entry point we were given conflicting information as to whether or not there'd be a public bus that would take us the 60km to Livingstone. Plenty of taxi drivers offered to take us but their prices were huge. Two separate drivers even offered to take us to the bus station for free - obviously pretty confident we'd find there was no bus! However we politely (and by the end maybe a bit more forcefully) refused all offers of help and started off on foot. Quite a distance further on and the kids were starting to grumble about the weight of their bags (three weeks of no walking has made them soft) when another taxi stopped. We were far enough away from the border post now for the tourist taxis to have given up. This was a local taxi, offering us a share taxi - with a couple of local people - all the way to Livingstone for a third of the price we'd been asked for at the border post. In we piled!

So a bit of stubbornness meant we paid $65 instead of $250, we finally got a decent walk in, and got to spend an hour in a car with two other locals with our bags piled in all around us and the firewood that was already filling the boot.

Our accommodation here isn't the best. We've got ants, basically no hot water and also no light in the bathroom. Maybe we should have put that border crossing savings towards a nicer place!

I was really keen to go myself, and to take the boys, to an African church service. We went to a service both in Uganda and in Ethiopia and I really love the music. There are lots of churches in Livingstone and so having read the sign outside a church near our guesthouse we turned up in our Sunday best (best being relative) at 8am. The church was empty, as were the two close by. We saw lots of people walking around dressed up smartly but none of them seemed to walk to a church - not that we were following them, honest. We bumped into someone who worked at the guesthouse who said we were a bit early and that we'd hear it once they started up. He was right - be 9am the music was going and by 9:30 we were sat in a church watching the room fill up with Africans in their Sunday best.

It was brilliant. The music didn't stop until the sermon part started at 10:30 (which is when we left) and for that entire time most of the congregation were up on their feet singing together. This was a room full of spirit, full of people coming together and worshiping something they really believe in. I loved seeing it.

I don't think that we've taken the kids to a church service before so they won't have anything to compare it to from a Christian point of view, but I love that they can see the differences from the Taiwanese, Burmese and Indian temples they've seen, and the mosques from Oman or that we hope to see in Qatar. Even if you take the religious aspects out of all of these places, there's a lot to learn.

H: Total distance travelled with our truck: 3,746
Grains of sand/dust collected in our truck/bags/clothes over the last three weeks: 611,292,398

It was with a lot of sadness that we handed our truck back today. Where have those three weeks gone? It feels like we've hardly been here, yet the excitement of picking up the truck feels like so long ago. We have loved every minute of it.

But not before one last game drive in Chobe National Park. It's a place famous for its elephants - possibly more than 50,000. We managed to see three. At a distance. In fact we didn't see much in that first hour, which is totally to be expected on a game drive but we were a bit disappointed as it was our last one. But then the stars aligned for us as we noticed other cars pulled in just ahead and followed suit, to be met by a leopard. Our first wild leopard and a really beautiful sight. This was shortly followed by a family of warthog, baboons and monkeys. In fact the monkeys took us a bit by surprise. The baboons so far have ignored us and it wasn't until the monkeys were up on our wing mirrors trying to get through the windows that we realised these were monkeys, not baboons!

We finished our time in Botswana with a boat tour on the Chobe river, complete with hippos and swimming elephants. It was definitely a pinch-yourself-to-see-if-it's-real day.

We’ve been lucky to have been to a lot of countries and I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed them all. However there are very few I would prioritise going back to over experiencing a new country but that’s not the case for Namibia and Botswana. We have absolutely loved our time here and are left feeling that there was so so much more we wanted to see.