With a steering wheel in one hand and a camera in the other, best-loved adventure travel journalist Andrew St Pierre White spent four decades exploring wild Africa. In To Africa And Back, he spins a humorous and sometimes poignant yarn about those travels. Photographs enrich each story.

“Pay attention, boy!” came the command from across the classroom. It was often accompanied by a piece of chalk hurled in my general direction.

I’d jerk awake from my daydream and sigh. Kent in England was lightyears away from the wild places of Africa that held my heart captive.

Fast forward some twenty years…

I find myself alone at a rusted shipwreck on the desolate Skeleton Coast in Namibia with a video camera in my hand.

“Imagine those poor souls on that ship,” I say to the camera.

“Oh! Thank the Lord! We made it! We got to land. Praise be the—”

I look about.

White emptiness stretches on both sides of me to the distant horizons. In front of me, a barren range of wind-blown dunes almost fills the sky.

“Hang on a minute.” A long pause. “Maybe I’ll get back in the boat.”