I created the “Travellers’ Tales” section to give other travellers an opportunity to talk about their travels. Today I would like to introduce you to Heidi, a South African travel blogger based in Spain. She blogs at Spain on Foot.
I would love to hear about your travels too. Go to “Travellers’ Tales” , fill in the quick questionnaire and email it to me.
Read about Heidi's travels here:
I'm Heidi. I write Spain on Foot, a set of guides to Andalusia, and I live in Málaga, which was never the plan.
I was born in Zimbabwe and raised in Durban, which is where the whole thing really starts. Twelve official languages now, eleven when I was small. I grew up bilingual in English and Afrikaans, picked up enough Zulu and Xhosa to be polite, and thought absolutely nothing of it at the time.
Durban being Durban, the languages were only part of it. Zulu, Afrikaans, English and the biggest Indian community outside India, all in one city, all quietly eating each other's food. Bunny chow came out of exactly that. A curry served in a hollowed-out loaf of white bread, invented in Durban, and you'd struggle to find it anywhere else on earth.
I didn't think of any of that as diversity. I thought of it as Tuesday. You don't notice the water you're swimming in until somebody takes you out of it.
Me and my sister Gretel as kids, dressed up in traditional-style African costumes
That's the curiosity the blog runs on, long before I had a word for it. Not what a place looks like. How people actually live in it. What they eat, what time they eat it, and what they're like with each other at nine o'clock on a weeknight.
Then my husband's work took us to Costa Rica for three years, and COVID ended that before we were finished with it. When the company offered us Spain or Florida next, we chose Spain. Neither of us had ever set foot in the country. That was 2022, and four years on I'm still a little surprised by how much I love it.
Spain on Foot began as notes for friends who were coming to visit. Where to eat, which day trip is worth the early start, which famous thing you can skip without guilt. The notes got longer. They turned into guides to Málaga, Ronda, Granada, Nerja and the rest, and the rule hasn't changed since the first one: nothing goes on the site until I've been there myself.
I'm 45, married, mum to one daughter, and staff to a dog called Axel. When I'm not writing, I'm cooking, reading, or crocheting something I will almost certainly never finish.
The train from Durban up to Chegutu in Zimbabwe, to visit family. Days of it, or what felt like days to a child, with the window down and the country going past.
But it's what waited at the other end that actually stuck.
The game reserves first. Seeing that many animals in one place when your entire frame of reference is a picture book. And once, I touched an elephant. Actually put my hand on it and felt how warm it was, and how rough.
Then Lake Kariba, on a houseboat, drifting past bleached dead trees still standing in the water from when they flooded the valley. Crocodiles on the banks doing the thing crocodiles do where they don't move at all, which is somehow worse than if they did. Fish eagles calling over the water. And the sunsets, which Kariba is rightly famous for and which I have never quite got over.
And Victoria Falls, which you hear a long time before you see, and which soaks you to the skin whether you dressed for it or not.
That is an unreasonable bar to set for every trip that follows.
Me in in Malaga, Spain
Gibraltar, in August. It's a strange little pocket of the world. Red phone boxes and a fish and chip shop a fifteen minute walk from Spanish tapas bars, everyone switching between English and Spanish mid-sentence, and monkeys with no concept of personal space whatsoever.
I liked it enough that it now has its own guide on the blog, which is usually how you can tell.
Walking up through the nature reserve.
I would love to tell you I chose the walk over the cable car out of some purist principle. The cable car closed in November 2025 for a complete rebuild and isn't expected back until 2027, so nobody is choosing anything at the moment. You walk, or you take a taxi tour.
Walk, if your knees will have it. Everyone wants to get to the top, and the top is lovely, but the walk is the actual thing. Views out over the strait to Africa on a clear day, and the Barbary macaques crossing the path like they own it.
They do own it. Worth remembering before you take your sandwich out of your bag.
Me with one of the Gibraltar macaques
Cancún. And I'm almost embarrassed by how straightforward the reason is.
An all-inclusive resort where for one week I did not cook a meal, clean a surface, or plan a single thing. I am the planner in this family. I am the one with the itinerary and the opening times and the backup restaurant. For seven days, none of that was my job.
I didn't know how badly I needed it until somebody handed it to me.
Ponta do Ouro in Mozambique, just over the border from South Africa.
When we first started going, it was wild. Sand roads, not much in the way of paved anything, and you went because someone had told you about it rather than because you'd seen it somewhere. It's grown a lot more commercial since. I know that's the usual complaint and I know I'm part of the reason places change.
It still pulls at me harder than almost anywhere I've been.
Get an R&R at Fernando's Bar. Rum and raspberry, and nobody outside southern Africa seems to know what you're talking about when you order one.
It isn't really about the drink. It's about sitting there at the end of the day with salt on your skin and sand still between your toes, with nowhere in particular to be next.
My husband. We have now moved across three continents together, which either makes a marriage or quietly ends it.
We're still picking each other, so I'd call that a result.
A good book. A delayed flight, a rained-out afternoon, a bus that takes three hours longer than the timetable had any right to suggest. If I have something to read, not one of those is a problem. It's the difference between a wasted afternoon and an unexpectedly quiet one.
You don't have to plan everything. This is rich coming from me, and my family will tell you so.
But some of the best things we've found came from having an empty afternoon and wandering into it. Over-plan a trip and you can accidentally schedule the adventure right out of it. Leave a gap. See what turns up in it.
Costa Rica. Again.
Which is a strange answer for a bucket list, given I lived there for three years. But COVID ended that chapter mid-sentence, and there's a version of those years we never got to have. There are places we'd planned to go and never went, and people we said goodbye to over a screen.
I'd go back tomorrow.
We arrived in Spain with three years of Costa Rican Spanish and far too much confidence in it.
In Costa Rica, a drinking straw is a pajilla. So that is what I asked the waiter for, at a table full of my husband's new Spanish colleagues, in my clearest and most polite Spanish.
In Spain, pajilla is not a drinking straw. It is not something you ask a waiter for in front of your husband's new colleagues, or in front of anybody else. The word here is pajita. Two letters in it.
They enjoyed that considerably more than I did. I have drunk everything straight from the glass ever since.
We went to Zimbabwe most years. On one of those trips, a professional hunter was showing us the lions. He had his hand through the fence, stroking one of them down the length of its nose, top of the nose to the end of it, completely relaxed about it.
So we were relaxed too. He did this for a living, and that was good enough for all of us. My daughter was standing right next to him.
The lion opened its mouth.
That was all it did. No lunge, no roar, none of the things you would expect. It opened its mouth, the man pulled his hand back out of the cage, and two of his fingertips were gone. Like a knife through hot butter.
Then blood everywhere.
We drove back to the house first to disinfect it. The hospital and the stitches came after that.
My daughter was ten. For her it was the most exciting thing that happened on that holiday, and I mean that literally. Ahead of the animals, ahead of everything we had actually planned and paid for. She told the entire school. Her teachers still ask about it.
She also came away from it understanding something I could have said out loud a hundred times without it ever going in. You do not trust a wild animal. Not the calm one, not the tame-looking one, not the one somebody has been stroking all afternoon.
She is twenty-seven now, and she still will not put her hand in a cage. Not a lion's. Not a bird's. Not a puppy's.
The Drakensberg, without hesitating. As a family we'd hike up into the mountains and sleep overnight in the caves. There were freshwater rock pools up there for the worst of the summer heat, and a couple of times we were daft enough to get into them in winter too. I have lived in three countries since, and I still measure mountains against those ones.
How can people connect with you?
Blog: Spain on Foot
Instagram: @spainonfoot
Facebook: Spain on Foot
It's the same curiosity it always was. Now it's just chasing flamenco and tapas, instead of eleven languages and a train going north.
[Featured Photo: me in a flamenco dress]
Sara Essop is a travel blogger and writer based in South Africa. She writes about family travel and experiences around the world on her blog "In Africa and Beyond". Although she has been to 53 countries thus far, she especially loves showcasing her beautiful country and is a certified South Africa Specialist.
