Wandering Africa is where I put the travel stories that stuck with me.
Some come from proper trips. Plenty come from work travel, where I had a day, a weekend, or just a few spare hours to get out and see something. Some are from places I had planned to visit for years. Others are from places I more or less stumbled into and ended up liking far more than expected.
I am Håvar Bauck. I am a traveltech entrepreneur by trade, but I have also spent a large chunk of my life moving around Africa, getting to know places properly, and collecting stories along the way. Some glamorous. Some not. A few involve excellent scenery, questionable roads, odd hotels, and plans that looked much more solid on paper than they ever were in real life.
That is travel, really.
I have never been that interested in travel as a box-ticking exercise. I do not care much for rushing through a place, grabbing the standard highlights, and pretending that counts as knowing it. What stays with me is usually something less scripted. A city with real attitude. A landscape that suddenly goes quiet. A roadside stop that turns into a conversation. A strange little town nobody talks about, even though they should.
Africa is where that kind of travel has shaped me the most.
I have lived and worked across the continent for years. I have built businesses here. I have travelled through it in many different moods and modes. Work trips. Road trips. Detours. Weekends away. Long drives. Short stops that should have been longer. The more of Africa I see, the less patience I have for flattened versions of it.
Why I Started Wandering Africa
This isn’t my first blog. Not by a long shot.
My personal blog – bauck.com – has been online since 1998, which, in internet years, is roughly the Paleolithic. Back then, blogging was still a fringe curiosity. I started writing simply to document my experiences and share them with a few friends. Over the years, that blog morphed, paused, reawakened, and evolved – much like me after an overnight layover in Addis.
But the travel stories, especially the Africa ones, gradually started taking up more and more space. They deserved better than being buried between startup reflections and whatever else I happened to be writing.
So I gave them a home of their own.
Wandering Africa is not meant to be a glossy travel brand. It is not a ranking site. It is not one of those overly polished blogs where every destination looks perfectly lit and suspiciously drone-friendly. It is a personal travel site. A place for stories, impressions, photos, and places that left a mark.
Sometimes because they were beautiful. Sometimes because they were chaotic. Sometimes because they were unexpectedly funny. Often because they were all three at once.
The Name. And a Little Linguistic Truth
The name is not very mysterious. I wander, and a lot of that wandering has happened in Africa.
If you’ve traveled East Africa, you’ve probably heard the word mzungu – the Swahili term for a white person. But there’s more to it than meets the ear. Mzungu comes from the verb ku-zunguka, meaning “to wander” or “go around in circles.”
It’s a term born of honest observation. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, European explorers moved through the region, often aimlessly in the eyes of locals – looping through unfamiliar landscapes with unclear intentions and suspicious hats. So they became known, quite literally, as wanderers.
That’s what mzungu means: someone who wanders. And, well… guilty as charged.
That’s what I do. Not in the colonial “I have just claimed your mountain” sense, but simply as someone who likes moving around, exploring, and taking the occasional detour. I follow roads that look interesting. I like seeing what sits beyond the obvious stop, the neat itinerary, or the heavily marketed version of a place.
Not because I think travel has to be dramatic or profound all the time. Mostly because I’m curious. And because some of the best parts of being on the road happen slightly off script.
What You Will Find Here
You will find stories from across Africa. Cities, islands, coastlines, old towns, highlands, road trips, national parks, lakes, borderlands, and the occasional place that barely gets a mention in mainstream travel coverage but clearly deserves one.
You will also find a fairly serious stack of pictures from places I have visited around this continent. Some from work trips. Some from actual holidays. Some from quick detours, long weekends, and half-stolen gaps in a schedule that was meant to be about something else entirely. And some from places where I left thinking I had only just scratched the surface and should have stayed longer.
Some posts are practical. Some are more reflective. Some are here because a place had enough personality to earn a page of its own. Others are here because I had a camera with me and the good sense to stop and pay attention.
You will also notice what this site is not trying to do.
I am not interested in recycling the same flattened Africa story. Too much writing about the continent swings between safari-and-sunset fantasy and the opposite extreme, where everything becomes heavy, worthy, and strangely joyless. Both miss a lot. They leave out the humour, the texture, the weirdness, the beauty, the friction, and the ordinary life that makes places feel real.
Africa is too varied for that. Too big. Too layered. Too contradictory. Too alive.
I would rather write about places as they actually feel. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes rough round the edges. Sometimes elegant. Sometimes a bit chaotic. Usually more interesting than the brochure version.
I tend to like places with real character. Cities with energy and a bit of madness. Landscapes worth the drive. Beach towns that still feel like themselves. Stops that have not yet been sanded down into something tidy and forgettable. I have always had a lot of respect for places that do not need to oversell themselves.
A Bit About Me
I am originally from Norway, but much of my adult life has played out in Africa. I am one of the co-founders of HotelOnline, and for years my work has revolved around travel, hospitality, and technology across African markets.
That gives me a slightly unusual angle on travel. I have seen Africa as a traveller, but also from inside the tourism and hospitality industry. Through my work, I stay constantly connected to the travel world, so travel and tourism do not sit off to one side. They run through almost every part of my life. I have spent time in hotel lobbies, airports, meetings, roadside restaurants, beach properties, city centres, back offices, on long drives, and in more hotels than is probably healthy for one person.
That overlap between work and travel shapes much of what you will find here. A lot of the stories started with one reason for being somewhere, then took a different turn once curiosity got involved. Quite often, the place had far more to offer than whatever first brought me there.
Since 2019, I have also been speaking with increasing frequency at tourism conferences and industry events, on topics such as travel tech, destination marketing, digital marketing, investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation. The angle is always travel, and the focus is always Africa. I am also available for selected speaking engagements.
I did not set out to become a travel blogger in the usual sense. No grand rebrand. No dramatic life pivot. I just kept going places, kept paying attention, and kept ending up with stories worth writing down.
Why Africa
Because Africa is endlessly interesting, and because it keeps refusing to fit inside one neat story.
Every time someone tries to simplify the continent, reality makes a mess of it almost immediately. That is one of the reasons I like it.
The scale is enormous. The variety is ridiculous. The history runs deep. The contrasts can be wild. You can move between very different worlds in a surprisingly short stretch of road. Old kingdoms, fast-growing cities, forgotten roads, deep tradition, sharp ambition, serious beauty, complete nonsense, and everyday brilliance. Sometimes all in one trip.
And despite all that, a lot of travel writing on Africa still ends up sounding generic. Too polished. Too shallow. Too exoticised. Or too nervous to let places feel like real places.
I would rather do the opposite.
Wandering Africa is my attempt to write about the continent as I have experienced it. Not as a slogan, not as a trend, and not as a backdrop, but as a collection of real places with depth, personality, history, humour, friction, beauty, and life.
I’m not trying to explain Africa. That would be absurd. I am simply documenting the places I have seen, the journeys I have taken, and the things that made those places stay with me.
Thanks for Stopping By
If you are here because you love Africa, are curious about it, are planning a trip, or just enjoy a good story from the road, welcome.
This site is for people who like places with character. People who do not need everything to be polished to enjoy it. People who know that some of the best travel memories come from the bits that were not neatly planned, or from the places that never made the top ten list in the first place.
Have a look around.
You might find a place you already know. You might find one you had never thought about visiting. Either way, that is part of the point.
And if you end up adding a new destination to your list because of something you read here, I’ll take that as a win.
— Håvar – African Wanderer (Blogging since 1998, long before it was cool)