Ah, Mzansi ...

 Way back in 2019, and it does seem an incredibly long time ago, we started planning a trip to South Africa.

Come February 2020 we were ready - flights booked, car hire paid for, hotels organised and then Covid.

We'd used a local travel agent in South Africa to organise a lot of the tour, including wildlife reserve tours, which meant we'd paid up front in Rand for a lot of the trip.

One of the side effects of  Covid was that the South African Rand dropped against the Australian dollar, so when we cancelled - actually we postponed, as, like a lot of people, we initially thought it might be like SARS and burn itself out in a few months - rather than simply return our money, the travel agency offered to put our money in an escrow account so we could rebook when things settled down, the idea being that we wouldn't lose money due to the fall in the value of the Rand, or indeed foreign exchange charges.

We said yes to this, because we really really wanted to go.

Well, almost a year later, clearly things aren't settling down.

While things are more or less under control in Australia, international travel is off the cards until the end of 2021, and may not fully resume to sometime in 2022.

So, reluctantly, we've cancelled. Yes, we'll take a loss, but that's life.

The important thing is that we're both healthy.

Hopefully we'll get there some day, but when, only God and his holy angels know ...