When Cameron and I were little our Grandad, Ernie, used to reguarly tell us a bedtime story centred around a Raffie Swan bus trip. For you non-Berwickers, Raffie Swan had the worst coaches imaginable. Regularly our school trips would be spent in a lay-by, somewhere between Holy Island and Newcastle, while we waited on another coach coming to pick us up from our broken down vehicle. As the infamous song goes, ‘You’ll never get to heaven on a Raffie Swan bus.’

However, in Ernies bedtime stories, we would all be on a bus traveling around Africa. Cameron and I would laugh and point out that there is no way a Swans bus would make it to Durham, never mind Africa, but Ernie was undeterred and carried on. We would go past villages with young children playing outside their mud huts, before being surrounded by thick jungle and spotting lions, elephants and giraffes.

Ernie was a Berwicker, and hadn’t traveled much further than Spain. But he had a vivid imagination, and we were transported to a new world with his storytelling. We used to love these stories, and Cameron would go to nursery the next day telling his friends that he had spent the previous night in Africa. Unsurprisingly, the whole class asked for ‘an Ernie’ on their Christmas list.

Yesterday, I experencied the Africa of Ernies imagination. On a thirty hour bus trip we spotted a giraffe hanging out on the side of the road with his two ostrich friends. We passed women in traditional Namibian dress, we saw people selling biltong from little stalls and we watched the sun set over the African plains. As the sun rose the next morning, we went past villages of mud huts where the first people had risen to get the fires lit. Later on there were children running along the road to school, women sitting chatting in the sun and people collecting goods from neighbouring villages. The roads were terrible, and full of ginormous pot holes – our nice coach managed just fine, but it would be interesting to see how the buses of our childhood would have fared!

Namibian traditional dress. Image taken from google as it was tricky to take a photo from the bus!

A Zambian village

I think Ernie would have loved being in Africa, meeting new people, trying new food and reading the local news. His stories definitely fuelled my interest in traveling here. Sadly, my wonderful Grandad passed away just before I left, but we will definitely be toasting him with a Zambian beer tonight.

• Livingstone