We finished up work on the Mandela and Beyond project on Friday October 17 and set off from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town along the Garden Route, which is a beautiful stretch of road through towns and countryside.

However, you have no idea how much running around (and tearing out of our hair) we did during the final few days of the project!

Whilst competing in a race against time to get all of the hardware from the vans, out of the boxes (there were more than 40 of them), connected up, and installed with the necessary software and parts of the network still weren't working properly, and trying to find the faults often felt like looking for the needle in a hay stack.

But it all worked out fine in the end, and our persistence paid off.

St. James' School held a special leaving assembly for us, with the girls in the choir, and both the traditional and hip-hop dance groups putting on a wonderful show for us.

Afterwards, we ate a nice lunch with the teachers, and then had a great night out with some of them at a local community hall.

The DJ played a mixture of golden oldies and new music, and that seemed to suit everyone.

It's now Monday October 27, and I've been in Cape Town for four days.

We had previously stopped off at Jeffrey's Bay (for a few hours), the Tsitsikamma National Park (for two days), and Mossel Bay (for two days).

Each place had its own attractions, and we were very lucky to have found some high-quality accommodation for a very reasonable price, allowing us to spend more money on activities during this holiday part of the trip.

In rough chronological order, these have included: going to the beach, experiencing South African nightlife on many an occasion, going on a zip slide tour of a beautiful forest canopy, bungy jumping, eating out at several excellent restaurants, boat trips, sea kayaking with whales, riding horses and quad bikes, shopping and, er, more shopping (for Leeanne and Tina, Cape Town was truly a shopping paradise).

What has been surprising to me, is the fact that eight very individual young people have got along so well with each other, for most of the time.

Don't get me wrong, there have been times where we've all been ticked off with others in our group.

However, any differences were then quickly put aside.

The others (apart from Riccardo and I) went home yesterday.

We saw them off at the airport, after spending the day at the beach, which was lovely.

I'm currently staying with Riccardo, at his grandmother's (Teresa) apartment, which was very nice of her to arrange for us.

Riccardo is staying until the end of November, and myself until Friday of this week.

The weather has been mostly excellent, and it has been extremely hot at times, but I think we all started to get used to it. It's going back to the cold in Scotland that I'm dreading!

Having noticed the other day that my temporary residence permit extends until January 2009, I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't book my return flight for a much later date, which I had the opportunity to do (I thought I could only stay for a maximum period of one month).

This is how great I think this country is, and I'd stay much longer if I could. But, all good things must come to an end, and I'll be finally going home on Friday October 31.

Please catch up with me again next week, in my final blog.

Also, be sure to look out for some rough cuts from my documentary in the very near future. I've now got around thirteen hours of good-quality footage to start editing down and assembling.