Having studied and worked in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa for close to 7 years, it undoubtedly holds a very special place in my heart.

I truly believe that it one of the most beautiful and diverse regions in Southern Africa and it’s surprisingly underrated as a tourist destination, even amongst many South Africans.

View Larger Map

I therefore am very supportive of a new online initiative called Dispatch@venture launched by the Dispatch Online (a sister publication of the Times Online), which has sent a team of its journalists trekking around the Eastern Cape, armed with hi-tec gadgets and luxury cars, in order to promote and market the province and uncover its untold stories.

Dispatch Online Editor, Andrew Trench, describes the project best:

Our teams are blogging from the road, producing video, pictures, audio etc and gathering comprehensive local information about the places they visit which we are building into a permanent collection of travel information about the Eastern Cape. On our 6000km journey – supported with a R200 000 cash sponsorship from Mercedes-Benz South Africa and who have also thrown in some top-of-the-range cars for us to use – we intend finding (and have already located) stories of hope and inspiration as well.

The project is similar to the Sunday Times’ Explorer project from eight years ago although ours intends to exploit the web technologies which are now available to us. As a newspaper, it is our first truly cross-platform project and the first which has web content at its forefront.

We will experiment in places with GPS-based content and have also optimised our @venture site for mobile. We are also using QR codes (as has the Times) to promote mobile use of the site.

More info on the project is available on Andrew’s blog.

It’s amazing to see a local newspaper engaging in an upliftment project like this and the timing couldn’t be better with Fifa 2010 just around the corner.

Nice work guys!