A-Level Results Day: How To Spend Your Gap Year, From Botswana To The Middle East.

Spend your gap year driving the Garden Route
in South Africa ( iStock )

How Independent journalists spent their gap year

If your A-Levels weren't as you expected this morning – why not consider taking a gap year? More than 230,000 people take one every year, according to statistics from Year Out Group.

And if you need some inspiration for where to go and what to do, here's how Independent journalists spent their gap years – from travelling around the Middle East to working on a conservation reserve in Botswana.

Bel Trew , Middle East correspondent.

After I left school in 2003, my sister and I flew to Cairo to travel around the Middle East.

We couldn’t afford to fly around the region, and so took battered boats, buses and shared taxis from the Egyptian capital to Beirut in Lebanon, which these days would mean crossing war zones but back then was entirely possible.

Full story at Independent.