23.02.07 Garden Route, KwaZulu Natal, J’burg, St Lucia, HluHluwe NP, Kruger NP, Pilanesberg NP, (SA) ………HOME! HI there, how is everyone? Still keeping to your New Years resolutions, or have they fallen by the wayside already! Well here it is our last blog entry – for this trip anyway! It’s a touch woefully that I write this chapter, we have been having such a great time that knowing that our time is almost up is a little sad. However, what is great is that we’ll be home to see everyone and that more than makes up for it! So how have we been spending our last few weeks? Actually it’s been a bit all over the place due to the fact that we have had to incorporate selling the landy in to our itinery. We didn’t want to have to hang around in one place trying to sell it, so we put adverts on the web and in the national version of Auto Trader. This meant that we had people calling us from all over SA, and as you know SA is a very big country, so meeting up with interested buyers resulted in driving all over the place. Nevertheless, we still got a lot of other things done too! Firstly, we left CT and headed along the Garden Route (the East coast) which was a very beautiful area. We met up with some friends that we had met in Tanz, Cedric, Luc and Maria (the guys travelling in the 1949 landy), in a backpackers in Cintsa. It was great to see them again and exchange travel stories. They had done very similar routes to us, but had stayed in Moz for longer and had several typically African nightmare tales to amuse us with. Cedric is SA’n (from Durban) so knows all the great places to go around these areas and took us to some fab places. I mentioned it briefly last time that we were camping on beaches looking out to see the dolphins swimming around off shore, very nice! We stayed in some really lovely campsites that were totally off the beaten track. One in particular was near a place called Coffee Bay, called Bulangula. It took ages to get to and the last 10km was 4x4 vehicles only and we could easily see why. It was rocky, hilly, and very muddy (lots of rain recently) and there was no way anything other than a 4x4 would get through. The campsite has obviously taken this in to consideration and has it’s own transport link that picks people up from a village back on the easily accessible dirt road. We hadn’t done any real off-roading for awhile so Jas was very keen to get the landy dirty again and put the landy through its paces again! We managed to get a little bogged down, acouple of times, but nothing she couldn’t handle. Whilst staying in the various campsites on our trip, we have encountered many different ways of having a shower. Mostly it has been our great fortune to have your usual standard shower type, varying only in degrees of water pressure, and degrees of temperature. Some had hot and cold taps, which did indeed provide hot and cold water. Some had hot and cold taps, that provided cold and cold water! Some didn’t beat about the bush and just had the one cold tap, and some not surprisingly didn’t have the luxury of a shower at all! Sometimes great torrents of water came out, sometimes a wee trickle. Quite a few places used a ‘donkey’ method of heating up the water. This is where there is a wood burning furnace-type contraption that very efficiently heats up the water. The only thing is it takes a long time to get going and so you have to plan in advance when you want a shower and get the fire going plenty of time beforehand. There is a reason for me boring you with our bathing options and that is that at the camp at Bulangula, we were introduced to by far the most interesting and dare I say exciting mechanical shower that we have ever seen (trying not to sound too mad!). Apparently they are quite common around Africa, but this was the first time we had encountered them. They are rocket showers and are quite brilliant. It consists of a big metal pipe that the water runs up to the shower at the top, nothing amazing so far, I hear you say, but it’s the way that the water is heated that is cool. There is an opening at the bottom of the pipe where there is a pad of gauze. At the side of the shower is a bottle of paraffin, a measuring jug and some cigarette lighters. So you measure out some paraffin and pour it in to the opening so that it is soaked up by the gauze. Then you light the gauze and as the paraffin burns it heats up the water flowing up through the pipe. It makes this very funny rumbling rocket noise as it works and the whole bottom of the pipe lights up. The water is heated up instantly and you have to get on and shower pretty quickly because it only lasts 7 minutes before the paraffin burns off. The only down side is that the paraffin smell does get up your nose a bit! I thought it made the whole ‘going for a shower’ routine a little more exciting than usual, but you might of course say that I’ve been travelling for too long now and I really need to get a life! Anyway cleanliness aside let’s get back to other things! From there we made our way to the Southern end of the Drakensberg, which is an extensive mountainous area that is very stunning and is right on the border with Lesotho. We stayed at Sani Lodge BP which is at the bottom of a road that goes up to the top of the Sani Pass and in to Lesotho. We had planned to drive up there for the day, but the unpredictable weather was messing us around and the idea is to get to the top and see the great views, but we wouldn’t have been able to see much with all the clouds! Instead we went for some lovely walks around the BP, and enjoyed the views from there. Whilst we were there it was Jas’s birthday; we had a nice relaxing day and Jas spent it doing his most favourite thing……photographing! In the gardens of the BP were lots of lovely wild flowers which attracted some very pretty sunbirds, so Jas was ‘happy as Larry’! As luck would have it nearby there was an English style pub, so no prizes for guessing where we went in the evening to celebrate. The five of us had a slap up meal and the boys savoured properly brewed beer, a rarity in SA! On from Sani Pass we went to Durban. Cedric and Maria were at the end of their trip and going back there to settle down for a bit and get jobs again. We met up with some of his friends and stayed with them for a couple of days; a nice break to have a bed to sleep in and all the creature comforts of home again! By this time we had been contacted by a couple of interested buyers for the landy who were both based in J’burg. Knowing that we didn’t have a huge amount of time to spare, we only stayed in Durban for a couple of days and had arranged to meet the potential buyers. So after saying farewell to Cedric, Maria and Luc (who was now going on travelling by himself) we headed up to J’burg to see if we could get the landy sold. On the way to J’burg, we found another campsite to stay at in a different part of the Drakensberg. It was called Glengarry and was one of the nicest c/s we had stayed in on the whole trip. Beautiful setting, excellent views and very relaxing; there was only Jas and me there! We went out for some more walks and lounged around by the lakes, it was lovely. There was a 9 hole golf course there which we could use; for the small fee of £4 each we hired clubs, balls etc and could use the course as often as we wanted for the whole time we were there, pretty cheap eh! Jas likes the odd game of golf, and I have never played in my life, so here was the perfect opportunity to get me started. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t brilliant either! I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would and Jas was very impressed that I lost only one ball during the 3 rounds we played. We had a lovely few days there and really enjoyed the Drakensberg area. In J’burg, Dean, was very keen on buying the landy, but wanted to have it AA tested before he definitely said yes. That meant staying in J’burg for a couple of days and gave us time to get around a bit. Near J’burg is a World Heritage site called the ‘Cradle of Humankind’. It’s essentially a large cave that is millions of years old and was years ago used as a limestone mine. There were lots of gold mines in times gone by and in part of the processing of the gold, limestone was required. Therefore there were just as many mines for getting the necessary limestone. In this particular mine they found some skeletal remains and a after lots of investigating they turned out to be remains of Austrolapethicus africanus (don’t quote me on the spelling!), ie. our relations from about 1.8 million years ago. Then further inside the cave they found more bones that were even older, 3 million years! As you can imagine these were quite important discoveries and now the site is devoted to telling the history of those ancestors from the information they gained from these remains. Along with other bits and bobs they dug up from other sites around this area, they also found proof that people were using fire about 1.2 million years ago. It’s a very interesting place and they have done a very good job of presenting the information and taking you for guided walks through the caves to show you where things were found and tell you all about it. It was whilst we were in J’burg that we realised that we didn’t have too much time left and we decided to extend our flights. We were still in negotiations with Dean about the landy and were hoping to get to a few other places before coming home, and that clearly wasn’t possible if we stuck to the original date! With still a bit of play on our credit cards, we thought, ‘why not stay just a few more weeks’ and quickly sorted it out with the airline. So now without such a close deadline we left the bustling city and went back to the coast to an area of wetlands called St. Lucia. We knew that Luc was heading that way too so we arranged to meet him there and spend a couple of days exploring the area. There are lots of hippos and crocs around there and the usual signs warning against walking around at night are apparent. Sometimes the hippos even get on to the roads around St. Lucia, and I thought that would be quite fun to see, but no luck this time. Not far from St. Lucia is the Hluhluwe NP which is reputed to be the rhino capital of The World! It contains half the world’s population of rhino, which is quite impressive, and was definitely on our list of places to go. We were not quite sure how well it would live up to its name, but after two days driving around, it more than lived up to its reputation. Throughout the first day we saw 19 rhino, all up close, no that was a good start! There were a few of the usual other animals, but the rhinos really did steal the show. The next day we were sure we couldn’t beat 19, but would you believe it, we counted 24 rhino and at one point the landy was surrounded by a group of 10! As we drove around we saw to the left of us a rhino mooching along. Stopping to get a few pictures, and scanning around to see if there were more, we spotted two on the other side of the road. Two then turned in to four, then six, seven, and then before we knew it we had counted 10 rhino! They were casually grazing and plodding along, not in any rush. After a while they came closer to the road and began to notice we were there. It was amazing, they weren’t bothered by us, but just very curious and came right up to the landy to sniff us out! I was a bit concerned at how close they were, while Jas was just snapping away, saying ‘its OK they no going to bother us’, ‘easy for you to say’ I thought! However, he was right, they got bored with us and started to walk on. A few of them got a little feisty with each other and began to have a bit of a tussle, which was cool to watch. They eventually wandered off and were quickly lost in the scrub and you could easily believe that there was nothing there at all. From our short visit I think we can vouch for the rhino capital 100 per cent! As you can tell Jas and I do very much enjoy visiting the NPs here and there. So you won’t be surprised that during our last couple of weeks we have been getting our fill of them before we come home. We don’t know how long it will be before we come out to Africa again, so we’re making the most of them now. As we really enjoyed our trip to Kruger NP and we weren’t a million miles away from it, we decided to pop there again for a few days. The easiest way to do this was to drive up through Swaziland, which we thought would be good. I think quite a lot of people do this because it was by far the easiest border crossing we have ever had; the shortest time and the cheapest fee. It doesn’t take long to drive through Swaziland, only about 3 hours, and it’s a very pretty country. It’s not particularly different to other parts of Africa, but despite only being there briefly it was nice to have a quick look at it. Back in Kruger NP, and we had more excellent animal sightings, plus a few tremendous thunder storms. It seems that whenever it rains in SA, it doesn’t just rain, there is always thunder and lightning. One night the lightning seemed to be right over head and I have never heard such loud cracks of thunder. I was thankful that the landy has an aluminium body and was (hopefully) not going to attract the lightning strikes! When in the NPs we always keep an eye for the small things as well as the big. For example, there are lots of tortoises in Kruger which cross the road and we always stop to make sure they reach the other side in one piece – some of the SA’ns speed along the roads like nobody’s business. And if you happen across a really fresh lot of elephant or rhino poop, there will inevitably be several dung beetles getting stuck in to it, literally! They are great to watch and work extremely hard to get the dung nicely moulded in to round, easily ‘rollable’ sized balls. They can move the balls remarkably quickly and sometimes move them impressive distances. It was quite funny one time when we found some hard at work, and could see one trying to move a ball that wasn’t well rounded at all and rather squished on one side. He was struggling to move it around, putting in Herculean efforts, but every other time he almost rolled it over it would fall back on top of him! It was comical to watch, but also very admirable as he kept on trying and was slowly but surely moving the ‘odd’ ball to its destination. If only we could have told him to take note of his fellow dung beetles shaped balls (no rude comments please!), it would have saved him much time and energy! Another time we could see lots of birds in the sky and were surprised when we got closer to find that they were lanner and peregrine falcons, and kestrels all flying together catching insects. There were probably over a hundred of them swooping around altogether. It was spectacular to see especially as to see any of them in England is quite a rarity, let alone in such large numbers. There is also a very nice bird called the woodland kingfisher, that looks quite ordinary at first glance, but when it meets another one displays its beautifully coloured wings. Jas was determined to get a picture of one displaying and it was proving a little tricky. We could find them easily enough, but getting them to stay still let alone display was near impossible. To make the task easier, Jas had taken to mimicking their distinctive call in an attempt to get them to display and when we were anywhere near one would start tweeting out of the window! To his credit we finally got one to show off for us and Jas got some great photos, however, whether his bird impression was really the instigating factor or not is highly disputable! Amongst some of the other amazing things we saw were hippos play fighting in the water, hyenas chasing each other, a leopard eating a vervet monkey, wild dogs playing around, lions lounging in the sun, 4 cheetah cooling off under a tree, elephants strolling through the bush with very young babies, a buffalo having a heavenly mud bath (totally covered in mud), and plenty of zebra and giraffe. At one of the river crossings, there is a dam and the track follows the edge of the dam so that the water is about level with the windows of the landy. On one occasion there was a crocodile in the water right next to the edge of the dam and when we drove next to it you could almost touch it, it was that close. Jas took some photos, but not without firstly closing the window enough so that the croc couldn’t reach across for a quick snap! The next few days we had to go back to J’burg again to sort out the landy business. Dean and his girlfriend were definitely buying it and we needed to sort out transferring the money and ownership. This we thought was going to be a fairly straight forward process, but we were still in Africa right, and although we thought SA was a little more user friendly, we soon found out that was not the case! Basically to cut a very longer and arduous story short, the SA’n banks don’t like the idea of sending hard earned money out of the country for someone else to enjoy. Dean and Toni were having real difficulty getting the banks to authorise a transfer, and it was beginning to become obvious that it was not going to be easy to get the money. We discussed all sorts of options; giving us all of it in cash (not really a sensible idea, don’t want to carry around that much money), arranging for us to have it in travellers cheques (banks wouldn’t let Toni buy the cheques and then us to sigh them), us opening a SA’n bank account and then transferring the money later (still the problem of getting the money out of the country) and the ideas went on and on! Finally we realised that the money would be easier to move if it was going from a business account. So we contacted the people we bought it from in CT and asked them if they would act as go between. Toni would put the money in their account and they put it in ours. It seemed to be possible and so we arranged all the details and off we went. However, we know that things never run as smoothly as you want and so as I write the last bit of this blog (on the day we fly home!) we still have no money and now no car! We have to trust things will go through but we won’t know for sure until a couple of weeks time! It has all been a bit of a hassle for our last few days, but that’s Africa and we are used to it! Back to being in J’burg and knowing there isn’t much we can do here other than sit and wait, we made a last trip to another NP called Pilanesberg, only 2 hours away. It’s a much smaller park than Kruger, but is very nice and has all the animals there. We were very lucky to see 2 black rhino one day which was excellent. The black rhino are endangered and are much shyer than the white, usually staying hidden in the bush. But this morning they were wandering around a grassy area and we had a perfect view of them and Jas got some great pictures. We had a really great last few days safari’ing and saw more lions and leopards, elephants, rhinos, and everything else, a lovely way to end our stay. The campsite was very nice, swimming pool, restaurant and all that, but one thing it had that was not so good was a really naughty troop of baboons! They were constantly emptying the bins and trying to get food from the camps. We have a spare tent that we put our stuff in while we’re there so that the landy isn’t full up whilst we’re driving around. You remember from the earliest blog that we have several big black boxes to put all our things in, and these were in the tent too. Late one morning on returning from a drive, and find that not only have the baboons opened up the zips of the tent, but they have gone through some of the boxes and generally thrown most things around and made a huge mess! Luckily they didn’t find (or rather couldn’t get in to) the food boxes, ‘phew!’, but did scatter all our clothes around and tried to eat some soap! We have found that most of the campsite in the NPs we’ve been to have one particular animal that hangs around during the day and could be called the camp’s mascot. For example in the Kgalagadi there were lots of ground squirrels, and in Etosha lots of mongoose (we’re never sure what the plural of mongoose is; mongooses, mongeese, mongi, we haven’t ever found out), in Liwonde it was warthogs, Kruger had vervet monkeys and lizards, in South Luangwa it was elephants, in Chobe there were buffaloes, and in Pilanesberg there were ostriches. We were quite amused when we suddenly noticed two ostriches casually wandering around the camp, eating and drinking, not at all bothered by all the people and cars around them! It’s a nice little feature and we have very amused by the way they are totally relaxed by our presence and it makes walking around the campsites much more interesting! So now here I am on our very last day, finishing off this blog and thinking, by tomorrow morning we will be back in London and trying to get used to being cold again! It has been an amazing trip and we have done and seen so many things it’s hard to believe that we have done it all in just 10 months! It was a sad moment when we watched the landy being driven away, it has been our home and we have loved having it. I never thought I would enjoy sleeping in a rooftop tent so much! We love Africa and already know that we will be coming back again sometime in the future, but for now we have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and are very happy that things have gone so well. We are really looking forward to coming home and seeing you all, and thank-you all for all the messages and emails you have sent us along the way. We loved hearing from you and sharing our tales with you, and hope that you have enjoyed reading the (lengthy) blogs and seeing the photos as much as we have enjoyed putting them together. Now I must end this chapter of our travels, bid you farewell from Africa and say this is the last blog for now, we’ll probably begin to plan our next trip in the not too distant future and we’ll be back on the website sometime soon! Bye for now and we’ll catch up with you soon! Love Kate and Jas xxxx