Arrived in Singapore early this morning – first place with free Internet access so far this trip! Flights were fine, but I feel tired now – it’s not even midnight Canadian time but the night is over for me already…hope I can keep sleeping on this leg of the trip!
After Kruger, we stayed in Pilgrim’s Rest – a ‘living museum’ (a little like spending the night on the set of Anne of Green Gables). Quite different than the rest of the trip, to say the least!
Then on to Johannesburg, which we all seemed to like. I was way more impressed with this city than I thought I would be (I’d been nervous about visiting it). It actually reminded me of Montreal (and I never would have expected that!).
We managed to visit the Apartheid Museum before Cullen and I caught our flights away.
On our way to Kruger Park we spent the night in a town called Glencoe (where people seemed very surprised to have tourists stop). We stayed at the LaLaLaPha Hotel and were treated to 10 C temperatures! This was shocking – we weren’t prepared for this! Cullen and I played pool and embarassed Canadians everywhere with our poor skills. Most of our competitors only spoke Afrikaans, so that made for a slightly different experience than usual (although I can’t say that was responsible for my terrible playing).
Next we went to Nelspruit, where Cullen redeemed himself by winning at Blackjack at Casino Emnotweni…
Almost at Kruger, we stayed one night in a lodge at Hazyview…
Then on to Kruger where we slept in rondavals (round huts with thatched roofs) and got to have about 2 days of driving through the park. This ended up being a whole lot more fun than I think any of us expected. We saw a lot of animals (and got pretty good at seeing them before being told what was there). On our last morning, our guide was quite pleased to finally be able to bring us to where the lions were…
And, the weather was hot! Really hot! We weren’t used to this! The experience was great. I hadn’t known that it would be so relaxing to be that close to animals (and that I would really find it exciting to see a giraffe in the trees!).
We’ve been travelling for over a week now and finally have 2 days to rest. We’re at an area called Marina Beach, just outside of Durban. The weather is much hotter than Cape Town (no ‘Cape Doctor’ here to keep the temperatures down) and this region seems to have a lot of small resort towns and a slow-paced holiday feel.
We head to Kruger on Monday and have a couple of days there before wrapping up the South Africa portion of my trip in Johannesburg. I think I may have more time to blog when I get back to the Frankfurt airport (March 11!).
The part of our trip that was supposed to be the most challenging was the drive through an area known as the Transkei (sounds like ‘Trans Sky’). Ever since arriving in South Africa, we were given warnings about how dangerous this part of the country would be and told not to stop at all along the way. After all the warnings, we definitely didn’t find this part of the drive to be too bad. The stops we made for gas (oops – ‘petrol’) were fine and we only had too delays – one for the traffic in Umtata and the other when there was an accident on the road. So we happy to have made it through without any scars. The risks people had warned us about were that the people wouldn’t help us if we broke down or had an accident, that there were no fences so large animals could run onto the road and pose a hazard, and that we could be faced with violent crime if we strayed from a well-travelled area. Anyway, all went well for us but I must admit that I was relieved to be finished with the drive and arrive in Kokstad. It turns out that it snows in this area, but thankfully, not while we were there!
The next day was election day in South Africa and we got to see people heading off to the polls, which was interesting to witness after hearing about it in the news all week (there were some worries because of the power outages).