Into Africa!

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First blog of the second leg of our trip. So for over a month we stayed in Sydney, just bumming around and planning more things for the Africa trip, it went really fast! This morning (2nd June) we finally got on a plane headed for Johannesburg (via Singapore). We arrived at 9, booked our bags through (we did an online checkin earlier) and had brekky with the families. There was no queue at customs so managed to make it through rather quickly and got to the gate very early. The flight was pretty average, bad plane food and a weird choice of movies. But we managed to nap a bit, and 8 hours later we arrived in Singapore!
Changi airport is awesome! We took the skytrain from T3 to T2 (where our onward flight goes from) then checked out the transit hotel, but they were fully booked. Next door was the free cinema running some movie I didn’t know of and was halfway through, but there were also PS3 games to play and xbox games, so we sat for half an hour and played some space shooting double player game. We went for a wander and found a massive screen playing football highlights, and then later English premier league matches all night. The chairs contain the speakers, so unless you are sitting in them you can´t hear the commentary which is cool! And next to those were other smaller tv´s playing national geographic etc with 2 hightech seats facing each one with inbuilt surround sound. Very cool airport!
We got on our 2am flight and headed off to South Africa, we had a spare seat between us and took full advantage, sleeping for most of the 8 hour or so flight. We arrived at sunrise in Johannesburg and got told it was a barmy 6 degrees celcius outside! crazy! We managed to get our bags and get through customs in record time. We called Mufasa backpackers to come and pick us up, but they took a while because it was peak hour and there was so much traffic! Johan was the driver and we chatted all the way back to the hostel, driving past a township on the way. It is the dry season so everything is brown. We arrived too early for check in, so had much needed showers and some breakfast before getting into our room. We walked 15 mins down the road to a local shop to buy stuff for dinner later that night. We then decided to do a tour (to keep us awake for the day!) with Jozi tours to the Lion Park. John picked us up and we drove the hour into part of Pretoria to the park. The tour consisted of driving through a small game reserve to spot giraffes, gazelles, impala, zebra and ostriches, then onto the Lion exhibits.

We had to have all windows up to go into the predator section. Then we drove through 3 different large open enclosures with a different type of lion in each. The first were desert lions, a large male with a black mane looked amazing with 3 lionesses and 3 cubs playing under a tree. The second lot were white lions, and there was a very cheeky lioness who was very interested in the tourist truck full of people in front of us. Luckily they had mesh covering all possible points of entry that she tried and eventually she gave up... maybe someone had brought a sandwich on board with them?
The third lot were your normal lions you see in the savannah, lots of them were all sleeping together in a big pile under a tree, looked very cosy! We drove through another section with 3 wilddogs having a lazy afternoon nap and another with 3 inquisitive cheetahs that were obviously waiting for something near one gate. Finally we got back to the main section of the park where there are a few other creatures, hyenas, foxes and lion cubs!! There were a few large enclosures with I supose you would call them teenage cubs, playing a bit of biffo chasing each other around. Then we moved onto the other side of the fence to where we had driven through first, with giraffes etc. We bought a bag of giraffe food for R20 and climbed up onto a platform to feed one of the giraffes who had wandered over for a snack! very cool! We washed our hands and then went into the lion cub enclosure (smaller cubs) with a keeper. We got to play with them! 3 smaller normal cubs and 2 larger white lion cubs, we got bitten and scratched a bit because they were so playful and thats how they play with each other, but it was awesome! After 5 minutes we had to leave, but it was worth the 1 hour drive to play with them! We also saw meerkat babies pretending to be on the lookout next to mum and dad in the next enclosure.
We met up with John again and he drove us back to the hostel, taking backroads since the traffic was horrific! He told us a bit about Jo´burg, there is a new train system from Pretoria to Jo´burg but people cram in, it was supposed to lighten the load on the roads, but now trains, buses and roads are packed with people. Apparently people hang off the back of the train as well to try and get a free ride... so dangerous! He also told us that a lot of the townships are empty over holiday periods like christmas because a lot of the people who live there are only renting a shack, and their family lives elsewhere, they just need accomodation close to work. University students also live there as the university housing and flats in the centre of Jo´burg are too expensive so they rent a shack in a township for less than half the price per month (e.g. R600 a month for a shack = $90 a month). There are also a lot of roadworks happening that were supposed to be finished for the world cup but are still unfinished which makes traffic even worse.
After getting back to the hostel, we had a very early dinner, tried the Castle Lager beer (1 between us) and then went to bed at 7. We slept until 6.30am next morning, packed up everything ate brekky and then Johan took us back to the airport to catch our flight to Madagascar.
The plane ride was about 4 hours, we got separate seats, but the plane was only half full. I had a seat next to a nice American girl who had spent ages in Aus last year, we chatted a lot! The plane was pretty tiny too, only about 20 rows of seats. We arrived and since we already had our visas (we got them in sydney since we had heaps of spare time) and got through really quickly, got our bags and walked through the exit to find a cabbie that had our names on a sign (we´d organised it with the hotel). We exchanged our euros we had bought in Sydney into Malagasy Ariaries, all the money didnt fit back into my pocket since we ended up with 556,000 ariaries!!!
The cab ride took a while since the airport isnt close to the centre of town, but we drove past rice paddies with big horned cattle grazing next to the road and kids playing saturday club soccer on dusty fields. We arrived at Sakamanga hotel where we had the cheapest type of room they offer... its very nice! The reception speak english too which is helpful since we had a few questions and our french is pretty bad.
The room has a safe which we were advised to use, then we went for a walk around a bit of the centre, its pretty dirty and smelly, lots of kids running around in barefeet and theres broken glass etc around the place. Lots of people selling things and trying to get us to buy stuff. We walked through a market, one side was all things like shoes, paper and pencils, thongs, tshirts etc, the other side of the road is all the food produce, lots of yummy looking baguettes and things. We´re planning on having dinner in the hotel restaurant which serves local specialties, and the prices are about $5 a meal! whoot!
Tomorrow we head south to Fianarantsoa 😊 xx

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Photos

Big Lion
the first lion we saw in the park

More Giraffe food!
he was hungry or cheeky or both!

Lion cub!
I have a hole in my shirt now

sakamanga hotel´s street
In Antananarivo

Tana
View of part of Antananarivo, Madagascar