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Published: November 30th -0001
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Friday (13/8/10)
‘Breakfast 5.30, 6 we hit the road’ Jack (this was starting to become routine!)
After a restless night we headed for the border back into South Africa, despite the long queues everything was going seamlessly, too seamless in and out in ten minutes.... until our truck paper work got held up, a couple hours later we finally crossed the border stopping for a groceries and breaky number two.
We cruised through the gates of Kruger National park midmorning for our first game drive of the day. We stumbled across a group of giraffes at the water hole having a drink back legs spread wide apart, front legs bent to allow their long necks to get to the water, a hell of a lot of work just for a drink.
But otherwise it was a fairly quite day a few warthogs, an elephant, impala, kudu, nyla and baboons.
We stopped for lunch and continued on our way to Skukuza campsite. We arrived just in time for the sunset safari, Chris, Jez and Carly jumped from one truck to the next. The first hour was action packed spotting two rhino just by the road, elephant, and just as darkness fell a
LEOPARD also just by the road in the spotlight. Our novice spotlighters lucky. After a pretty quiet hour, we spotted a herd of elephants feeding by the road with very small calf, a white tailed mongoose, and a hippo at full speed on the dry ground (and they are quixk!).
We made it back to camp, our crew had kindly put our tent up and prepared a BBQ of lamb chops sausages, salad and potato’s whilst we feasted three huge hyena’s eyed off our dinner through the fence.
Saturday
Our last day on the truck, we enjoyed some brilliant hot showers and hit the road on 6am for our final game drive out of the park. It was a stunning sunrise but a very quiet morning spotting just a couple giraffe and elephant.
With a long drive ahead of us we left Kruger just before ten, stopping briefly at Nelspruit long enough for us to return to the News Café for some smoothies and pick up a couple big boxes to send our camping gear and the odd souvenir back home.
With just a brief lunch stop we made great time and pulled into our luxurious (but expensive)digs African
Travel Centre Lodge. We thanked Jack and Richard for the past two weeks and wished them all the best.
That evening we took Becca and Chris to the Portugese Restaurant for a lovely way to top out a fantastic three weeks.
Sunday
After a relative sleep in (it was after 6am after all) we decided the cheapest way to get to the famous …markets was to hire a car. We took our complimentary transfer to the airport a day early picked up a hire car and returned to the Africa Travel Lodge to pick up the others. With the Sat Nav in control we made to the market, picking up some more paintings, souvenirs and the cheapest most delicious Asian lunch. We returned to the Lodge for a final cidar in the sun. Hulk and Eva left for the airport and we set to cleaning our tent and constructing the most well packed box I have ever seen (fingers crossed it makes it home ok!).
We opted for some takeaway for dinner enjoying the luxuries of a car and snuggled up for an evening of movies.
Monday
After breaky we set off in search of a post office
with our perfectly packed box. We joined the queue and by luck weighed our box in at 19.95kg sneaking into the cheaper sea mail bracket. We sent our paintings airmail not being able to squeeze them in the box. Mission accomplished we sat down for a well earned coffee with wifi. We filled our day wandering around the shops, called in for a birthday special fish and chips at Ocean Basket for just 10 rand (1pound) and watched 'Inception' at the cinema (once Carly returned to the desk to get them to start the movie half an hour after it was scheduled).
We filled the car up and returned it to the airport and began our epic journey back to Ireland via the UK leaving Africa after an amazing nine weeks!
Our first flight aboard Egypt Air stopping over at Cairo departed at 10pm and arrived at Cairo around 6am, following a three hour stopover we boarded for London Heathrow arriving at 12 noon . After scrapping through the 50 questions to return to the country, we navigated a couple terminals, spotting X factors Jedward on the way to our Aer Lingus flight to Cork arriving at 8pm. We collected
our hire car and made our way to Killarey B &B. A mere 26hours after we left... we skipped dinner and crashed.
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