On our way to Durban...

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Today our adventures included leaving our clothes in the closet of the hotel in Port Shepstone, where we were last night, and having to go back 120 km each way to fetch them - through a gridlocked portion of the N2 that had been diverted due to an accident and was allowed to start up again right after we had to get off . Fortunately, our things were still hanging in the closet! Thank goodness we haven’t been that forgetful very often on this trip. And we stopped at a store, got a few supplies including phone airtime, and came back to have cheese and crackers for dinner.

The landscapes have been amazing, beyond description. We decided to get a small but good digital camera, because ours has been broken since we left Bloemfontein. Which means that we’ve taken only a few pictures with the computer in all of the Eastern Cape, none of that scenery.

We continued into Durban along the coast and drove immediately to North Beach, which appears on almost every postcard of Durban. This beautiful stretch of beach makes Durban a big tourist center. After visiting about six hotels along the beach, we found a couple that were affordable and even offered us an ocean view. The room is small but clean, and we are used to small anyway. Amazingly, this place costs about the same as the hotel in poor dirty Umtata, where we had no hot water and the car alarms went off all night.

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