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Durban FanFest
Opening game of the world cup. After a week in Pietermaritzburg we were excited to finally get moving and see more of South Africa, driving to Durban in Kam’s aunty’s car. The sound of the vuvuzelas was calling us. Staying in a nice hotel with ocean views, we enjoyed a few nice days in Durban soaking up the exciting world cup atmosphere with some friends from Australia, Huy and Cherie, getting down for some serious waterslide action at uShaka marine world and watching the Aussies get thrashed by ze Germans. Durban was the first place on our trip where we encountered some of the rougher elements present in South Africa. These rough elements, however, came in the form of some obnoxious Australian fans sitting next to us in the stadium. As it was, downtown Durban was very safe due to the heightened security presence. Even at night we felt quite comfortable walking around, the main strip that is. You only had to wonder a few blocks in the wrong direction and you got a bit of a sense of what Durban is like the rest of the year. All in all, our time in Durban felt more like a seaside holiday than part of a backpacking trip,
and Kam finally got to enjoy her much-beloved ‘bunny chow’, curry served inside a hollowed bread loaf.
From Durban we headed up to the picturesque Drakensberg mountains for a spot of hiking. After a day of chasing Kamini up and down some rather steep paths, we had planned on spending the night camping at nearby Spioenkop wildlife reserve. We’d gotten the tip from a couple of friendly locals in a pub near Pietermaritzbug the evening before, who had told us that we could expect to be woken up by giraffes wandering through our campsite. In spite of the weather forecast for a cold, rainy night and the recommendations of the local tourist office to find ourselves somewhat warmer and drier accommodation we decided to go ahead with our plan. Driving down from the mountains in the late afternoon, we knew we had to enter the park before 6pm. We reached Winterton, a nearby town, at around 5pm as it started getting dark. Temperatures were still quite mild at this point. (Kam: “Mild temperatures! Are you kidding? I was freezing. We went to the first pub with a fireplace in it.”) Knowing that it should only take us around 15
minutes to get to the park, we decided that we still had enough time to get a couple of toasted sandwiches and a hot cup of tea for Kam (beer for me) at the local pub. Of course the sandwiches took longer than expected and we found ourselves at 10 to 6 racing to the park in the dark. The security guard was clearly surprised to see us, so surprised in fact that he didn’t charge us for entering the park and forgetting to tell us that we shouldn’t really be driving through the park at night-time at all, as several signs clearly indicated. Driving carefully along a rough dirt road, hoping not to have a flat and even more so hoping not to hit any of the park’s furry residents, Kam started questioning the wisdom of what we were doing. Luckily we made it to the campground safely and the only animal we saw that night was a buck eating grass on our chosen campsite. Of course it didn’t wait around to get hit and so went about setting up camp. It was around this time that we discovered my torch was broken. But seeing as we had the
car’s headlights this didn’t concern Kam as much as the sound of the howling hyenas in the near distance. Unfortunately we didn’t actually see any of them. Instead we were treated to one of the coldest nights of the month, waking up to frost and even a few tiny icicles covering the tent. Oh well, at least it showed that our gear was up to cooler conditions and would hopefully see us through the rest of our African trip. And we weren’t the only ones to be camping. A big group of game hunters were camped nearby. These guys weren’t here to kill the animals however, but to capture and move some of the animals to larger reserves in order to control the numbers at Spioenkop. We waited for the sun to come out, packed up camp and as we did so finally caught clear sight of our first African wildlife, a couple of giraffes enjoying breakfast, only a few hundred metres from our campsite! We quickly finished packing up and went about exploring the rest of the park. Being a relatively small reserve, there were none of the bigger scarier animals, which allowed us to camp there in the
first place, but we were plenty excited to be seeing zebras, elands and other springbok type animals. It was a great taste of things to come.
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Hair
Hi Kamini, now I remember what I wanted to ask every time when talking to Florian. Your hair has grown considerably and it looks great. Love to you two. Me PS: Love the photos