Pretoria

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It was a morning of sad goodbyes... Fiona and I, along with all the other people leaving the tour, got up early to wave off the truck full of new travellers, and a couple of our friends who were staying on the truck, as it headed off on its 3 weeks trip to Cape Town. After breakfast, everyone else started to leave to go to the airport for their flights home/onwards. Fiona and I hadn't quite worked out how we were getting to Pretoria, so we figured the best way was to take the free lift to the airport, which was just a few minutes away, and get a bus from there... Bad idea - we hadn't realised that on a Sunday, the buses were few and far between, and the ones that ran were very expensive... Luckily the owner of the hotel who had driven us to the airport haggled us a taxi for pretty cheap, so we jumped in that. As we were approaching Pretoria, we realised that we didn't have the full address for our hostel! Our taxi driver tried phoning the hostel, only to discover that we had written down the wrong phone number :-S We eventually got hold of the right number, found the right address, and somehow ended up outside the correct building!

The hostel was situated on a 'normal' residential street. Normal for Pretoria anyway... Every house on the street was surrounded by 6 foot high walls topped with lethal looking barbed wire, signs saying that the property was protected by a 24h armed response unit, and quite a lot of the houses had large snarling dogs at the gates... Not very homely! Our hostel looked the same. Although once you got inside, you realised it was actually quite nice, and the large snarling dog was infact a wee cuty fluffy white thing.

After dumping our 20 bags (I'm not quite sure how we managed to get all our stuff into 2 bags each on the flight from Scotland) in our room, we went for a quick wander to get some food before going to bed - at 7pm! We were shattered from a month of being on the go...

The following day we planned to have a wander about Pretoria, but we ended up spending all day in the shopping mall and then in an internet cafe - catching up on 4 weeks without either! We did finally manage to see the Union Buildings - South Africa's Parliament, and apparently "the most recognised building in South Africa". We didn't recognise it.

That evening we had a welcome meeting with the other volunteers that were starting placements in the area. Other people were heading off to places with lion and tiger cubs, but by the sounds of it, they were going to have an easy time... Their working days were 10-4, whereas we found out we'd be working 7-5 at the monkey foundation! Ouch! It's lucky that Fiona and I were so used to getting up at 5am - 7am sounded like a lie in ;-)

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