Continued.....

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Ok, so, have been lacking a bit on the whole travel blog updating thing so I have 8 glorious weeks to now write about!
Right, so I left off at the 5 star lodge-as I said it was so beautiful, and right next to the chimpanzee sanctuary!! They had about 12 chimps there when we visited, including 4 gorgeous babies, most of whom had been rescued from awful conditions as tourist attractions. One was even an addicted smoker and alcoholic. Luckily Bethan and I nabbed ourselves a private tour as we did not receive our wake up call for the group tour. After a lovely lunch we then began out looong journey back to Johannesburg (approx. 8 hours drive).
We stayed in J'Burg for a few more days following that, generally just chilling by the pool, before deciding that it was finally time to move on.
We awoke at 5:30 on departure day, ready to leave at 6:30. Needless to say, after we'd said our goodbyes and settled ourselves on the bus we slept for a good few hours. We got a nice surprise when one of the girls we met in Kruger climbed aboard (Alex) and we realised we would all be in Durban in a couple of days time. We arranged to meet up before she left the bus in the Drakensburg mountains. This was when we suddenly realised that we hadn't actually booked anywhere to stay the night. We had heard good things about the Happy Hippo and were hoping to stay there, but unfortunately they were fully booked for the night. As were the next two hostels we tried. As we began to get desperate we finally got lucky with Nomads, and we consoled ourselves that even though it was chucking it down, at least we had somewhere to go. Our joy was short lived when we walked in and felt the air of gloom surrounding the entire place. We discovered that this was due to the fact that everyone there had a cold. To be fair I am sure that it is a lovely place when the sun is shining etc. but we decided to escape the dark and germs and booked ourselves into the Happy Hippo the following night.
That place could not have been more different! Bright, clean, only 4 in a dorm rather than 8, and in my opinion, just generally alot nicer. It was also situated in a rather good place-right next door to UShaka Marine world which consists of the largest aquarium in Southern Africa, a big waterpark and a huge shopping complex in between!! Pretty handy considering it rained the entire 5 days we stayed there hoping that the sun would shine for just one day. Alas it was not to be, and we ended up spending far too much money buying 'necessities' such as handbags and bracelets. The aquarium was amazing and when we finally met up with Alex - after a slight misunderstanding with taxi driver who took her the other side of town to Hippo Hide - we decided to show her the wonders of the underwater world.

For my photos of Ushaka and Durban please follow this link -



After 5 days when we realised that the weather was not going to get any better and I was spending far too much money on KFC's mash and gravy, we thought it time to move on again....

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