Blogs from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Africa - page 10

I crawled out of the diminutive door of my beehive this morning, sorry to let the experience go, but not wanting to prolong the inconvenience of the unconventional. We slowly drove out of the game reserve, rewarded by seeing a crocodile swimming with most of its head out of the water, evidence of its pulling a kill in its mouth, although we couldn’t see what. Also, Duane stopped by a seven- or eight-foot-tall termite mound created in less than a year. Not too far along the highway, we stopped at an excellent set of cooperative self-help craft stores called “Gone Rural ”. I found some brown and orange flat mats (meant to be placemats), which fulfilled my souvenir goal for this trip. And I fell into temptation over a cheerful printed infinity scarf (red, white, gold, ... read more

Umfolozi Game Reserve. Mainly Rhinos. Zululand Game Drive. We SURVIVED! Rolling Rhino Dung. We arrived on a windy, rainy afternoon at the Reserve. Dressed in Khakis and ready for the Rhinos! Yes there we were in a reserve with 900 plus Rhinos roaming around just waiting to gouge us should we make a mistake. The female Rhinos have the sharpest horns, so you can be sure that with their babies, we were going to get charged at should we show a threatening stance. Sitting high up in a Toyota type vehicle was comforting. Our first real encounter was just that! A Rhino crossed the road as we were driving by, and gave us that evil look, stopped and stared, and then in a huff moved on down the road wiggling his big fat bum. Oh the ... read more

Yesterday, we almost float away from our campsite, and thereby we missed a change to discover a great area and the last “non-safari” National Park. From today; the national parks will be different: Hello safari! Yes, finally, the safari would started. It defiantly would be the highlights of my trip. This was a child dream; a safari in Africa and it shall be coming true! I could defiantly not wait to see the first animals in the wild, especially the giraffes! I like them, due the fact they have so long necks. Too bad, I had to wait two extra days to see them, but we saw quite a lot other animals, including 4 of the big 5? Which ones? Keep on reading! We left the Amphitheatre Backpacker Lodge, a time later than we planned. The ... read more

The next section of our tour of South Africa found us centred on the now peaceful rolling grassland hills of KwaZulu-Natal in and around Dundee to follow the 'Battlefield Tour'. Initially we had a fairly long drive to Ladysmith to find out about the siege of the town, when 12000 British troops were besieged for 118 days by the Boers in 1899. The small museum was informative and presented the history very well. We travelled on to Spioenkop, a 4810ft high hill, covered with tussocky grass and large boulders, where the British forces suffered a decisive defeat to the Boers. We could easily see how the British soldiers had dug poorly positioned trenches in the dreadful terrain, which partly led to their downfall. Many monuments and graves were scattered over the summit as a grim reminder. ... read more

I departed Sandton, Johannesburg, as I had arrived: on the airport express service. The train breezed eastwards through suburbs, industry and intervening golf courses to Oliver Tambo International. I disembarked and scurried down the escalator to a help desk. "Where is the domestic terminal?" I asked of a young woman behind the desk. She pointed back upstairs in the direction I had seen various other people from the train heading. Feeling a bit foolish I took another escalator up to the next floor and found the SAA desk. I skirted the self check-in which I still find intimidating and joined a queue. It was being held up by a family who were taking advantage of the free cling-wrap service or whatever they call it, whereby your bags are wrapped in layer after layer of cling-film, allegedly ... read more