A Tale of Two Cities

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Geo: -33.916, 18.4222

At 5:00am, Kjell knocked at our cottage door and announced we had 30 minutes until we left for a sunrise game drive. The sky was again cloudless and it was already quite warm, even before the sun rose. We spent much of this morning drive tracking Cape Buffalo, but were unsuccessful. We did see a huge variety, however, of gazelle and antelopes and tons of zebra. Though we had a short stop for coffee and snacks shortly after sunrise, we still had a full breakfast waiting for us at the lodge after the three-and-a-half-hour game drive.

Shortly before noon we were loaded up and driven back to the Olifants Gate to meet our shuttle back to Johannesburg. The return drive seemed much longer, and that was probably due to the fact that we knew we still had a two-hour flight ahead of us to reach Cape Town. The airport was quite chaotic when we arrived, as it was a Sunday night at the end of a four-day weekend for the South Africans. Though were are literally hourly flights between Johannesburg and Capetown, on at least three different airlines, our flight was still completely sold out and we had no luck in getting on an earlier flight. We used the extra couple of hours to have a nice dinner at the airport, only to then get served another dinner on the flight itself.

We didn't land in Cape Town until nearly 10:30pm, and we'd been up since at least 5:00am, so we were all exhausted. The friends with whom we were traveling had flown into Cape Town the previous morning and were staying with family. In the meantime, we were to pick up our car for the week -- a massive Mercedes van -- and get to our hotel in downtown Cape Town. Given my level of exhaustion, the size of the van, and driving a stick shift on the wrong side of the road in an unfamiliar city in the dark, it was an "interesting" drive to the hotel. I'd driven on the right side several times before, but this was the first manual I'd driven on that side in a while, so that coupled with the size of the van took a little adjustment. Still, aside from a small scare that our car was too tall for the hotel parking garage, we made it without a problem and were collapsed into our beds shortly before midnight.

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