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Published: February 7th 2010
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Cape Town to Orange River
Sunday 31st Jan All the group is assembled now and we head off out of
Cape Town.
There are 23 of us all together. We are a mixture of ages and nationalities - We have Brits, Australians, Swiss, Dutch, Koreans, French, American, Mexican and two of the crew are Kenyan. I’m going to struggle to learn everyone’s name especially as there aren’t too many bog-standard English names. We are travelling in one of those trucks converted to an overland vehicle that you see quite a lot of in Africa and we’re going to be camping - I’m sure I decided at some point that it was time to start growing old gracefully and to start travelling in a bit more comfort!
We head out of
Cape Town towards
Cedarburg. The landscape seems drier than I expected it to be, but it is the end of summer here and there will probably be some rain in the next few weeks.
The roads are good so far and we make great progress. We’re not too far out of Cape Town when we begin to see baboons on the rock faces
at the side of the road and we hastily close the windows a bit.
Les Joyeux Temps De La Vendange We arrive at our campsite,
Highlanders near
Trewal at about 2 p.m. This is in a wine area and we arrive during the “Vendange” so everything is quite busy at the moment. The farm is part of a co-operative which produces a range of wines and in the afternoon we are treated to a wine-tasting session. It is a bit of a “random” experience, though, to be at a wine-tasting in Africa hosted by a man who calls himself “Sparky” and wears a kilt!
Monday 1st February Much of Monday is spent travelling up to our campsite, the
Fiddlers Creek, on the
Orange River, the border with
Namibia. We make one stop, at the town of
Springbok, to pick up supplies. This is a fairly small town but we are able to get all the supplies we need. Doug goes off to buy a roll of toilet paper but only manages to come back with a bumper family pack of 10 rolls - hopefully that should be enough to last him for
the rest of the trip! One thing I do notice is that this is one of the few African towns I’ve been to where I can walk down the street without being hassled.
Mad Dogs and Underwear We reach our campsite on the
Orange River in the late afternoon with enough light to get everything set up and to go for a swim in the river. The campsites so far have had much better facilities than I expected with flushing toilets, hot showers and even an electrical point to charge up our cameras and phones from.
This campsite has two dogs which befriend us. One is a Staffordshire Bull {
I think all Staffies are insane. My father used to have a couple of Staffies and this one behaves in exactly the same way that they did} and the second is a Labrador. Some of our group decide to go for a swim in the river after an evening in the bar. While they are in the river the dog stole some of their underwear - I suspect the bar owner has trained it to do that!!
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