Blogs from South Africa, Africa - page 2

We woke up to find the hills bathed in sunshine, something we’d not seen in 2 ½ days. Shame we were leaving….we drove for miles down the dirt road past the other ranches, the Drakensberg and the intensely green trees and the golden brown grass bathed in that early morning light before heat haze builds up. All the colours stood stark against each other. Things look so different in the sunshine. Dodging the potholes as best we could and steering around the craters, we took the N3 motorway north, confusion reigning at one point when Google maps stopped working, but we were soon back on our route. Signposting in SA is often nonexistent, and we never found a useful map, so as back up Sara had for each journey printed out detailed instructions as back up. ... read more

What a great day! The sun was shining and Sara felt better after a day of lying in bed ill. We started the day at Monkeyland, which sounds tacky but is in fact a huge reserve housing monkeys rescued from zoos and private owners worldwide. A ranger took us on a guided walk, with the moneys often running up to us. The most numerous were the ring tailed lemurs, so cute with their long ringed tails and big yellow eyes. Several were nursing tiny, very new babies. There was a female gibbon, separated from two newer gibbons that were in a cage for new arrivals, so they can get to know the other residents of the reserve before mixing. They were calling to each other making an astonishing racket. The guide told us the howler monkeys ... read more

It was pouring with rain again when we left Boschendal, and the weather only got worse as we hit the N1 and visibility was maybe 50 yards. We opted to pay the toll and take the motorway route through the Huguenot tunnel which is nearly 3 miles long. It saves 11 miles of twisting roads through the old pass – money well spent on a day like this! The views would have been spectacular but we wouldn't be seeing them. Once through the tunnel the rain eased off a bit, so we could see we were driving what would indeed have been a very scenic route on a clear day. We tried to stop in Worcester to visit an open air museum, but Google Maps had other ideas, taking us through a couple of industrial estates ... read more

We kicked off with a visit to the aquarium, alarmed to see – and more significantly hear – a school party of about 60 primary school boys making an unholy racket. Fortunately we managed to dodge them most of the way round. The first exhibit was a frenzied shoal of clownfish straight out of Finding Nemo. We saw tiny translucent jellyfish and miniature pale pink strawberry corals, then moved on to the big tanks with the sharks and a very cute rescued turtle. He had balance problems and was floating upside down, so the staff had attached a ballast weight to the top of his shell to keep him the right way up. But the highlight of the trip was the penguin enclosure. By chance we arrived just as three African penguins were brought out for ... read more

Dear All Greetings, on this my final entry on my amazing journey through South Africa in the summer of 2023. It really was an epic trip, definitely one of the best ones up there alongside recent trips to Japan, Scandinavia and the Galapagos Islands, and I've also been enjoying very much writing up these travel blog entries, re-living all those adventures again! My final few days were spent in and around the country's powerhouse central state of Gauteng, in the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, with a total cumulative population of a staggering 14 million people! It felt quite something to finally be in the beating heart of South Africa after travelling through its regions for so long, almost like an exciting culmination and climax of a highly eventful journey, and my time there certainly did ... read more