Blogs from South Africa, Africa - page 643

After a lovely week spent with Andrew, Ella and the kids, we headed off to visit Craig, Shantelle and Chloé on their farm, Devon Bank, near Indwe in the Eastern Cape. It was an 8½ hour drive which was uneventful until we reached the town of Aliwal North. We had just crossed the bridge into town when we had to stop as there were two gangs throwing stones at each other across the main road, some the size of ½ bricks. It was quite an intense battle and they seemed to have no regard for the vehicles trying to get through. We waited at a safe distance until hostilities calmed a little and made a run for it. We made it through safely and reported it to the police manning the roadblock on the way out ... read more

The bruised bums are beginning to recover and we've managed to get rid of the majority of the dust we collected along the way - it gets everywhere! Note to anyone intending to undertake a similar venture, don't take any white clothing with you, especially socks, ours will never be the same again! We've had a great week with Andrew & Ella, Phil has managed to get a couple of games of golf in and Laura and Ella spent the day at the Mangwanani health spa getting totally pampered. Laura deserved it after her ordeal last week. We also went to a Barnyard Theatre evening with a live band playing a rather eclectic selection of music. It's a great idea, you take along your own picnic (pizzas in our case), kick back and enjoy the evening. ... read more

YABADABADOO!!!!! Just got confirmation, we have lift off!!! Bikes are free and the boys are working on them as I type, later on we're packing and loading our "best friends to be for the next 4 weeks", and at the crack of dawn.... vroom vroom!! We're starting 3 days late, but we're racing the first few days and should be back on track with the original schedule by day 4 - may god be with us! About 1.000kms a day... (sore bottoms...) Tomorrow we head North through Namaqualand - one of the 7 flower wonders of the world, apparently it's the best season in the last decade due to the early rains, will get some good pics and hopefully will be updating the blog in the next week, aiming to at least once a week... Light ... read more

We needed to be in Rivonia by 06:30, which meant getting up at 04:30. Phil forgot to correct the time on his mobile to the local time-zone which is 1 hour ahead of the UK. This isn’t a major issue unless you’re using your phone as an alarm clock, which we were! Fortunately Ella wanted to go back to bed and knocked on our door at 05:00 to say good-bye. A short mad flap ensued which, as it turns out, was unnecessary as the mechanic joining us was 45mins late. Our bus got under way shortly before 07:30, progress was pretty slow, and we lost a piece of the bus along the way. No one knows quite how or why, but driving through the Magoobaskloof Mountains, our driver noticed an excessive amount of sparks in his ... read more

Although we didn’t leave for the bike ride until the Tuesday, events started on the Monday with the fetching of our rental bikes from Fritz Pienaar Cycles in Pretoria. Arno provided us with some fantastic bikes at a very reasonable rate, and he was extremely helpful. We had a slight drama when we got back to Andrew & Ella’s to find that we couldn’t lower Laura’s saddle far enough, a quick call to Arno and next thing we were taking a hacksaw to the saddle post - sorted! ... read more