South Africa | No 1 Adventurers travel blog

Back where it all began

We had planned to spend our last night in the tent at Glentana. We stayed at a nice campground there last time, just set back from the beach, lots of grass, good amenities. But when we left the Mountain Zebra National Park it rained for most of the trip and while we don’t really mind camping in the rain, packing up a wet tent is horrible, especially when we need it to be completely dry for the trip home. So we re-thought that idea and booked a hotel room in Mossel Bay, about 400kms east of Cape Town. We had dinner at Cafe Gannet and I had the seafood stew, a true bargain at 220 rand – about AUD$24. It had prawns, fish, mussels, calamari and half a crayfish! I have no idea how much it would cost at home – at least double, and probably a lot more. It was delicious.

We made a bit of a detour on the way back to Cape Town, to Cape Agulhas, southern-most point of Africa, and the point where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. It had rained on and off during the day, but we were lucky that it stayed dry while we hopped out of the car, read the plaque and took photos. After the mayhem of cars, buses and people at The Cape of Good Hope earlier in the year, we were very surprised that there were only a few people at Agulhas, and no tour buses.

And then the drive on the N2 back to Cape Town. It must have rained a lot recently – a couple of rivers and creeks had broken their banks, dams were looking full, water on flat low-lying areas. The rural part of the drive was just endless rolling green and yellow (canola) hills, and the livestock looked good. Lots of heavily pregnant cows, and tiny white lambs. Even though it’s now Spring, there’s not much evidence around – we passed orchards where the trees still looked dormant, no blossoms or any hint of green yet.

We’ve done the big cull of stuff we aren’t taking home – 3 quilts, a set of fleece sheets, folding chairs, a spade, tent pegs, SA extension cord, a black denim skirt that I bought when I realised I didn’t have enough summer clothes (what on earth was I thinking – I hardly ever wear skirts!), the food we didn’t get around to eating and various other bits and pieces. Our Airbnb host has offered to take it all to an op shop for us.

Greg took the 4WD to be cleaned this morning and we have returned it and picked up another car that we’ll take back to the airport tomorrow. It was easier and cheaper to do that than get a taxi back to where we’re staying today, and then another taxi to the airport tomorrow morning.

So that’s it … another grand adventure almost over. Thanks for travelling with us. Sorry for the lack of musical accompaniment to this trip – internet access was mostly just too slow to be able to do more than write posts and add photos.

Our friend Wayne Manna is a keen musicologist and he made the following suggestion for our trip’s theme song. Thanks Wayne!

“The Great Heart” by Johnny Clegg. He is a British-born muso (and I think an anthropologist) living in South African who incorporates a lot of African themes into his music and has recorded heavily with South African musicians.”

Youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlpKDYJRzMk

A selfie at the southern most point in Africa

In case you can't read the plaque behind — In case you can’t read the plaque behind

While I waited for the car to be cleaned - these are everywhere in South Africa — While I waited for the car to be cleaned – these are everywhere in South Africa

Security at the AirBnB house we are staying at (hope there is no fire!) This is the steel security door in front of the Front door

One of the windows (all the windows have internal steel grills)

Mountain Zebra National Park

We really did try hard to camp in Lesotho, but in our hunt for a flat, level spot to pitch the tent on, we realised that there’s probably almost no such thing in the whole country. It’s all above 1000 metres, and most of it is either mountainous, rocky and usually both. We have a 4WD guide book that has a self-guided driving tour through Lesotho, which recommends campsites and alternatives, but we were unexcited by their camping suggestions, so we headed straight to Maseru. Lesotho’s capital has a population of just under 250,000 .. so large enough to be a decent-sized city, but it still has constant reminders that we’re in Africa – cows and goats roaming around suburban streets, crazy traffic and even crazier pedestrians, invisible road markings because they haven’t been painted in at least 20 years.

We booked a room at a ‘Guest House’ on booking.com, but it all got a bit confusing. We turned up at the Trinity Guest House, conveniently located close to the SA/LS border, only to discover that there are 2 guest houses of the same name, and the one we had booked was 12 kms away. Then when we got there, the receptionist claimed to have no knowledge of our booking. Luckily there was a vacancy, driving in the dark here is … challenging.

Crossing back in to South Africa the next morning was the usual chaos. We’ve done quite a few African border crossings now, and the only thing they all have in common is that they are all different. Some need slips of paper stamped by several different departments, a couple demand health checks, some want all the paperwork for the car, and some just scan our passports and send us on our way.

We spent a night at the Onze Rust campground at Colesberg. We stayed there on our way to Cape Town last time.

We’ve just spent a couple of days camping in the Mountain Zebra National Park, about 1000kms north east of Cape Town. Went for a drive yesterday and saw lots of mountain zebras (they only have black stripes, no grey ones like plains zebras) and heaps of different species of antelopes. This morning it’s very misty and we wouldn’t see much, so we picked the right days to stay. Heading back to Cape Town today and have booked an Airbnb place for our last couple of nights.

The chaos of cars and trucks at the Lesotho/South Africa border crossing

A truck full of ....Pidgeons — A truck full of ….Pigeons

Everything closed up after another monkey stole a bannana — Everything closed up after another monkey stole a banana at Mountain Zebra Park

Sun setting over the rest camp at Mountain Zebra Park

Windmill pump, a common site over the Karoo just like they are in Outback Australia

Heading to Lesotho

We left Jo’burg on Saturday to drive east along the N2 freeway tollroad towards Durban. One of the closest towns to the Sani Pass is Himeville, which is about 650kms from Jo’burg, so we split the drive into 2 days, planning on staying overnight at Harrismith. There’s one campground there, but it’s very close to the N2, set behind a service station complex with at least 12 fast food choices, cafes, a bus station, and loads of parking. We thought it might be a bit noisy, so decided to head out of town a bit to a campground within the Sterkfontein Dam and Nature Reserve. Much better choice.

We were the only ones in the campground, but there were other campers near the edge of the lake. Finding a cleanish site without too much horse poo on it was a bit tricky, but we did find one, and learnt later that the ‘horse poo’ was actually zebra poo! How exotic! Sadly we didn’t see any zebras.

Something that has really puzzled me about South African campgrounds is that they always have at least as many bathtub cubicles as shower cubicles. This one had 8 baths, 3 showers and a disabled shower cubicle with a broken shower head … so that would actually be a disabled disabled shower cubicle ….HA! Yes, I think I’m hilarious, you may beg to differ.

Last time we were in South Africa, we listed some of the things we saw people selling by the side of the road. We saw the funniest one so far in Harrismith … a guy selling whips! Obviously a rural area, unless he was including a free copy of ’50 Shades of Grey’ with every whip he sold.

Last night we stayed in an Airbnb cottage in Himeville, and we’re very glad we did that rather than camp. Huge electrical storm and heaps of rain in the early evening, not typical weather for this time of the year according to our host. This morning it’s fine and clear, so hopefully the drive through Sani Pass will be okay. I’ll leave it to Greg to add some photos.

See you in a few days, we won’t have internet access while we’re in Lesotho.

Finding room for the solar panels in between the Zebra poo

Camped at Sterkfontein Dam. Ground is dry because it only rains in summer and it is winter. Trees are bare because its winter.

Shopping at Pick n Pay Supermarket Harrismith

Its only a bit broken...Harrismith — Its only a bit broken…Harrismith

Back in Johannesburg

We hadn’t planned on coming back to ‘Jozi’, but when our plans to spend time in Botswana changed, we decided to come back here then head east to Lesotho. This time we’re staying in the ‘leafy northern suburbs’, rather than in trendy downtown. We booked a cottage on Airbnb and it’s been lovely. Our host lives in the main house on the same property, which you can see here. She originally owned the house next door and subdivided the block a few years ago. Her current property used to be the tennis court of her old house.

Seems like that’s a common thing to do around here – driving around we noticed a lot of house numbers with ‘a’ or ‘b’, next to the original house number. Security around here is pretty full-on. These must originally have been enormous blocks – the place we’re staying at is huge!

We haven’t really done much in Jozi this time, we’re really just using it as a rest stop – we went to Sandton City Shopping Centre yesterday to resupply and have lunch. They claim it’s the biggest shopping centre in the southern hemisphere and it’s full of up-market shops, mostly clothing stores. We did find a nice place to have lunch – Walnut Grove.

Now we’re heading east. Probably won’t have any internet access in Lesotho, but we’ll let you know what it’s like when we get back to South Africa.

Just for perspective here is the size of Australia versus Africa

Narrow high windows on the flat we stayed in that are difficult to climb into

One end of the road is blocked off with an electric fence. Next door are two properties both with their own security booths — One end of the road we stayed in is blocked off with an electric fence. Next door are two properties both with their own security offices with security guards.

The other end of the road with a security gate, the only way to get in

Rocks on the front of the neighboring house making it hard to even get near the front wall

The streets are alive with the sound of generators

We have been in South Africa for 3 days but have suffered load-shedding 4 times already. South Africa is suffering load-shedding because it cannot generate enough electricity, so suburbs have power cut off for two hour blocks. The first night we were here the power went of for 2 hours from 6pm to 8pm, but we were zoned out from jet-lag so it didn’t matter.

Friday night getting ready to cook dinner, and bang the power goes off for another two hours. Then Saturday morning we get up early because we are collecting our 4WD, we leave the apartment at 8am and bang the power is off again. On the way north we stop at a supermarket to get more supplies, but we knew driving through town that the power was off, as the traffic lights were all out. The supermarket has a huge generator screaming outside, and inside is half -dark with only some of the lights operating. This is South Africa 2015, but they are building new power stations and it will all be fixed – in 2020!

UPDATE: As I wrote this post I wondered why someone was running a generator in a powered Caravan Park, until I realised – off course the power is off- and we are load-shedding again!

Camped at the Vanrhynsdorp caravan park.

Khayelitsha Township

Birthday lunch

No, it’s not my birthday, or Greg’s birthday. I spent my birthday driving part of the way from Jo’burg to Cape Town the last time we were here. For my birthday, Greg had tried to book us into The Test Kitchen in Cape Town, but it is booked out months in advance. As soon as we knew we were coming back, Greg emailed to make a booking and got us in. Which was pretty lucky as at about the same time as he emailed, The Test Kitchen made it to number 28 in the Top 50 Restaurants in the world. It’s also regarded as the best restaurant in Africa. It is now booked out until March next year.

We had lunch there yesterday and it was superb. Beautiful setting, in part of an old biscuit mill in Woodstock. The restaurant has an open kitchen and we were able to watch the 15 or so chefs at work. We sat near the dessert chefs who were baking micron-thin sheets of pastry and doing various other components of the 2 desserts, then later in service all the action was right there as 4 of them got busy plating up.

We decided to have the 7-course tasting menu and even though it sounds like a lot of food, it was ‘just right’ and we were hungry again by dinner time. It was all delicious, beautifully presented and very artistic with lots of different parts to each dish – foams, barks, crumbs, sauces. Greg took a photo of the menu, but I don’t think the resolution is high enough to be able to read. I didn’t make notes because each dish was very complicated and I wanted to just enjoy it all. You can read more about the restaurant and the food here . The service was excellent, the waitstaff knew all about every dish they served. I had a glass of wine, Greg stuck with water. The whole thing cost about the same as a not-very-fancy restaurant meal at home.

And then we went and bought a small mountain of food and other ‘essentials’ to go with the 56kg of camping gear we brought with us and came back to the apartment to cook the lasagne we’d bought at Woolworths the day before. Woolworths here is like David Jones at home. And to complicate things just a little bit more, David Jones at home is owned by Woolworths here.

the tasting menu (click for a larger version)

Cape Town

36 hours after leaving home, we arrived in Cape Town. When they invent a faster way of moving from one place to another without all the waiting around at airports, I’ll be the first in line to use it. We had quite a long wait at Changi Airport, so we made good use of the time by getting a room in the transit hotel for 6 hours and catching up on some sleep. The plane stopped in Jo’burg before going on to Cape Town, and because of some technical problem, we were delayed for about an hour while it got sorted out.

There was a little boy sitting in the row behind us and he was pretty horrible for most of the flight from Singapore …. until he fell asleep 10 minutes before we landed in Cape Town. Excellent.

We’re staying in an apartment right in the city, in an old Art Deco building that was originally the offices for the South African Mutual Life Assurance Company. We’re on the 5th floor

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/4813477?guests=2&s=jBtx

The weather is about the same a home – around 16 and fine today, with showers predicted for tomorrow. Table Mountain was shrouded in cloud, and it was quite windy when we went walking in the city. We’re really trying hard not to go to sleep too early, although Greg has snuck up to the bedroom and it’s a bit quiet … I’d better go and make sure he’s still awake!

the lifts in the South African Mutual Life Assurance Company still have the operators seats

Back to the other SA

We had such a great time travelling in South Africa earlier in the year that we decided to go back and see some more. This time we’re hiring a 4WD, so we can get to more places, although you may recall that we did take the ‘road less travelled’ a few times on our last trip.

We’re starting and finishing in Cape Town, and the basic plan is to drive north to Namibia, hopefully as far north as the Angola border, then head east to Botswana and see more of The Beautiful Country, then back to Cape Town. Alexander McCall Smith fans will note that we have given him a nod in the title of this blog.

Okay, plane’s boarding, gotta go xx