Monday, 2 July 2012

Durban to Nelspruit 27th June


Today the plan was to start on the 6/7hour journey towards Kruger Park so we could start early the next day with spotting animals etc. So we were heading to a hotel in Nelspruit, approximately 1hour from the park gate and around about 7hours from where we were in Durban.

We had a lovely 5am start and we were both actually really awake and excited! Went into the living room and was greeted with an AMAZING view of the sunrise over the Indian Ocean. So we stood taking photos and admiring for a while before making some breakfast!

Eventually (after forgetting a few things :S) we headed to Nelsprite, it was mainly up the motorway so not much to see. However we did go through a town called Amsterdam! Nothing like the city we know though…. We stopped off at Peit Reitief for lunch then back on the road again….
We had a hire car from the airport, however it kept cutting out constantly :S we decided to ring the company to get a replacement. The only problem was it was waiting in Nelsprite still about 4hrs away… We saw a fair bit of the country that was good. Taking in the scenery etc.

We finally reached Nelspruit about 5:30pm!! First stop…. The bottle shop! Once stocked up on  2 crates of beer, 1 crate of cider and 4 bottles of wine! (bear in mind we are in the Kruger for 3 nights….) we decided to look for the airport to pick up our replacement car……
Well what an adventure that turned out to be! Soon after we left the bottle shop it was pitch black! And south African motorways don’t believe in lights or lots of signposts so we had to depend on the headlights last minute to find where we were going. After being ¾ of the way there, Johnny is convinced we are going the wrong way so in an attempt to turn around we end up on the hard shoulder of the opposite side of the road, facing the wrong way!! We eventually turned round and headed back to where we came from… after various times of turning round we ended up back on the original road and finally made it to the airport where we unloaded and got a new car..

Next challenge was to find dinner. Which we found in the form of pizza and chips from a random take away shop somewhere in Nelspruit.
Our final challenge of the night was to find the hotel.. this wasn’t so hard and we made it there absolutely fine however.. when we got there we didn’t know the code to get into the gates and so we then headed to the nearby garage to get phone credit and ring them to let us in… we got in… and started to find reception. The first building we came across, Jonny jumped out and tried to check us in. Only to find that the door he was banging on, wasn’t reception but some random actually staying at the lodge too :s hahaha

That’s the lodge we stayed in…
We soon found reception, unloaded and went straight to sleep as we had another early start the next day…. 

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