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.
Now that you have put a map of Australia on that of South Africa Greg you can see how hard it is to supply water to such a vast area good chat on Skype catch up after Lesotho.