We’re staying at Cape Vidal campground, which is about 35kms north of the park entrance near St Lucia. This reserve isn’t part of the SA National Parks group, so our Wild Card doesn’t cover it and we paid an entrance fee in addition to the exhorbitant campground site fees. The entrance fee was okay, but at $55 per night for a powered site, this is the most we have ever paid to pitch a tent. It makes what we paid in Norway in 2013, and at Cradle Mountain, Tassie at Easter last year look reasonable!

The campground is fine, but nothing special – we paid less than 1/3 the night we pitched the tent on the deck in the forest and THAT was special. This one has sandy sites, unimaginative allocation system where we just got the next empty site in the row, when there are other more secluded sites that we’d prefer. Then the next people to come along got the site next to us, and so on.

The monkeys are here in abundance, but none have really bothered us yet. We sat and cooked in the tent last night, which was a good thing in more ways than one as we realised this morning that we’re back in a malarial zone. But just now I got up and walked 5 paces to put something in the car, and in that time a monkey came and sat on the laptop to check out if we had any food on the table worth stealing. They are swarming all over our next door neighbour’s tent and stuff, but he hasn’t left anything interesting out either.

So now we’re at the ‘what was I thinking’ stage of the trip. Happens every time – we end up with a strange collection of food that don’t go well together, and I don’t remember why I bought them in the first place. It’s not too bad though, we don’t have a lot left, apart from most of a kilo of ‘cake flour’. Every supermarket here sells 2 kinds of plain flour – cake flour and bread flour. Each has different protein levels, depending on what you want to use it for. I guess cake flour is the same as our plain flour.

Tomorrow is our last day, we fly out around midday on Saturday. We’ll pack up what we’re taking home, throw out and give away what we’re not, and drive the 600kms to Joburg. This afternoon we’ll drive around part of the reserve and hopefully see some wildlife

We went for a drive in the park yesterday afternoon and saw lots of wildlife, including a meercat. We hadn’t seen any meercats before. And just as we’d decided we’d seen enough and were heading back to camp, we found the most beautiful young mother elephant and her calf, eating grass close to the road. We spent ages just watching the 2 of them eat, pulling up a few blades of grass at a time with their trunks. Their trunks are incredible instruments – capable of such fine actions, but also of smelling and detecting things. Their eyesight is very poor.

Close to the park’s office complex is a viewing deck overlooking a waterhole where elephants go to drink. It’s floodlit at night, which doesn’t seem to bother the elephants at all. We walked to it after dinner last night and there was one big fella having a drink.

We drove through Adelaide in Eastern Cape today. As far as we know, apart from our hometown, it’s the only other Adelaide in the world, so we just had to go there. Lots of ‘Welcome to Adelaide’ signs, it has a hospital, a large town square and a museum in an old stately home from the 1860s that looks like it should be on a tobcco plantation in Louisiana, USA. Unfortunately the museum was closed. Not sure what the population is, a couple of thousand perhaps. Like its South Australian namesake, there seemed to be a lot of churches!

We’re staying at a campground just east of East London and we’re the only campers here, although Greg went to try and have a look at the beach (no luck, there’s an electric fence in the way) and one cabin is also occupied. Bit of a shame as the campground has a lovely pool and other facilities, but the road here from the freeway is appalling – major road works on the access road, then a rutted unsealed track that most caravan owners probably wouldn’t like to drive on. Just up the road a bit is a nice sealed section, with brick walls and footpaths on both sides of the road. Strange thing is that behind the brick walls is just an overgrown mess. Like a developer got as far as a decent road and a bit of infrastructure, then ran out of money.

Greg had read about the Forest Timber Camping Decks in the Knysna Forest on the National Parks website, but there wasn’t a lot of info about them, and no review on Trip Advisor, so it was all a bit mysterious until we actually got there. There are 10 decks, including one with disabled access and 4 with permanent tents set up. Apart from us, only one other deck was occupied. Great for us as we don’t have a strong herding instinct, but a shame that such beautifully constructed decks with excellent facilities aren’t being utilised.

The decks were constructed in 2007, and each deck has space for a reasonable sized tent (ours is a 4-person with large vestibules front and back), plus room for chairs, table and gear. There is a high bench with shelving underneath and a couple of rustic bar stools, a braai, power and lights. As we couldn’t use tent pegs to anchor the tent, Greg got very inventive with tying guy ropes to the slats of the floor and to the railing around the deck. We lit the braai and cooked braaiwors, a long sausage curled into a circle, potatoes and zucchini. My timing was a bit off with the potatoes- I should have par-boiled them first – but we left them in the coals after we’d had dinner, then fried them for breakfast.

It still really surprises us how well-equipped most campsites in South Africa are. Just about every site is powered, with a water tap either at the site or close by. Bathrooms all have hot & cold water, showers and often a bathtub, plus facilities for washing dishes and clothes. Larger parks also have a camp kitchen, with sinks, hotplates and a boiling water dispenser. Compared with campgrounds we’ve stayed at at home, these are excellent. And cheap. The Camping Deck cost us less than $20 for the night.

We kept on driving east, stopping in at Port Elizabeth for some supplies and lunch. PE, or ‘The Bay’, is one of the largest cities in South Africa, with a population of just under 250,000, over 50% of them white. It’s a very large shipping port. East London, which is about 250kms further east, is the largest city in Eastern Cape. From those names, you can guess that the British were the ones who settled this area … in the early 1800s.
About 40kms east of PE is a little seaside village that we just HAD to visit … Colchester. Not much like its British namesake, just a service station and some houses tucked in behind a wall of high sand dunes. Greg’s dad is from the original Colchester in Essex, and Greg and his family lived there for a few years in the early 1960s. There is also a town called Adelaide in Eastern Cape, a couple of hundred kms north of where we are now. We’ll head there after we leave the Addo Elephant National Park tomorrow to see what’s there.

So we’re back in wildlife-spotting mode. Drove into Addo yesterday afternoon, through the southern gate near Colchester. We booked 2 nights at the Main Camp, which is at the northern edge of the park, a 50km drive. We took a few side-roads and saw lots of wildlife, so I’ll resurrect the Wildlife Tally again

Wildlife tally for Thursday 19 Feb

antelopey thingies – common duiker, kudu, red hartebeest. Different species to the ones we saw all the time in Kruger, which were mostly springbok and impala
zebras
elephant
ostrich
warthogs, so many warthogs!
leopard tortoise

New to the list – flightless dung beetles & black -headed herons

This park is so different to Kruger …. of course! Much milder climate, quite mountainous and it’s mostly coastal scrub with just a few tall trees. There is a waterhole near the main camp’s office/restaurant/shop complex with a viewing platform, and a large ‘grandmother group’ of elephants visited this morning.

elephants
giraffes
antelopey thingies – impala
buffalo
hippo
warthogs
zebras
white rhinos
blue wildebeest
tortoise
storks
vultures
New to our list today – a rock monitor who lives around our campsite. A very good reason to take a torch and wear thongs or sandals when venturing away from the tent in the dark.

We took a short drive out to Mlondozi, a popular picnic spot a bit north of Lower Sabie. Up on a hill, it overlooks a river and the Lebombo Mountains, which mark the border with Mozambique. So that’s probably as close as we’ll get to Moz. The picnic area was busy, and I guess in the busy periods it would be impossible to get into … or out of. Not much wildlife around at that time of the day, and it was hot – 37C
We headed back to camp for a swim, then went for a drive later in the afternoon, south towards Crcodile Bridge. We saw 4 more rhinos, including a group of 3. Plus a big group … oops, tower … of giraffes. 8, the most we have seen together. And on the flora side of things, we found sausage trees! Lovely large leafy trees that have red flowers in spring, which become sausage-shaped seed pods that drop in autumn. They are heavy so it’s best not to stand under one of these trees at that time of the year. The only animal that likes to eat the ‘sausages’ is the baboon. The seed pods are very fibrous.

Last night’s dinner was blue wildebeest schnitzel steaks, cooked on a braai! The wildebeest smelt a bit ‘gamey’ when it was cooking, but they tasted very much like beef. 500g cost less than $6, and as Greg pointed out, they were probably as low in food miles and carbon footprint as we could get.
We had a HUGE thunderstorm last night. Clear sky when we went to bed, 2 hours later the lightning and thunder woke us up and we took shelter in the car for a while. This morning … clear sky again, and very high humidity.

We’re leaving Kruger today. Its been an amazing week here, but now it’s time to move on and find more adventures. We’re going to Swaziland for a couple of days and may not have internet access there. In which case, see you on Saturday when we get to Joburg

Everything Greg knows about lions, he learnt from The Lion King movie
A group of lions is called a ‘pride’, but only if they are standing on Pride Rock. We haven’t found Pride Rock yet, so that might be why we haven’t seen many lions.
He keeps looking for meerkats, but hasn’t found any yet. But they must be here somewhere ‘cos we’ve seen heaps of warthogs, and Timon and Pumbaa were best buddies.
Warthogs are much, much uglier in real life than Pumbaa was in the movie. They must have Photoshopped him.
Zazu the bossy bird in the movie (Rowan Atkinson was his voice) was a red-billed hornbill, like the one that fell in love with our car when we camped at Satara Rest Camp. We didn’t realise it at the time or we would have made sure we got a photo. We have seen a few since, but never close enough to get a decent photo.

zebras
elephants
giraffes
antelopey thingies – impala and waterbuck. We see so many of them that now we just call them all ‘antelopey thingies’. If we find something different that we haven’t seen before, I’ll add it to the list
blue wildebeest
baboons

New to our list today – lions! 2 lionesses actually. They were about 100 metres away from us, sitting in grass near a bush and we could really only see them when they raised their heads. If someone hadn’t stopped to tell us they were there, we wouldn’t have known. Still, it was exciting for us to finally see them. Greg marked the spot on the GPS and we stopped again on the way back – they had moved into the sun as it was late afternoon and ther previous spot in the shade would have been getting cool. Then last night there was one roaring and growling somewhere nearby … on the other side of the campground fence, I hope!

Despite the title of this blog post, we’re not going to Mozambique. We thought about it as Kruger National Park continues across the border into Mozambique to become the Limpopo Transfrontier Park, and visiting the capital, Mabuto, would be interesting. But we can’t take the car, a day visa costs $80 each and we heard a horror story about corrupt Moz immigration officials from a South African woman when we did the tour to Vic Falls. I’ll re-tell it here in the hope that it warns other people to be vigilant at borders.

This woman had been to Moz at least half a dozen times before and travels around Southern Africa a lot, so she isn’t a novice, but the last time she and her adult daughter went to Moz, their passports weren’t stamped and they didn’t realise it. She remembers hearing the thump of the stamp, but it didn’t go on the passport. They only realised when they were trying to leave the country and got hit with a 2,500 rand fine each (around $300). They didn’t have that kind of cash with them, so the officials held the daughter while the woman went try and get the money from an ATM across the border. While she was there, her car was robbed and she lost phones and other valuables. The daughter eventually got away and the woman got in touch with Moz officials much higher up the chain and got it sorted out. But tourists wouldn’t have the time or connections to be able to do that.

So …. anyone travelling to Mozambique needs to be vigilant about making sure their passports are stamped properly.

We’re heading south today, but still staying in Kruger. We’re planning on camping at the Crocodile Bridge campground as it’s good for seeing lions and rhinos. Fingers crossed! On the way, we’re calling in to Szkuza, which is the main camping and admin area in Kruger. There is an Avis office there and we want to get written permission to take the car into Swaziland. If we get permission, we’ll spend a couple of days there before we head back to Joburg on Saturday.

Here’s what we saw yesterday.

dazzles of zebras
a couple of herds or parades of elephants
a bloat of hippopotamus
a tower of giraffes
impala
bushbuck
waterbuck
common reedbuck
a leopard tortoise
New to our list today – lots of banded mongoose including many babies and an implausibility of blue wildebeest.

My favourite group description is a ‘dazzle of zebras’, Greg’s is ‘an implausibility of wildebeest’. I’m really hoping to see a crash of rhinos while we’re here. Greg has added more photos to our last post, Out & about in Northern Kruger National Park, including a better pic of the crocs with the dead hippo, so you can play ‘Spot the Crocs’.

We have been befriended by a Southern red-billed hornbill. He has fallen in love with our car, or rather, his reflection of himself in the car’s windscreen. He’s quite tame, very persistent, quite vocal and I reckon if Greg spent enough time with him, he’d be able to teach him how to count to 10 by the time we leave.

Our friend Margaret commented that she hadn’t realised that Kruger National Park was so popular. Here’s a bit more info about it:

Around 19,500 square kms, covering 350km north-south and 60km east-west. The entire eastern boundary forms the border with Mozambique, and with Zimbabwe along the Limpopo River to the north. Along the western edge are several large privately owned game reserves, most (if not all) of which offer upmarket accommodation and wildlife experiences. We’re not upmarket enough with our tent, so we’ll stick to staying in some of the 26 (!!!) campgrounds in Kruger, which are able to provide accommodation for over 4000 people per night. We moved to the Satara Rest Camp this afternoon, which is in the Central part of Kruger. There are 3 guesthouses here, 180 self-contained units and a 600-site campground. And there are a couple of even larger campgrounds further south!

It hasn’t been busy anywhere we’ve stayed or driven, but during the summer and other school holidays, I’m sure it would be packed. It’s only a few hundred kms from Joburg and Pretoria and South Africans do love the outdoors. I think they are even keener barbecuers than Australians, if that’s possible. They call a barbecue a ‘braai’ – rhymes with ‘dry’ – and have all sorts of braai utensils and equipment that we’ve never seen before. We bought a beautiful cast-iron bread tin with lid (like this one here) that I’m looking forward to using when we go outback camping at home.  A braai is standard in all campsites – it might be a half 44-gallon drum on its side, some kind of large dish to hold coals with a grill above it or even just a concrete area to light a fire on. There is always something so that people can cook outside … and they do!

As we drove out of Kazungula, where the borders of Zim and Zam meet Botswana, we saw giraffe grazing by the side of the road! We stopped and got out of the car, but they were a bit wary of us. We got back in the car and turned around to get a closer look and they weren’t at all bothered – more used to vehicles than people, I think. There were 3 of them.

I decided that giraffes were my favourite African animal because of their purple tongue, but then a few hundred kms further south, we saw a group of 5 zebras! Again, we hopped out of the car and walked a short distance off the road to get a better look and spent quite a while watching them watching us. I think we got to see as much wildlife on the A33 as we would have if we’d done a game safari tour thing in Chobe National Park.

Our night at the Woodlands Rest Camp was very nice – a little oasis in the desert, with beautiful grassy campsites, a swimming pool and good amenities block. There were several groups of campers, and they all seemed to be staying there for a while, unlike us who were just using it overnight. We had a very interesting chat with the owner this morning. Originally from Zim, her 4 siblings now all live in Australia, but her daughter still lives with her young family in Zim, in Harare and it’s …. difficult.

We’re heading back to South Africa today. I’ll be sorry to leave Botswana, it’s been an absolute pleasure travelling here.