The last dinner

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Effectively, this would be our last day in Africa since the following day we would be catching our flight back to Europe so in order to celebrate this fantastic 3 weeks we all went to have dinner together and invited the staff too (cook, driver and cook aid).

We went to spend the night to a town in South Africa but don't ask me for the name because I just can't remember... I must be getting old faster than anticipated...

Dinner was pretty good and although the restaurant was a 10 minutes walk from our hotel we all had to go by taxi. Apparently crime rates in most South African cities are staggering. Not safe walking in the streets.

After dinner most people went to bed... except 4 of us which decided to carry on and try out the night life in this city which name I still can't remember.

It was a bit of a pain having to take taxis everywhere but as you can see in the above picture we were having a horrendous time...

As all good things in life, it all came to an end and we had to go back to the hotel and get ready for the following day. We had a plain to catch!

I think it's worth noting that I was given fifty billion dollars... from Zimbabwe...

I know, it's lacking three zeros... but that's the anglo-saxon way of counting, for them one thousand millions it's a billion, for the rest of us, one million millions is a billion. Unfortunately for me 50 billion Zimbabwean dollars are not worth the paper they were printed on... otherwise you could probably count with a million or so coming your way dear reader. :-)

And that was my African adventure... Some of the people travelling with me in this fantastic excursion had travelled quite extensively throughout Africa (Moi, Merce, Ina) and made some good recommendations about other places I should visit so it is very likely I will go back to Africa some other time in the future. I really liked it, it was far better than what I expected.

Limpopo River Mouth

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After all the hours we spent on the bus we were all really eager to stretch our legs.

The previous day we had seen a lighthouse up on a mountain so we all decided to go there and check it out.

The place really reminded me of all those movies of the Second World War in the pacific...

There were some fantastic views from the top.

In the afternoon though we decided to go for another walk, but this time by the river. We started by the beach and followed the river up-stream.

Below is the point where the river meets the sea

It was a nice walk although sometimes it was required to get wet.

After sometime walking we found a place with some tables and a dirt track leading back to the place where we were staying

And again we had a great opportunity to take some nice sunset pictures

Above you can see the lighthouse we climbed to in the morning

This was our last night in Mozambique, the following day would be our last day in Mozambique and we had a long journey in front of us. We were going back to South Africa.

Heading into Mozambique

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In the same way I was positively surprised by the standard of living in Botswana I was also surprised but very negatively by the standard of living in Mozambique...

It is a poor country, and it is as poor as it gets. You can see the devastation of the civil war on the people and the way the live. The Limpopo National Park (The part of the Kruger park that belongs to Mozambique) had no animals whatsoever... not due to the predators as you may think but due to the soldiers and the hungry villagers...

Roads had no asphalt, the "national road" joining Mozambique with South Africa was a dirt track... and there were a couple of places where the "road" disappeared due to some flood in the past so you had to get into the jungle and find the road.

The villages looked like something taken straight from a documentary...

I'm afraid that's not the poor part of the village... that is the village.

But let's back track and start from the beginning before you all get depressed with this story...

The border crossing was a bit more involved than all the others we had done since in this occasion we all had to buy a 50 US dollar visa which is the one you can see on the right hand side

And for that sticker we had to wait for 2 hours and pay 50 US dollars each, not to mention the amount of forms we had to fill in...

When we all got our visas and passports stamped we made our way out of the border and into the "road" which as I said earlier wasn't a road but a dirt track.
Below you can see the "road" and a "road bar" as well.

In a couple of occasions the road just disappeared in front of us and here I have to give credit to the driver, driving a big truck through the jungle it's not an easy feat... The driver just got inside the jungle and found a spot from which we could cross over to the other side of the gap left by the flood that took the "road" with it. Some of the crossings were really tight and narrow but the driver seemed to navigate through them with ease... Not sure what kind of test they have to pass in order to become a truck/bus driver for this kind of adventures but I can assure you not many people would be able to do what he did...

Anyway, for our first night in Mozambique we were to camp nearby a village like the one on the photograph above. The campsite was pretty good, so we put up our tents, made a fire and had dinner...

And at night all the crawlers come out...

I had never seen this type before but it was huge (for an insect, that is).
Mozambique is an endemic area for malaria carrying mosquitoes and there were plenty of those around but for some reason I never got bitten, although I cannot say the same for some of my companions... This campsite however wasn't too bad with mosquitoes, there were some but not too many since we weren't nearby a river nor any other source of water but in our next destination it was a very different story...

The plan in Mozambique was to spend a couple of nights by the Limpopo river mouth. There was some kind of resort there owned by some South Africans. It was nice but we were the only guests in the place. Which is not surprising considering how inaccessible it was and the state of the road from South Africa... clearly not a place for the mass tourism.

The views were fantastic

And we took the opportunity to go for a walk on the beach, after all those hours in the bus we were all really looking forward to stretch our legs.

And when the night came, we all learnt to play "werewolf", a game that I learnt there and I were to export quite successfully to Australia in a later trip. :-) We all got so involved with the game that even when the generator went off at midnight... we carried on playing using our torches in order to see other people faces.

For the following day, we all wanted to do some exercise, after all the time we spent in the bus for the past few days we couldn't wait to move our legs so we had big plans for the following day...

Kruger National Park

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The Kruger National Park  is now part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, a peace park that links Kruger National Park with the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, and with the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique.

 We got up early in the morning (as usual) and headed for the border... you may not know this but crossing the border is something that takes anything between 1 and 2 hours if there is no queue... that's only the time it takes you to do all the paperwork and for them to inspect the vehicle... and the border has opening and closing times so you don't want to get there too early because it's closed nor too late so you would have to spend the night there...

A pity I didn't take any pictures of some of these border crossings... some of them were really picturesque.

Along the way we did one stop at a small village in South Africa in order to get some drinks and food for the next 2 days.

Don't get distracted by the handsome man on the next picture the important bit is the ad for the doctor on the background

Doctor W.J. Mbogo... you can't really read it on this picture but essentially it says Witch Doctor... with a more flourish vocabulary of course...

Below is all of us in the bus on our way to the famous Kruger National Park
and me experimenting with the black and white filter of my camera

We took a break before we started, remember we had been travelling for a while before we reached the park.

It was a freezing cold day, I remember that because we lifted all the windows in the bus in order to be able to take pictures, we were all wearing our coats and it was still cold...

You can probably appreciate the different levels of hypothermia on our faces here

Something I found quite remarkable about this park was that after coming from the wild where all animals run off when they hear your vehicle coming, here they just keep going and is like they didn't notice you. There are used to cars... That's why you could never have the chance to take any of the following pictures.

At first we thought it was some kind of accident and someone had run over some animal but when we got closer

and closer

We realised that these lazy hyenas were taking a nap in the middle of the road because the road was nice and warm...

You can rarely get so close to a wild hyena

I think she was really considering whether to jump at me or not... she looks like she's thinking about it... doesn't she?

We managed to see quite a few more animals but after a few weeks in Africa you stop taking pictures of zebras, wildebeest, giraffes, etc because you already have lots of them... you are only interested in the difficult to spot animals like lions, leopards, cheetahs etc...

Elephants are always majestic, specially if they look upset as the one below

And we saw our first buffalo here too

Seriously, if you come to Africa make sure you get a pretty good camera with a good telescopic sight or most of your pictures will look like above... some brownish thing moving away from you...

And while we were on the Kruger National Park we crossed the tropic of Capricorn

We spent the night at the park, camping and the following day in the morning we headed towards Mozambique. Destination: The Limpopo river mouth

Tuli

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The lodge where we were staying was pretty cool and the most amazing thing about that place is that there were almost more wild animals inside the lodge than outside... they even had a few elephants crossing through the previous night (you could see the spores they left behind).

The rooms didn't look like anything special from the outside

But on the inside, they were quite alright, actually. The one you can see on the picture above and the two below belong to Ina's room. It even was by the swimming pool!. She had the best room!... or so we thought until the night came and the toads started to sing... all night loooooong... she was the only one who didn't sleep at all because of the noise. We were all quite jealous when we saw her room... not so much when we saw her face the following day...

The room is the one at the end...

As you can see there was a lot of trees and grass all around us

Which attracted many wild animals... like
Wild boards

 Monkeys

and springboks

Just to name a few of them... there were lots of different birds as well and the place was just by the river Limpopo, right on the border with South Africa
The river below is the Limpopo river and the other side of the river is South Africa, we were still in Botswana... as you can see it wouldn't be difficult to enter South Africa illegally... in fact you may get there by accident if you go for a stroll...

We managed to see a sizeable zebra and wildebeest herd coming to the river to drink

It was an amazing place to stay and rest after the Kalahari experience... it really felt like civilization... but within a natural environment, i.e. we had running water and electricity (we went for many days without it), even hot water!  but at the same time you could see all these wild animals around you...

We only spent a couple of nights there though... the following day we were on the move again, destination: Kruger National Park

This is the place where the below amazing video was taken... if you've never watched it before...stay until the end, it's really worth it... no special effects, just being at the right time in the right place...



Amazing wasn't it? Well that was our next destination although our expectations weren't as high as what you can witness on that video...