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.

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

Leaving South Africa

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The first day was quite a tiring day since after the long flight we all got into the bus and drove almost until the night.
It is worth mentioning that our bus was no ordinary bus. :-)
Check it out!

Yes, her name was Carmen. :-) Everything we needed for the whole month, we had it on Carmen.

Our destination for the day was the Madikwe Game Reserve right on the border with Botswana but still on the South African side. We got there right before the sunset and the temperature was alright we were all wearing t-shirts.

The encampment was nice although there was no electricity nor running water.
For a hot shower you would warm up a bucket of water using logs and fire and for light at night it was like going back to the 19th century, we were using oil lamps.
Toilets...they were a hole in the ground of course. Electricity and running water are not available everywhere in Africa, we are used to it in Europe but down there... it's a very different story.

The plan for that night was to do a safari trip to go and see some animals. They are the most active right before sunset and at sunrise, this is because there is still light but it's not too hot, during the day is way to hot to wander around, even for the animals after thousand and thousand of years of evolution.

When we started the safari everyone was like...oh! look! a zebra!, look, look a giraffe!, oh my God! An elephant!!! every animal was amazing...after 3 weeks there.. oh! crap...that elephant is blocking my view!, bloody zebras! they are everywhere! After 3 weeks you were hoping to see difficult to find animals...like lions, leopards and the like...

Nonetheless, it was pretty exciting to see our first zebras, giraffes, elephants etc...

And our first white Rhinos, by the way, the name white Rhinos doesn't come from a colour it actually comes from something that got missed in translation. When the white men came to this country the natives called them wide Rhinos because the mouth is wider than on the black Rhinos and the explorers understood white instead so the names White and Black Rhinos stuck every since.

That small construction you can see below is man-made and it was made in order to provide water to the animals since there are no natural water sources in the reserve.

After the Rhinos it got pitch dark and I cannot describe how cold it was. I think everyone in the group was freezing we just couldn't wait for the safari to end. It was so cold that that's what I remember the most from the experience, the following day most of us had side effects from this cold night..in my case chapped libs.
Remember...is you go to a night safari...take a thick jumper with you...and a blanket if you can... you can thank me later. :-)

The sunset was amazing

And that was on our first day!

The following day we got up early in the morning for another safari and guess what... everyone was carrying a blanket and a think jumper! :-) We all learnt our lesson.

There was a point where one of the guides found a leopard in a tree and they never allow more than a couple of cars stopping in an area at any given time so we had to queue up and wait until one of the other cars came our way so we could take their place and as we were waiting this big fella was crossing the road with a few friends...

Another car came behind us and tried to skip the queue so our driver overtook him but in order to do that it got really, really close to the elephant that started to move its leg forwards and backwards and make threatening noises, our blood froze for a while... luckily the elephant seemed to reconsider and kept moving on leaving us be... none said anything for a while...we were the quietest car in the place...you could ear the flies passing by...
And then we got to see the leopard...

Actually we couldn't see the leopard, Ina that had one of those super cameras with an integrated telescope in it took the picture and thanks to that we could see it on the picture because it was way too far to see anything else but a yellow stain on a tree.
   Actually if you pay close attention you may notice that it's not only a leopard, its prey is also on the tree. This is something leopards do very often, they catch something and take it up a tree to avoid hyenas coming and taking the prey off them.

After the safari we went back to the base camp, back to Carmen and off to the road again, on our way to Botswana, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve

South Africa - Botswana - Mozambique

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This was an organised excursion throughout the Kalahari desert and a tiny bit of South Africa and Mozambique that I did back in September 2009.

When I started preparing this trip I thought Africa would be a dangerous country to go to so I opted for an organised excursion instead of going on my own as I usually do. As it was an organised excursion with a Spanish company I thought I would minimise the risks... but as you'll see in some of the posts...the risk of getting eaten by some wild beast were always present and I felt, sometimes, that the risk was way out of my comfort zone. The good news though is that I survived the experience and I enjoyed the experience so much that I intend on going back to Africa again...some other time. :-) Everyone needs a little bit of adrenaline in his/her life...that makes life worth living!

The trip started in Johannesburg from there we headed north to Botswana were we spent most of the time, then we went back south towards Mozambique and made it back to Johannesburg in order to catch our flight back to Spain.

It was about 25 days, we had a guide, a cook, a driver and someone helping the cook. Nonetheless we had to do the washing up after every meal, set up our tents etc, in other words it wasn't the kind of excursion where they do everything for you, you actually had to do some work! :-)

This is an overall description of the itinerary:

First we went from Johannesburg to the Madikwe Game Reserve

From there we went to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve

Then back to South Africa in order to visit the famous Kruger Park and then off to Mozambique, where the Limpopo river meets the sea.

There were many miles ahead of us, great extensions of land most of it without any road and through some of the most inhospitable terrain well away from civilization. If you are looking for an adventure, this is it! it doesn't get much more adventurous than this!


But I think it's time you get to meet the rest of the gang. Unfortunately I've been unable  to remember the staff's names, it's been a long time and their names weren't the easiest to remember. Cook's assistant was from Botswana, the driver from Namibia and the Cook from Zimbabwe.

Front row, from left to right:
Cook's assistant, Reme-DIOS, Paca, Belén, the driver


On the back row, from left to right:
Moi, the cook, Fran, myself, Carlos, Héctor (the guide), Luís, Mercé and Victor.

 The only person missing on that picture is Ina, but you can see her on the next picture at the front fixing her hair.

The trip in itself was very good but what made it exceptional was the group of people I travelled with, they were all well travelled and some were pretty funny which made the trip far more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise and thank God for that!, otherwise imagine spending a month with a bunch of people you can't stand all together in a bus... Someone would have ended up killing somebody else!