Saturday 13 July 2024
We have been in South Africa for 18 days now. The cars are still stuck in transit. We know the boat has arrived, but we don’t have a clear date for the unloading.
In the meantime, we’ve done a lot of things since the last post on this blog. Some of you might have been keeping up-to-date on our Facebook page, but I thought I’d give you a few more insights with this little wrap-up of what we’ve done and plan to do next.
A few days back, on Monday, 8 July, we drove from Barlow to Hluhluwe Game Reserve. The scenery was amazing—hill country with lots of wildlife. We spent three or four hours driving through the various routes in the park, encountering various wildlife along the way. We saw many animals within the broad family of antelope, plus a massive buffalo that tried to charge Barry. Toward the end of the day, we had a wonderful encounter with a group of about ten elephants. It was awesome in every way.
Going to town
From there, we spent the night in another small private game reserve and saw plenty more animals within the broader antelope family, plus our first giraffe. We then travelled to Sodwana Bay, a world-renowned dive location with fantastic coral by all accounts. Robert took advantage of the opportunity to dive and enjoyed it immensely.
While Rob was diving, Barry, Jeneen, and I drove to another game reserve in an attempt to see rhinos and hippopotamuses. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any, but we did encounter a lovely family of giraffes and plenty of antelopes. And meet a few other folks looking also and learned a few things in those conversation – like you always do!
We then moved camp and drove inland again, staying at Fugitive’s Drift Lodge near Rorke’s Drift. For those who don’t know (and we didn’t), a drift is a natural crossing point in a river. The rivers in this area flow most of the year round, but in the wet season, they become amazingly wide and powerful. These crossing points become the only opportunities to navigate the fast-flowing rivers. In colonial times and before times before that, these drifts became the only crossing points.
Rorke’s Drift and nearby Isandlwana are famous sites of the Anglo-Zulu War that occurred in 1879. We were given an amazing story about the prior history and political context of that time, as well as the actual events of this significant battle. A remarkable number of both Zulu warriors and British soldiers were killed in what, from our perspective now, seems like a bizarre set of circumstances. But during the colonial period, the British Empire was an unstoppable force, taking control of many places. The Zulu forces numbered 40 thousand people and the British contingent was in the order of 4 thousand. It astonished us all the shear scale of the battles. (For anyone interested in the story here is a link Battles of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift | Isandlwana & Rorke’s Drift Battles, South Africa | Britannica)
Our visit to Fugitives Drift Lodge has been the highlight of our travels so far. It’s an amazing complex with a fantastic reputation for both its hospitality and the incredible insights the guides provide about the Zulu-Anglo wars. The lodge is situated within a game reserve, so we saw our first zebras and a family of giraffes.
Fugitive’s Drift Lodge
The Battlefield
Being conscious of our budget, we moved on after about 24 hours and drove 30 km to the town of Dundee. We stayed in what can only be described as the quirkiest caravan and chalet park complex. All of the chalets were rendered to look like the homes of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. There were very few people there, but we successfully completed our first unsupervised braai (charcoal-fired barbecue) and left as quickly as we could in the morning.
Because the cars are not yet available (poor Mollie and Melissa, stuck in a container on a boat with no clear release date), the next step of our journey is to drive to Johannesburg after staying a night at a farm in a place called Greytown. From there, we will fly to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, hire a car, and continue that part of our original planned journey before flying back to Durban once we know more about when the cars will be released.
Graves of the English – Isandlwana