It feels like ages ago that I last wrote a blog. Since then the suggestions (read criticism) of my travel blogging haven’t ceased from the family and some closer friends. Now I’m going to have to try and incorporate everything into this road trip blog. It’s January and so it is our usual ‘head to a game park’ time. Last year we decided that we should have our own car in the Kruger Park. Google tells me that the shortest route to get to Kruger from home would be 1870 kms. It means the usual 2-weeks in the Kruger trip is now slightly longer to allow for the time to get there and back.
The other ‘small’ (read sizeable) problem we have encountered is that the Kruger Park suffered massive floods last week. Currently only 5 of the 12 main rest camps are open in the Kruger Park with bridges and roads washed away. The Kruger Park is the same size (roughly) as Wales, Slovenia or New Jersey state in the US. But there is really only one main north to south road and that road crosses many rivers and those rivers flooded and have damaged the infrastructure. They are estimating that it is billions of Rands of damage. There is no timeline at this point as to when they might open roads, other camps etc.
The slightly bigger issue was that we had booked camps that were either directly hit by flooding (Letaba), had their electricity knocked out (Satara) or became inaccessible because of roads and bridges being washed away (Mopani, Shingwedzi and Punda Maria). Toward the end of last week I thought we should move our booking into southern camps rather which we knew were open and fortunately managed to do that. Still a few days before we get there so you knows what might happen in those 3 days.The good news is that we are on route and will make the most of it even though we won’t get to the camps we really wanted to go to. It will probably just make us want to do it next year instead!
We left home today around 3pm. You might wonder why so late. The reason … mother-in-laws 85th birthday today and I am still working hard to stay on her good side! Happy birthday again from us. We had a celebratory lunch today but we wanted to start our journey to at least cut off a few hundred kilometers today. As we never believe the best route is the fastest one and that part of the enjoyment is the journey, we are taking a marginally longer route but hopefully more enjoyable than the main N1 road. We headed north up the west coast today. That route even had my daughter confused but the purpose was two-fold, find a good spot about 2-2.5 hours outside of Cape Town and hopefully do some birding on route as well. Clanwilliam met both criteria and that is where we are staying the night.
One small detour on route in that we were trying to add Protea Canary to our bird lists and there is a reliable spot about 10kms short of Clanwilliam. We spent an hour looking but to no avail. The 38 degree C temperature and very windy conditions probably didn’t help our search. H did manage to add a lifer (Lesser Kestrel) while we were driving 120 km/h though so it wasn’t an entirely unfruitful day.
We arrived at 6pm at our guesthouse – Rosenhof Guesthouse. They upgraded us into a 2-bedroom cottage (not that we need all the space) but it is nice to be able to spread out. It is situated quite near the river so we did a quick, short bird walk along the river and added a few birds to our trip list. They had left a freshly baked loaf of bread in the cottage with apricot jam and so we felt it would be ungracious not to have a slice of that (as we had no plans to eat dinner after the celebratory lunch). Not much else to do here but write a blog and then head to bed. We need to be up early as we have a long drive ahead tomorrow.
P & H