BootsnAll Travel Blogs

just a quick note afore I get to write up properly:

drove 10 hours from Cape town to Kimberley (and early crashed due to falling asleep at the wheel!) then flew from Kim to Joburg, then Joburg to Maputo. AND I GOT MY PASSPORT BACK!!!!!! WOOHOO!!!!!!!!!!

anyhoo, I was supposed to get picked up at the airport by the hostel van…but didnt. so got ripped off by a taxi (not too badly though) Maputo is AWFUL! its supposed to be a nice mix of portugese and arabic, but is in fact a lot like Beirut without the nice areas! buildings are all falling down, pavements have been bombed, theres police with AK47’s everywhere and armed guards at nice houses and shops with pump action shotguns!

I met 2 people that got robbed…a BIG afrikaans guy got his wallet pinched and a german girl got her bag pinched (complete with money, cards and passport!)

oh and it rained the WHOLE time I was there!…torrential! the roads were flooded and all kinds

the good news was that I met a guy from Consett!!!…works in Maputo at the mo with his wife Christine. I met them at a cafe where I was struggling with a waitress that couldnt speak english!…can you believe that! ..anyhoo, Christine helped and we all got talking…nice to meet a geordie out here. they are a real nice couple who drove me around maputo one night to show me the best – and worst – of the place, then we had a smashing seafood meal at a real nice restaurant where embarassingly enuff, Gary paid! so I paid for coffee in a flash hotel that the diplomats use in Maputo apparently, great stories thru the evening of Garys fun and games in border control for Mozambique and his army days kept the dreary weather at bay
…and so I moved on ‘ in the rain: 8 hour bus ride to Tofo…where it still rained. nice hostel thoug h which is right on the beach (Fatimas Nest) it stopped raining yesterday, so I took a boat trip (rib) out to snorkel with Whale Sharks!…we only got to see one, but I was first into the water and it swam right undernath me!….so close I had to swim to the side to miss its tail! fabulous thing! incredible visibility too (and the water is 26 degrees!!!!)

in Inhambane today to get cash and check the place out…its OK, I guess but not THAT scenic

more later

well, Gilly stayed for 2 weeks – we had a ball!

shame was the weather was pretty dodgy (the garden route had 12 inches of rain in 3 days……meaning floods and lots of damage: we stayed at Plettenberg Bay at a beautiful hostel with a near deserted beach which is reputed to be one of the best…it was a fab beach, except it had a massive 20m wide line of driftwood right along its length from the storms!..and a nearby beach which cordons off a salt water lagoon completely disappeared!!! we had some good weather too though (and Gilly managed to burn and peel a bit just to prove it!)

best place we stayed was BuffelsDrift which was an airconditioned TENT with en-suite bathroom right up against a lake, i.e. we had a small deck which actually went out over the water. we also had the best meals: one at CapeTown Fish Market, which is a chain of restaurants…beautiful meals on both occasions that we went there.

basically our route was Cape Town, Bettys Bay, Oudtshoorn J-Bay, PE, Plett Bay, Cape Agulhas, Cape Town again. we went White Shark watching from a boat, safari drive at Buffalosdrift and Addo reserve, beach walking eating, drinking, went to the southernmost point in Africa went to the penguin colony, had a boat trip out of CT on a beautiful catamaran (where the crew did there best to get us drunk on sparkling wine …no idea how much we had…but it was a lot!) climbed Table Mountain….OK we climbed it in a cable car, so what?! ;^) and watched the sunset at Signal hill in CT

a great trip…just too short a time with Gilly!

Air con fixed and a nice cool drive thru into Cape Town. bit of a laff getting in as it was rush hour and I hadnt a clue where I was heading!...but I got to the Backpack hostel without crashing ... [Continue reading this entry]

OK, so we finally arrived at J-Bay...which was nice. It was a BIG party night here as a previous staff member was returning and we had brought Joseph down with us (he turned into a bit of a celeb). so...MORE ... [Continue reading this entry]

been a busy time since the Skydive: I spent a day at Tsitsikamma reserve at the mouth of Storms river - nice walk to a waterfall, and then I took a different way back and managed to split my shorts ... [Continue reading this entry]

WOOHOO!!!

its all happenin! ....did a skydive today over Plettenberg bay (apparently its in the top 2 places in world to skydive due to the gorgeous views!): strapped to a guy for a tandem jump which should have been 10,000ft but ... [Continue reading this entry]

oops, I did it again!

the highest bungy jump IN THE WORLD!!! 216m from a roadbridge (Bloukrans) in Tsitsikama, Republic of South Africa

WOOHOO!!!!

so, whilst I was on the Game Ranger course, I applied for an extension to my visa for RSA...I paid my money and was told it would be ready in a week or so. 10 days later and it still wasnt ... [Continue reading this entry]

...so 980km later I met the team and the 2 ACE students Ros and Tina. We caught Springbok and Mountain Reedbok for a couple of days (and got to fly in the chopper pretty regularly again WOOHO!!)  in a nice ... [Continue reading this entry]

I hired a car and spent 3 days in Kruger park: its a huge park - the size of Wales I'm told and has a number of biomes in there, from sandy veld to bushveld etc.

[Continue reading this entry]