Native Woman preparing food (photo by Ray/Eileen Proctor)
Berlin Falls
Bourkes Luck potholes
Bridge over Blyde River Canyon10/18-10/28 Kasane, Botswana to Laurel MDThe next few days were spent on a long boring drive to Kruger NP in South Africa. Our only entertainment along the potholed-covered paved road was the agricultural inspections. Now I’m all for stopping the spread of fruit flies, but when the “inspector” enters your van and asks you if you have any candy for her, you begin to question her motives. After losing our cheese, apples, oranges (which we bought locally) to greedy inspectors we started to hide the little food we had left. We were also stopped to see if we were smuggling women from Botswana into South Africa.
We finally got to Kruger NP and we spent a couple days cruising the roads at 30 mph looking for wildlife. One evening our group did a Safari tour in the park. The theory is that as you sit in these open 4 wheel drive vehicles, the guide would point out animals that the untrained eye would miss. Because of the size of our group, we split into two groups. Our driver failed to find us anything we didn’t already see. He even missed a rhino that we passed. The other group’s driver spotted a leopard and even a chameleon after dark! Bottom line, safari trips are only as good as your driver/spotter. The temperature reached 112 degrees F and our A/C in the cab was not working. Fortunately the abundance of wildlife kept our mind off the heat.
After we left Kruger NP we had a day to explore the mountains and scenic attractions. We had one more long day of driving before our farewell dinner. We said our goodbyes to our new friends. After returning our vans to BoBo Campers near Johannesburg, we took a 19 hour flight back to Dulles, VA. We drove to Laurel, MD and spent the next week with our friends Julie and Tom.
No comments:
Post a Comment