Touring South Africa
Kruger National Park
We arrived to Johannesburg late in the night, picked the rental car up next morning and drove eastwards to the Kruger National Park. We didn't really drive straight to the park, because there were many nice places along the way. One of them was the Blyde Canyon and the Great Escarpment, where the high plains dropped down vertically into the lowlands.
Kruger National Park is a big place, it measures over 300 km in the North-South direction! It takes days to explore it just remotely. Sometimes it feels a bit over-urbanized, with all the roads, shops and gas stations. But it does offer a great landscape and an abundance of wildlife. Elephants, zebras and antelopes are everywhere and there's a good chance to spot lions and leopards as well. It was raining when we were there, didn't seem as the dry season at all. But still, we had a great time and close encounters with some of the most dangerous inhabitants of the park.
The Drakensberg
After Kruger Park, we headed to the mighty Drakensberg range. The peaks reach more than 3.500 m in the sky and sometimes they are even covered with snow. They are lined alongside the border with Lesotho, which lies high on the plateau.
We stayed at the Sani Lodge, operated by a friendly guy named Russell, just below the Sani pass. In the morning, we climbed to the top of a nearby peak, Stromness. Not very high, but it provided a great view around the area.
Port Elizabeth to Capetown
We reached the Indian ocean coast in Port Elizabeth, a very nice town with great beaches. Then we continued along the coast all the way to Capetown, incorporating the famous Garden Route into our trip. Indian ocean is much warmer than Atlantic, the latter is hardly suitable for swimming because of the cold stream coming directly from Antarctica. But we were there in August, it was wintertime, so even Indian ocean was too cold for us.
On some of the parts we could follow a great railway route, that was winding like a snake through vertical rocky walls above sandy beaches. After leaving Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, behind, there was only a mountain pass left to cross and then we reached Capetown.
Capetown and Cape of Good Hope
Capetown is surely one of the great cities of the world! It seems rather isolated so close to the southern extreme of Africa, but its location is truly great. It's situated around the Table mountain, that rises from sea level to more than 1.000 m. The city has got a great waterfront, with many nice places to hang out. The Table mountain provides a nice backdrop, but there's more. Just nearby, reachable via a scenic drive through the Chapman's Peak road, lies the Cape of Good Hope. Vertical cliffs drop straight down to the ocean, which never stands still here. Warm Indian ocean and cold Atlantic meet here and this turbulent point caused grief to many sailors over the past centuries. Baboons hang out around the Cape and we also spotted a colony of penguins there.
After Capetown, our trip was coming to an end. We drove in one go to a great place called Bloemfontein and on the next day back to Johannesburg.
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