South African Honeymoon

Thursday, August 28

Some pictures of the room we've been staying in. This is from the bathroom looking out toward the window. The switch on the right wall closes a partition between the bathroom and the living area, so you can have privacy, or you can watch the television from the bathtub!

You can see part of the partition here.

The view of the canal out our window:

Looking to the left

Looking to the right
You can see from the pics that the weather was starting to get funky today - our third day here. Fortunately, we're leaving today to go to Kruger National Park! We have a 10am flight to catch to Mpumulanga Airport in Nelspruit, which is in the far northeast of the country.

Stepping off the airplane onto the tarmac. What a crazy airport - we were the only plane there, aside from some private jets that were parked there.
And all you could see was this in any direction:

...and the airport looked like some kind of old-fashioned hunting lodge. It's very new - they're still building it:

We got our car and we were off to the park! The rental car turned out to be a VW polo - it's a fairly small car (you'll see a pic of it later), so we were wondering if this is really what we should be driving into an African wildlife preserve. But the Hertz guy didn't seem to think it was strange, so we went with it -- we came for an adventure, didn't we?!

The roads and driving customs in S Africa are crazy if you're used to highways in the US. The shoulders of the roads are almost as wide as another lane, and that's just the way they use them. If you coming on somebody, and going faster than they are, they'll just slide over to the left until you go around. It doesn't matter if it's a broken line or not, or if there is other traffic coming or not - the oncoming traffic will slide over while you come around too. There are so many farm trucks and things like that, this really comes in handy. If they didn't do this, it would take forever to get anywhere.
We were also surprised to see huge orange groves along the highway - this guy was carrying a truckful somewhere.