In an earlier post, I wrote a little bit about my 3 month trip around South Africa. Now I would like to expand on it. In fact, I’d like to give you a play by play on exactly how we travelled day by day and all the adventures that we got up to along the way.
Day 1: We ordered a video camera online before our trip, hoping that it would come in time and of course it had to come at the very last minute (right before we were due to leave). At least it came though.
We started out after breakfast and drove all the way to Bela Bela where we’d actually arranged to go on an elephant adventure. What is awesome about being in the travel industry, is the contacts. We actually phoned the woman who was in charge of Adventures with Elephants and managed to get the whole experience for free, if we promised to send the video afterwards and also come and visit their other property (Zebula Lodge).
The Elephant interaction included getting to feed the elephants, touch them, walk with them (some people even rode on their backs), observe them and find out about their lives in the Reserve and where they had come from. It was such an incredibly interesting and eye-opening experience, that I could have stayed much longer than the allotted 1 hour time slot.
After taking some awesome videos (we actually forgot to take a lot of photos on the first day), we decided we better be off to Zebula Lodge to take that video. We only realized once we got there that the lady we had organised everything through was actually off sick and she hadn’t told anyone else at the Lodge to expect us or show us around. We duly took a short video of the outside of the lodge and carried on with our journey. Luckily it wasn’t a total waste of time, as we got to see some wild animals driving down the road to the lodge.
Our next stop for the day was at the Warmbaths resort. On the way there however we managed to find this little restaurant right next to a huge Baobab tree where we had pancakes (yes that is a “Hello Kitty” meringue on top of my pancake) to tide us over until dinner.
We had decided before our trip that we only had enough money in our budget to camp along the way, but we love to camp so it actually ended up working out perfectly.
We ended up in the hot pools that Warmbaths has to offer and then we made a fire not only to start our South African bush adventure off on a good note, but also to ward off any warthogs who came too close to our tent. 🙂 And what is a good night in the bush without some red wine (see tiny bottle that came with a plastic wine glass attached in photo below)?
The first day was actually relatively quiet, but we were still exhausted by the time our heads hit the pillow that night. With stressing that the video camera wouldn’t come, rushing to get to the elephant interaction on time, then rushing to Zebula lodge; we were just grateful we had a few hours to relax before climbing into our tent that night. We were also grateful that we had cold pizza to fill our bellies, as the wind was so hectic, that our fire didn’t last very long.
And so began the adventure of a lifetime!
It might have been 3 years ago, but we still spend evenings reminiscing about all the things we got to do on our trip and how we’d do it again in a heartbeat if we had the money. My boyfriend and I don’t often agree on much, but we both agree that our three month trip around South Africa was the best trip we’ve ever taken.
http://adventureswithelephants.com/
http://zebula.co.za/