Day 7, Year 6 We Have Wheels
Date: Sunday, October 31, 2010
Weather: Overcast; Winds SE 10-15
Location: Tuzi Gazi Marina, Richards Bay, South Africa
Our morning started with a trip to the airport to pick up our little car. So we now have wheels. The car is a Kia and really is tiny, but the seats are comfortable. The problem is that it is hatchback and there is not much room in the back for ‘stuff.’ So we are going to have to travel light. We will only be doing self-catering accommodations when we travel, so we will have to take food and leave the extra clothes behind! Today we bought a small cooler that can sit on the back seat between Lynne and I and we’ll just stuff everything else in the back. It’s not perfect, but we’ll make it work.
After picking up the car, we headed to the Boardwalk Mall to buy the cooler and other food supplies we will need. This first foray will be four days, three nights out, starting on Tuesday morning. We are basically copying what friends Danika and Sten of Mata’irea did last year. Their trip sounded very successful, so we are going to try the same. We will leave here on Tuesday morning and head south to a small nature reserve, then head west and north through Zululand where we will see some historic sights and visit a couple of museums, and then we will spend the night in a Zulu bush camp just outside Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve. You pronounce Hluhluwe as ‘shloo-shloo-we’ which is a mouthful. But there we hope to see the Big 5-buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion, and rhinos (both black and white). The leopards and lions are hardest to spot but since we will have two or three whole days in the park, we are hopeful. I say two or three days because we could leave the park early on Friday if we have seen enough and visit the St. Lucia estuary on the way back to Richards Bay. St. Lucia is now called iSimangiliso and is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Lake St. Lucia is Africa’s largest estuary. iSimangiliso means ‘miracle’ and according to the Lonely Planet the extraordinary beauty of the area lives up to its name. Both the game park and iSimangaliso are only an hour from here, so what we don’t see on this trip we can do at another time. We are just so excited to get out there seeing the beauty of South Africa.
Tonight we had a Mexican dinner aboard Constance and finalized our plans. Dinner and Margaritas were delicious, so thank you Ed and Lynne. Tomorrow we will be focused on refrigeration-once again. If you have followed our logs, you know that our freezer bit the dust months ago and even after buying a new compressor while in India and suffering through many days of work, the refrigeration people were not able to get it going. There is a man here named Oakie who came to our boat yesterday and took both our old and new compressor to check them out. He called today and said he was coming in the morning to get our freezer going, so we are hopeful (but with reservation) that he is going to be able to do this. We’ve heard this before, so we are leery. Let’s hope this time it works.
