After heading out of Lesotho we started to make our way along the Garden Route towards Cape Town. The South African scenery is amazing; it has everything from grasslands to rugged mountains to beautiful long beaches; it's a pity we flew through it. We could have done with spending so much more time there. Our first stop was Addo Elephant NP where we were staying for a night. There was a bit of grumbling from the group about going to this particular park. We'd been through Hwange and Chobe NP, both of which are famed for their elephant populations and the new guys to the group had seen heaps of elephants but no cats. Hilary, who's doing a bit of travel by herself, was armed with the Lonely Planet and was naming other parks nearby where we could have gone instead but the itinerary was set and Addo had been booked by the UK so there was no getting out of it.
Addo was a nice surprise. The South African parks are very well organised. The facilities are all very modern and tidy, the campsites, allocated, are separated by hedges to give you some privacy and all are equipped with a braai (bbq to the rest of us!). We set up camp, grabbed some lunch and headed out in Claudia for our first game drive. Although I do like game drives in landrovers, Claudia wasn't too bad, with only seven of us, there were heaps of spare windows so we could duck from side to side to take photos. The NP office has a sighting board which shows where animals such as lions have been seen so it was in that direction we headed first, however, the sightings were in the morning and by the time we got there, they were long gone. Rather predictably, we did see heaps of elephants. One interesting fact about Southern African national parks - did you know that oranges are banned in a lot of parks? Apparently they used truck loads of oranges to feed elephants during the droughts in the 70's and ever since, elephants, who have a great sense of smell will attempt to get them out of your cars etc. True. After our game drive, we headed back to camp for the evening and another early night. The following morning it was back up and out for the next game drive. Mark and Mat swapped around with Mat driving and Mark doing the spotting, it was nice to see Mark getting excited about something that wasn't a girl for a change! We headed around the park and we lucky to come across a big male lion crossing the road. Unfortunately, the down side of Claudia on safari is that she's very loud so we were too scared to go any closer in case we'd scare him off so we hung back a bit and he very quickly disappeared behind a small hill. We followed the road round a bit further and came across two lionesses and their three cubs. The group was in the scrub over one side of the road and slowly, one by one they came out; first the lionesses followed by the cubs. I have to admit we did get a wee bit excited, they were heading for the road and on the other side were zebras. We were hoping for a kill. All we got was a slow saunter. Oh well, at least it kept Cath and Graham happy, it was the first lions they'd seen in the wild. After driving around for a while and not seeing much else, we headed back to camp for breakfast, to pack up and head off towards Tsitsikamma.
Tsitsikamma is a mountainous national park which borders the rugged, windswept coast. Once again, all the campsites are well maintained and the place was very popular with campers. Firstly, we headed into the activity centre at Storms River so we could book any activities we wanted to do for the following day. I'd had my eye on a canopy tour in the forest and headed over with Hilary to book. After a bit of faffing around, Hilary decided to have a look at what else was on offer so I booked for myself. Twenty minutes later it was all change, both Hilary and Mark had booked so they changed my time for an hour later, no skin off my nose, it just meant more of a sleep in. After booking activities and topping up the alcohol supplies we headed for the campsite to get set up. Once again it was an allocated campsite so we pulled in, got the truck into a decent position and all piled out. You would have thought the locals had never seen a truck before; mouths were gaping, eyes were staring. We attracted much attention as we all got out our tents and set up. The camp site had a laundry so most of us decided to get some washing done. We sorted out piles and headed over to the machines only to find that they only took R$5 coins and there was nowhere to get change. Heidi and Mat and Cath and Graham managed to scrape together some change but everyone else lucked out. We did a bit of a search around looking for ‘volunteer rangers' to change some money for us and even walked round the cove to the shop but nope, no coins. Needless to say, I was a little annoyed. Heidi decided to head up to the park office at the top of the hill, I didn't feel inclined to join her so I decided I'd get the change back in the village the next day.
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Addo Elephant Park South Africa
