Category: South Africa 2019

July 22, 2019

Continuing about 150 km north, our next stop was Mapungubwe National Park. The park is in South Africa and is located near and along the Limpopo River and the borders of Botswana and Zimbabwe.

The park is split in half, with the Eastern and Western sections separated by farmland. The campsite is partially fenced, primarily to keep out elephants, but monkeys, baboons and nyala roam freely around the site.

The nyala are small to mid-sized and are very similar to white-tailed deer. They are habituated and would literally walk up to you and sniff and lick your hands with the expectation of food. This is great, but unfortunately, they have become this way because, without a doubt, people feed them. Not a good thing.

Every evening at sunset, two bush babies would leap effortlessly through the trees surrounding our site. The distance they can leap is quite amazing, and they do so without any sound whatsoever. We didn’t get any pictures of them, but we did a little farther along in our travels.

Before we arrived at our camp, we picked up groceries at a Choppies grocery store. Near the checkout, they had a CFC stand—Choppies Fried Chicken. It looked great, so we figured we would be lazy on our first night at the campsite.

We were very happy we did this, as the four bundles of firewood we purchased at the park gate might as well have been wet noodles. It was impossible to start a fire—more like a smudge—so our CFC chicken came in very handy that evening.

A visit just beyond the elephant wire

Chasing cattle back to Zimbabwe

Lilac Breasted Roller

The local residents

Just stopped in for sniff

Cape vultures

Slaving away

Chops, squash, beer and wine

July 20, 2019

We departed Johannesburg and headed northeast towards the North East border of South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Kazungula Quadripoint, driving approximately 430 km to our first destination, Blouberg Nature Reserve, located in the lowveld of Limpopo Province. We had a nice campsite for two nights located in a very dry and dusty bush veld!

Blouberg Nature Reserve harbours the biggest breeding colony of Cape vultures in the world and hosts more than 1,000 breeding pairs. We were hoping to see them.

Getting to the reserve was a little bit of a challenge, as our Garmin GPS told us to leave our vehicle and walk to our destination.

We figured it out. We had passed the turnoff.

In Joburg, we had to resort to Google Maps to find our hotel after picking up our truck. Our Garmin GPS didn’t help us.

We were told to turn left into a farmer’s field when we were looking for Woodlands and were told to turn left or right or straight or some other bloody thing several other times.

When we last visited Africa, we used maps. We were told GPS can get you lost. Well, whoever told us that was right, so now we travel praying to the powers that be that we are, in fact, going in the right direction and not towards Antarctica or Bolivia or some other place that is not remotely close to where we want to go.