The journey begins. South-Africa diary part one

Day 1 01.05.2021

In the morning we wake up and still have to pack a few things before we leave to South-Africa. At 10 we both get an email from our PCR test, Negative. That's a good start. After cleaning the whole apartment, the father of Kim picks us up to go to Zurich Airport. We have to wait 40 minutes to check in. At the desk we find out we forgot to fill in a form. This takes us another 10 minutes.

Within 3 minutes we get through security and we're sitting by our gate. At this point I still can't believe we are on our way to South-Africa.

Our first flight goes to Istanbul. The airplane is full. We fly with Turkish Airlines, its’ a very nice airplane with a good inflight entertainment. After 3 hours we land on time in Istanbul, and what is that an amazing airport. It's so big, modern, clean. We only have 2 hours in between our next flight. But I think I can spend days in this airport. We get a burger at Popeyes and have to go quickly to the gate.

Day 2 02.05.2021

It's 1:45 PM and we are sitting in the next airplane to South-Afrika. To our surprise it's empty. But really empty. We only paid 550 franks for a retour ticket. This is luxury. We both sleep during the flight, and at times we are awake we get nice airplane food. We could sleep in a row of 4, it was so empty.

Sitting far apart in the airplane

When we arrive, we get our bags pretty quickly, of course, with such an empty airplane. Now we call the Camper rental company so they can pick us up. But nobody picks up the phone, so we go with a taxi. We have a very talkative taxi driver, even he committed that when you are the first time in Africa and can't bargain you got to pay 200 rand for a taxi.

At the camper rental everything goes pretty quickly and we are after half an hour later on the road for a new adventure.

We go to the nearest supermarket and get food for a week. They have a lot of good things here in the supermarket, looks a bit like a Dutch supermarket. I am very happy and get a lot of nice things that I recognize from the Netherlands. It immediately feels like I'm at home. I also get some Koeksisters. I heard about them online so I have to try them. They're amazing, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. It has a super sweet taste, like honey. From now on this is my new favorite snack.

Now we have to search a camping. We are both really tired so we go to the closest camping we see on the navigation. We go to Witbank Dam leisure resort.

Our camper alone at the camping

We are with 2 other persons on the campground. The man that works here advised us to go toilet 2, because they renovated it. Well, at least they tried. The doors didn't close and there was no warm water. Toilet number 1 and 3 look worse than a toilet in Manila. At this point I'm happy we decided to rent a big Motorhome with a toilet and a shower. Even though we were the only one there, I don't really feel safe to go on that toilet alone at night.

We have a sandwich for dinner, we don't want to cook anything. We are too tired to cook something.

Witbank Dam leisure resort, 300 rand p/n

Day 3 03.05.2021

After a 12-hour sleep, we shower in our mini bathroom and we're quickly on the road again. Today we get internet so we finally can look for some better camping’s online. I search for a camping near a gate of Kruger. I find Kiaat Bungalows & Caravan Park and we set our destination there. Things go pretty well and we were mostly driving on the highway. As soon as we leave the highway, we get challenged by bad roads. There are a lot of potholes, and with a big motorhome it’s hard to dodge them. We arrive around 16:00 at the camping and we are again the only one. This place is beautiful. Clean and working bathroom, a swimming pool and we have a nice view. After a nice BBQ and a glass of wine, we quickly go to bed. A whole day driving makes very tired.

Enjoying some wine with my name on it

Kiaat Bungalows & Caravan Park, 250 rand p/n

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