Yep I’ve made it back once again from the land of Skelums (Skelum is a SA work for scumbag thieving bastard!). This time around I only lost (ie. was relieved of by a Skelum) my thongs and my credit card. As posted before you’re all aware of the tough time I had for the rest of my ‘holiday’.
We had many adventures returning from Mozambique to SA. I met a couple of guys who had a car and were planning to drive back to SA and visit Kruger. They weren’t aware of the new Transfrontier Park Border that opened 6 months ago. Basically instead of driving all the way south from Tofo, through Maputo then west into SA and into the bottom of the Kruger Park, you can cut straight West from Tofo going though the Limpopo Park on the Mozambiqan side, cross the border and you’re bang in the middle of Kruger. Or so the theory goes…
We were in a little VW golf (did I mention the roads in Africa sometimes aren’t the best??), 4 of us with all our gear. The first challenge was finding the right turn off as no one seemed to know where the hell it was and assured us that it wasn’t signed - joy! However the turnoff turned out to be well signed and that lulled us into a false sence of security that perhaps this wouldn’t be so hard after all…oops! After a long drive we finally found the entrance to the Moz park. The road ahead looked somewhat ‘challenging’ for our little car but the guys at the ‘Entrance’ (in reality a little shack by the side of the road) assured us that the 80km, yes, 80km trip to the border would be no problem for our little car, and yes the border would still be open when we got there. Well, unusually, they were right, about one thing, sorta… The road was passable by our little car, we somehow managed to keep the exhaust on over the rocky sections and not get bogged in the sandy bits, however, the trip took us well over two hours and we were well and truly happy to see the border post! Boy were we happy, except on coming closer it appeared that the gates were closed… “No!” we thought, “it can’t be, it’s only 4:15…” Well, yes, they were closed, BUGGER!
Luckily the people manning the compound also lived there and kindly let us in, informing us that the border had closed 15 mins ago but we could sleep in the compound and go through the next morning for the princley sum of R100. We had no choice but to ‘Agree’ and enter (what were we gonna do, turn around and go back??) Between us we had enough food do sorta survive through till the morning and the Skelums gave us a mattress each to sleep on. How kind. We awoke next morning and packed our bags, returned the mattresses to them with thanks and waited for them to start work so we could get the fk outta there! After getting our passports processed and stamped out, we also had to buy a permit for the park (yes for the privilage of driving 80km on crap roads and then staying at the border the night). After that came the request for our payment of the R100 for the night. Boy did that set things off, we basically refused to pay (we had no more money anyway except for the R1000 in my money belt to pay my SA visa fine next door, and I sure as hell wan’t telling them about that!). We argued and argued with the police chief, basically we all ended up giving him what we had left (about 2/10ths of bugger all) and asking him what he was gonna do as we litterally had no more money. He didn’t have much choice but to let us through, wanker.
It’s good to be back in South Africa, after a little confusion in paying my visa fine (they couldn’t find the receipt book) we were into the Kruger once again. I then spent the week with a mate of mine who runs a Ranch on the border of Kruger before returning once again to Hazyview to study/work. Didn’t hear my Wood Owl’s last night but that’s prolly cause of the massive thunder storm we had here last night, summer is coming folks! There are even rumours that I’ll be moving into my own room (that’s right in a building!) in the next coupla days, how exciting. Was trying to work out when I last had my own room and pretty sure it was (excluding home in Feb 06) a freakin long time ago! Ah, simple pleasures!
Ok, enough, later.
PS. Thanks to everyone for their kind birthday wishes. For those of you who forgot you prolly don’t read this anyway…!