Panoramic Tour from Nelspruit

Trip Start Oct 16, 2007
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Trip End May 09, 2008


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Flag of South Africa  ,
Thursday, November 1, 2007

We took another red eye from Doha and arrived in Johannesburg 6am the next morning.  The locals call it JoBurg - which sounds so much cooler.  Crime in JoBurg is supposed to be pretty bad.  So, everybody looked kind of suspicous to us... and since there is not much to see in JoBurg anyway, we headed out a few hours later on a shuttle to Nelspurit.  Another 4 hours and finally after more than 40 hours of traveling since Berlin we arrived at the Old Vic's Backpacker in Nelspurit pretty wiped out.
Old Vic's is a pretty nice place.  Bella runs it and crazy Dave can help you book trips around the Nelspurit area.  We decided to go on a one day Panoramic Drive with Dave the next day.  No need to mention that we slept like dead and getting up at 5:30am the next morning was kind of hard.  We met up with Dave and 3 English blokes in Hazyview, and started our first tour in Africa.

The Panoramic Drive took us to the Small Drakensberg Mountain range about 2 hours north of Nelspurit
On the balcony at Old Vic's
On the balcony at Old Vic's
.  We stopped for short walks at the Lisbon Falls, Bourke's Potholes, Blyde Canyon and Berlin Falls. 

Most impressive for Frank: The street sign 'Hippo Crossing' and a bunch of Baboons (a pretty common monkey in S.A.) crossign the street in front of the van.

Most impressive for Shari: The Potholes and the savory, stuffed pancakes at Harrie's for lunch.

The next day we had to take care of some regular day-to-day stuff (buying groceries, updating blog, getting $) and also to find plane tix from Nelspruit to Port Elizabeth.  We asked Bella where in Nelspruit to take care of these things and she pretty much put a big "X" on the downtown area of the Nelspruit map and said this was a "No Go" area, and it was safer for us to go to a suburban mall called Riverside Mall.  This mall was just like any mall in the US... surprisingly it didn't feel different at all.  But no Starbucks or McDonalds though, compared to in Berlin.

 
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