Today we faced a long journey south to the coast so we were up and out before 0700. Robert, the guy from last Saturday's AirBnB, had explained that the leaders of the local authority siphon off money so there is none left for the road repairs, which has left them in a poor state of repair. He wasn’t kidding! We’d come across some potholes a couple of days earlier while winding our way leisurely along the side of the Blyde River Canyon but now we were trying to make progress at speed along a fairly major highway we encountered the real things. Huge craters in the road surface, some 1.5m in diameter and over 15cm deep, randomly sprinkled in the surface of the road, meant maintaining any sort of speed required intense concentration and the reflexes of a cat to twist and turn a slalom course around them. Overtaking the large dual trailer trucks became a lottery as once committed we were both locked in our lane with very little room for manoeuvre. When planning this journey we had considered driving two sides of a triangle on national highways as opposed to taking a shorter route down a minor road. The potholes made that a simple choice.
With much relief we reached the national highway and quickly got up to speed to recoup the time spent on the pothole slalom course. The first side of the triangle retraced some of our steps from our first day back towards Johannesburg but we soon reached the turning for the highway south and it was much more satisfying to be heading in the right direction. For what seemed like an age we travelled through the ‘high veld’, part a huge plateau of central SA all above 1000m and very cool and arid. Km after km of a dead looking crop, which may have been corn, or brown grass with the occasional animal optimistically searching for something to eat. For a short section we were a stone's throw from Swaziland running parallel to the border.
After what seemed like an age we began to descend to the lower veld and we finally met some green. First the grass, then some trees and then acres of lush green sugarcane. What a pleasant change. On either side of the road small settlements of crude houses, mostly built with rough concrete blocks and corrugated metal roofs, began to sprout up. It’s difficult to believe in a country with so much potential wealth that thousands (maybe millions) live like this. This section of Carole and Phil’s (our SA friends) route plan was annotated ‘beware children and animals in the road’ - a prescient warning. As the settlements grew larger so did the volume of pedestrian traffic along the road’s side. Some human, some animal - mostly cattle. At first it seemed a bizarre choice to build schools on a main highway but it was soon apparent that there were no other roads on which to site them. So every day thousands of children run the gauntlet with the aggressive SA drivers and the huge trucks pounding along beside them. No wonder SA has one the highest road death rates in the world.
With much relief we made our final turn towards the small village of St Lucia, in the World Heritage Isimangaliso Wetlands Park only a few km from the border with Mozambique. Nestled on a peninsula with the Indian Ocean on one side and a hippopotamus filled lagoon on the other, and surrounded by game reserves, it is an idyllic spot favoured by tourists. As we wound our way past guest house after guest house and signs warning of hippos roaming the streets at night, we eventually came to Enduduzweni, our AirBnb stop for the next three nights.
As we got out of the car, weary from the long, and sometimes taxing, journey, we were met by a vivacious silver haired lady - Elfie, our host. She showed us around the three bedroom house we’d booked and then we sat on the patio together drinking tea while she told us about all there is to see here. Quite a lot it turns out so we may need to extend our stay.
Elfie is a charming, positive minded, elderly lady with three children, who lost her first husband to cancer when only in his 40’s. Undeterred she did the natural thing, fostered another child. She then lost a daughter to cancer, went through another marriage before retiring down here ‘to paradise’. There are two buildings on the plot which she has divided into the house, where we are, an apartment and a tree house, which she lets, and a small apartment for her to live, although she likes to sleep outside on the porch whenever she can. She seems to know everybody in the village, possibly helped by her preferred mode of transport - a large tricycle. We had a long chat about her life, our travels and the beautiful parts of South Africa before she left to greet some other guests and we made dinner and settled into our comfortable lounge with fast internet, what a blessing, to plan some more of our travels.
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| Settlements (courtesy of Google street view) |
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| Settlement (courtesy of Google street view) |
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| Sugar cane (courtesy of Google street view) |
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