St Lucia

Tuesday 26th January 2016 – By 7:30am we are sharing a taxi with a couple of botanists from Stellenbosch University to Durban airport. Keen to avoid Durban itself we paid the taxi driver a little more to take us to Balito, a small town about 15km up the coast. The botanists were great fun and helped us identify our colourful spider from the Karoo as a golden orb spider, so named for the appearance of its web. They also identified the white antelopes we had seen as albino springbok which are bred for their additional value to the hunting community. They also told us of their close encounter with a puff adder the previous day while they had been studying the flora of the Sani Pass. From Balito we took a minibus to KwaDukuza bus station and then switched to a second minibus for Mtubatuba. The bus took some time to fill up but just as we were beginning to lose hope a couple more people got on and we were off. Our final leg was from Mtubatuba to St Lucia with Alysa squeezed into the back and me acting as door opener for anyone alighting or disembarking. We arrived about 5pm in the pouring rain at a hostel encouragingly named Budget Backpackers where we booked 3 nights in a double tent. That evening we walked down the main street on the look out for hippos that use it as a route to their grazing grounds.

Wednesday 27th January 2016 – After so much moving around we take a well earned rest day. Laundry gets done, the pool gets used, I post a parcel back to England and Alysa takes a walk down to the beach while I buy provisions for our evening meal. In the evening we cook our first braii, a tasty combination of chicken drumsticks, steak, sausages and corn on the cob. Over our meal Alysa recounts details of her walk, including a flock of noisy hornbills and a timid little fawn. A vivacious French couple we met the previous evening offer to give us a lift into Swaziland when they leave in two days time and we happily accept.

Thursday 28th January 2016 – We rise at 4:15 am and by 5am are the sole passengers of an open-sided jeep trundling towards the near unpronounceable Hluhuwe Imfolozi Park. Our craggy featured guide, Ricky…looking just like Crocodile Dundee…drives us through the park stopping whenever one of us spots something. Over the course of the next seven hours, punctuated by a bush breakfast and braii lunch, we see zebra, kudu, wildebeest, nyala, baboons, storks, giraffe, impala, warthogs, buffalo and more elephants and rhinos than we can count. On our return we take a quick dip in the pool and walk together to the seafront where, once again fawns are lying up in thickets by the roadside and vervets are hanging about on the path like naughty kids. At the beach, after dipping our toes in the Indian Ocean, we circle back towards the mouth of the river where a croc is basking by the waters edge, rising and slipping quietly into the murky water when we approach too closely. We don’t linger as dusk approaches and we don’t want to risk any unwelcome hippo encounters on the way back to town. A braii again in the evening leaves us both looking forward to a few days of vegetarian meals. We chat into the night with the French couple, Vincent and Sylvia.