After we said our good-byes we had our first lay-over in Seattle, then in St. Louis and New York before the big flight. We flew South African Airways which is very nice, but I guess all international flights are like that.
When we finally arrived in Johannesburg we had to stand in a line to get our passports checked then we were off to customs. It was really easy because they didn’t even want to look in our luggage or anything. After we were clear of everything we went to where all the people were waiting for their arrivals. We met David’s parents, loaded up the luggage and started towards their house.
Some of the differences that I noticed besides driving on the wrong side of the road was that everyone was black except for the people in the cars and it made me want to almost ask, what happened to all the white people? Many people were selling things at the stoplights, anything from Super Glue to flowers and some just beg. All the houses have huge gates with either barbed wire, razor wire, spikes, or electric fencing on top of the wall and all just to keep people from breaking in their houses.
Many of the names of things here are called different like....
trunk of a car = boat, garbage can = rubbish bin, water slide = supertroop, small pickup = bucky, swimsuit = costume, flashlight = torch
The next day we went to Dan & Helen’s church and went to one of the members’ houses. They lived in a very nice part of the city. Their house and yard was very nice and their pool wasn’t too bad either. After that we went to a rugby game. On the way over there, I was told that rugby isn’t a game it’s more of a religion and it wasn’t hard to tell why. The stadium was huge and the game was lots of fun. The teams were the Blou Bulls vs. Western Providence. The game kept on getting more exciting as the fans had beer after beer. At the end a guy got knocked out cold into the next row of seats along with his beer!
Sunday, we loaded up the caravan (camper) and went to the feast in Rustenberg, about two hours from Jo’burg. The feast is a thing the church does once a year. For a week all the local churches get together and have a good old time. There was only about 150 people there which wasn’t much, but all the people seemed to be very nice. In fact, I would say the people there are a lot more friendlier than people here. The families of the church seemed to be a lot like the families here also. When I wasn’t swimming in one of the four swimming pools or going down the water slide or any of the other things that there was to do, I was with a group of teens my age that I had met.
Half way through the feast we went up to Victoria Falls. To get there we had to pass through Botswana. Finally into Zimbabwe. On the way up there we took a day trip through Hwange Game Reserve. We saw basically everything from crocodile to lion! After that we drove into the campgrounds near Vic Falls and set up our tents before going to sleep. Then next morning we went to view the falls. It was a very nice day but it was rather hot and the mist from the falls felt good. There was about seven different falls, but during the rainy season it becomes one big fall stretching for over a mile wide.
After coming home from Rustenberg and Victoria Falls, we spent the next four days viewing Johannesburg and a little bit of Pretoria, South Africa’s capital. While we were in Pretoria we visited the Parliament buildings which is the equivalent to our White House. In Jo’burg we did quite abit of gift shopping but also got to see a lot of the city. Jo’burg has a lot of big buildings, supermarkets, malls, parks, stores and houses like many of the cities that we have here.
It was a five hour drive to Kruger, South Africa’s largest game park.
We had left at 1:00 in the morning and arrived early in the morning.
We spent all day viewing the animals. Then in the evening we set up
the caravan in one of the camp sites. We spent a total of two nights
and three days there and we saw the following animals.
Browsers: giraffe, kudu, impalla, steenbok, elephant, eland, black rhino
Grazers: zebra, sable, buffalo, hippo, waterbuck, warthog, wildebeast
Predators: lion, hyena
Drakensberg is where South Africa’s tallest mountain is. we drove there and started up around 3:00 and got to the cave around 5:30. We spent the night in the cave which was pretty neat but it got cold. The next morning we got an early start and took the short hike to the chain ladders. The chain ladder was divided into two different sections which measured about 150 ft. long. When we finally got to the top we looked down to a blanket of clouds among huge cliffs.
Our flight left at 9:00 p.m. and we had to hurry a little because South African Airways’ computer system crashed and we had to wait in line for awhile. The flight went by fast even though it was 17 hours. When we finally got to Portland, my parents were there to welcome us home.
