And so, on the final leg, we pass from Mozambique (still very much real Africa) into the familiar yet enduringly surreal environment that is South Africa. And once again, especially after so many months in the rest of Africa, it is a shock. In Durban we went to the water slides at Ushaka Marine Park (fulfilling a promise I’d made to the boys way back in Uganda), and were stunned by the numbers of seriously overweight and unhealthy looking people we saw there (of all shades and hues). The aggressive consumerism that is the hallmark of so many western countries is glaringly apparent in South Africa too, and it really takes you aback when you haven’t been exposed to it for a while. We genuinely haven’t seen an obese person from Sudan to Mozambique. But the moment we get into South Africa, they’re everywhere! Scary stuff.
Not that South Africa isn’t a beautiful country because, of course, it is. From Durban we headed up the Sani Pass into Lesotho, a stunning drive through the Drakensburg. We nearly didn’t make it. I’d had Mahali’s joints greased in Durban and they garage had lubricated all the bushes with some kind of petroleum based lubricant designed to eliminate the squeaks (in itself a bizarre idea – I use the squeaks to tell me the car is still in one piece!). Unfortunately, the bushes in the panhard arm at the front were polyurethane, instead of rubber, and were completely dissolved by the lubricant. As this only became apparent doing 100kmh on the freeway near Pietermaritzburg, and as the result was a wheel shimmy of frightening violence, it was a somewhat unsettling experience.
Amazingly (and this is the counterbalancing joy of being in South Africa), there is a company in ‘Maritzburg (run, of course, by a sympathetic Zimbo) that manufacture polyurethane bushes, and we had new ones fitted and in place by 10am the next morning! Allowing us to make it up to Lesotho that same day. Sadly time didn’t allow us to traverse the country as we’d originally hoped, but the brutal fact was that we were ill-equipped to deal with the sub-zero temperatures we’d be encountering along the way anyway, so it was with some relief that we turned around and drove back down the Sani pass towards our next destination in Port Elizabeth.
PE is home to our great friends James and Colleen, and we took over their house and space for two wonderful nights in their company. The city itself may not be overly pre-possessing, but the neighbouring beaches are stunning, and we donned our fleeces for a bracing walk along Sardinia beach, where we encountered the biggest jelly fish we’d ever seen. PE is also home to Woodridge, Jake’s school. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t keen to visit it (school’s in session, and he’s missing it), so we passed reluctantly by (the rest of us being keen to go and have a look around).
From PE we drove down the Garden Route, overnighting in the national park at Wilderness (a less apt name for which would be hard to imagine, given that the N2 runs right through the park!), and then down to Cape Agulhas. This is the southernmost point in Africa and obviously a major landmark for us, marking the end of our southerly progress and the point at which we turned back north. We camped in a completely empty campsite right on the beach (it’s mid-winter in South Africa, and there’s nobody about in any of the tourist spots), and had a full fry-up breakfast right next to Cape itself. From there we had some emotional group photos together before we finally split up as a team, with Jambanja heading to one set of friends in Cape Town and us off to another.
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