woke up on a sour note.. only slept 2 hours. i thank the drum circle outside my room and jeff coming in and out 3 times during the night. as well as the m & m's i had at bedtime to make sure i had "food" with my malaria pills. plus, well - it sucks to be a girl sometimes, and i'll leave it at that! checked out of our hostel and got directions from the same guy that tried to direct us to dinner the first night. well, you can imagine how that turned out. drove for a bit but eventually made the wise decision to pull into a petrol station and ask. we weren't that far off, and the pump attendant was much more precise: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Left. 1, 2, 3, 4 Right." ok, on our way.
or so we thought. my god - the traffic was insane. and i thought jersey was bad! sure, the city is congested anyway, but add to that the million more here for the world cup, plus all the construction in preparation for the games. we weren't going anywhere fast, and it was 8:15 before we even really got on the highway - almost an hour later than i had planned. all i could think about was how we couldn't miss the gate closing at kruger. eventually we got out of the craziness of jo'burg, and we began to cruise along nicely. found an african pop station to keep me awake.. jeff fell asleep of course.
then BANG! out of nowhere this metal spike in the road hit my left front tire. i was already riding on the rim by the time i managed to pull off to the side. the tire was completely blown. and we had no phone! not knowing what else to do, we frantically tried to wave down someone to help. no one stopped. one guy even waved back.. thanks buddy. after about 10 mins - which felt like an eternity - someone finally stopped. we explained what happened and asked if we could use his phone to call europcar for help. then - it occurred to me - i didn't even check to see if we had a spare! duh.
gave jeff the keys and he found the spare. but thanks to my dad never teaching me how to change a tire ("girls don't need to know, that's what AAA is for!"), i had no clue where to begin. neither did jeff, and he's a boy! so the kind stranger proceeded to help us, even saying "okay, here's your lesson." it took all of 10 mins. asked if he knew how far we could travel on a spare, and he suggested continuing to pietresburg (rather than backtrack to jo'burg) as they would have a europcar branch. we thanked him profusely and parted ways, his final statement to us being "welcome to africa."
so away we went again, but it felt like we crawled to pietresburg (or polokwane, as it's now called) since we were driving well under the speed limit to protect the spare. drove directly to the airport, thinking that was our best bet to find a rental car branch. once there, jeff ran inside to explain our situation and came back to tell me they were just going to switch out the cars. sweet! so we unloaded and went in to do the paperwork, but that's when they realized it was an automatic. all they had were manual transmissions. friggin' a. they called several other branches but no one had an automatic, not even in the next few days. eventually decided we would just have to replace the tires, which would take 30 mins. super. so we went to the terminal (which consisted of 1 gate, 1 cafe, 5 tables and a few benches) to grab a bite to eat and rest.
well, once again - cultural differences. "30 mins" ended up being 3.5 hrs. and that meant that we missed the first night of our safari. no oliphants rest camp or elephants or astronomy game drive. i was so so bummed. i mean - there's nothing that can be done, and i can just hear G in my head saying "don't worry about it". but come on, it was the one rest camp i was most looking forward to since it was far from the touristy areas, plus elephants are my favorite land animal AND i love astronomy and was excited to attend an informal lecture about the southern sky. ah well, such is life. staying positive..
we finally got the car back around 16:00 and hit the road. saw some beautiful sunsets over the mountains, but the winding roads prevented us from really getting anywhere fast. it was already getting dark at 17:30 when we reached our halfway point of tzaneen so we just decided to stop. tried to find our way to the backpackers, but it was off the map we had and we got lost. so just pulled into arborpark lodge and fortunately they had rooms - for less than the night stay at the rest camp. sweet!
booked a room, and jeff wanted real food for dinner, so we set out to find something warm. unfortunately neither of us had our glasses and it was tricky to navigate around in the poor lighting. i was way cranky on only a couple hours sleep, and jeff was not making navigation decisions fast enough for my liking. finally i just said let's go to the pizza place we drove by like 80 times, and that seemed to satisfy him. maybe our brains weren't functionally well enough at this point, but i swear we ordered 2 slices each - though we both got 2 small pizzas each. ugh. couldn't eat most of it so threw it away b/c our hotel room had ants. at least we had a place to stay. so much for kruger day one!
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