Day 2: Flying to Hoedspruit

I landed in Johannesburg around 10am Wednesday after yet another sleepless night on an airplane and had about two and a half hours to reach my connecting flight to Hoedspruit. See, since my initial ticket to South Africa had been so cheap, I had decided to splurge on a connecting flight instead of doing the long, slow drive over to Kruger.

In the arrival hall, I managed to look just lost enough that some airport employee sidled up to me and asked if he could help. This was my third time here, so by now I was getting used to how things worked. However, I was tired from a long flight so instead of telling him to fuck the fuck off, I graciously allowed him to take control of my luggage cart and to show me the Vodaphone store where I purchased no less than 20gigabyte of data capacity (and 110R worth of talk time) all to be used in 30 days.

I paid for this privilege with money made from the sale of various items from the estate of my late father; stuff I was entitled to half the proceeds of, but which I had no hand in actually selling, so it felt like free money. This tells you all you need to know about my insight into economics.

Anyways, I left him with a small fortune and pressed on to my gate. Here, the board first said there was to be a 25-minute delay, then a 90 minute-delay. When we had waited for about half an hour, the doors out to the buses opened and we were herded onto one (they can't even get their delays right in this country). Soon thereafter, we were on our plane to Hoedspruit (and again I eminently jumped the queue to be among the first to enter the plane). A quick one-hour flight later and we landed, seemingly in the middle of the wild. I counted no less than four families of warthogs grazing along the runway and the terminal was a fairly small collection of buildings.



I soon got my suitcase and then my car from AVIS and was on my way north towards Phalaborwa. Now, I don't know about you, but personally, I get a tingle up the old leg when I'm driving down the road and see a triangular warning sign, but instead of the usual moose or deer of my native Norway, there's a hippo or an elephant. I really need to get one of those to put up at work… I reached Phalaborwa without any excitement besides a couple of wrong turns solely due to missing road signs. As in, the metal pole was there, but the sign on top was gone.

My place for the night turned out to be a nice house with several rooms; mine was at the end of a hallway and sported a bathtub and a fridge. I asked my host for a restaurant recommendation and she even called ahead to book a table for me at the Bushveld Terrace Hotel. Dinner turned out to be a return to the food orgy of my first visit to South Africa two years ago. A 300g slab of grilled beef with camembert cheese on top and cranberry juice, with the meat so tender and juicy it was pure heaven. In fact, it was so good that I even ate all my veggies, and let me tell you, that's not a common occurrence.