Cape Town to Kruger

Well, our last full day in Africa arrived on Friday, August 16. We weren't ready to have a "last day," but it showed up nonetheless. We jumped into the jeep at 6am and took off on our final game drive. There was another incredible elephant sighting along one of the main Timbavati roads. We saw elephants tearing branches off trees and eating them. One elephant -- a super playful one -- kept hitting the sticks off his tusks before shoving them into his mouth. By the way, fun fact (or is it?): Did you know that female elephants' pregnancies last for 22 months (OHMYWORD) I could look at elephants forever. Back at the lodge, we said goodbye to Alex and Theo, who were heading to the Hoedspruit airport. The rest of us had brunch and compared sightings from the morning.  Tim, the kids, and I packed up our bags and took one last look at the watering hole nearby. We saw wildebeests and zebras. We sure were going to miss seeing all these amazing animals every day. They're ha...

By Thursday morning, we had the routine at Kambaku down pat. Up at 5:30am. Over to the main room for coffee and hot chocolate and rusks , and then into the jeep by 6am.  It was cooooold out there in the mornings. Aiden and Moses had gotten a tip from another guide about a pride of lions. And thus, the hunt to find these lions began. Once we left the lodge, we drove quite a way over the Timbavati dirt roads to find the pride. A note about the dirt roads: They were amazing. Also, except for one unique tree and one unique watering hole, I never knew where I was on the dirt road network. I was always so turned around and every road looked like the next. Aiden told us that there were 785 roads in Timbavati -- and he knew his way around all. Each road had a name. The various lodges owned the roads on their property and were responsible for maintaining the roads. Safe to say that dirt roads = mind blown. But back to the lions. We drove to where the lions were last sighted, deep in the bus...

Day two in the bush: We were up at 5:30am. These game drives start early! (Actually, in the summertime, Kambaku’s game drives start at 4:30am because of the heat.) We gathered in the main room for coffee, hot chocolate, and rusks. By 6am, we were back in the jeep with Aiden, Moses, Alex, and Theo.  The morning drive was beautiful and quiet. We watched the sun rise and the bush come to life. Aiden had heard from a guide at another lodge that the baby leopard survived the night. When he shared that news with us in the jeep, we all cheered.  Driving around Timbavati, we saw more elephants and zebras and kudus and wildebeests, which are part of the Ugly 5 (something Moses taught us! The poor wildebeest…they get no love 😂). Others in the Ugly 5 include: warthogs, vultures, marabou storks, and hyenas.  The game drive was again exhilarating, especially when Aiden and Moses showed us a baby hyena den. We saw a couple of little hyenas pop into the den for protection while the adu...

After leaving the farm in Alexandria, we headed for East London, a large city on the southeastern coast of South Africa. East London would serve as the end of our Garden Route tour – and Tim picked it because of its airport access. East London is a big industrial zone, so there wasn’t much for us to do or see. And that was fine, because really, we were there to sleep on Monday night before flying to Johannesburg early Tuesday morning. But we had something else to do on Monday evening and that was celebrate Tim’s birthday! We toasted Tim over a long dinner at a restaurant near to our hotel. Then we promptly returned to our hotel and fell right asleep; we needed our zzz’s before an early morning flight. At 5:15am on Tuesday, we took our final drive in the Toyota Fortuner. There were already a lot of East Londoners out and about – running, walking to work, driving the roads. Flight time from East London to Jo’burg ran one hour. Once we got to the Jo’burg airport, we had four hours to kill...

After leaving Jeffreys Bay on Saturday afternoon, we drove for two hours until we reached Alexandria, a small farming town in the Eastern Cape. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but it’s safe to say we were expecting more than what was there. Even though it was 3pm on a Saturday, Alexandria’s small, local grocery store was closed (it had closed at 1pm). That was a big bummer, as we needed groceries for dinner that night and breakfast the following morning. There was a very small convenience store opposite the Spar grocery store, so Tim popped in there to see what he could pick up. He returned to the car with a few bottles of water, milk, eggs, and chicory coffee – the only coffee available. We would make do! We drove out of Alexandria’s main town – driving through town takes 90 seconds – and up a gravel road. Tim had booked us another Airbnb farm stay, just outside Alexandria. The Airbnb directions told us to turn off the big gravel road onto a smaller gravel road and follow it ...