Stories From Our Suitcase

Day 1: We woke up this morning in anticipation of our 3 day, 2 night mokoro trip in the Okavengo Delta. After gathering minimal supplies, we waited for our ride to pick us up and take us to the boat landing. As the 4x4 truck pulled up, there was quite a bit of clunking and sputtering. We loaded our supplies and then tried to get going. Unfortunately, the truck wouldn't start. Jeff and some other guys tried to push it into a jump start, but nothing happened. After a mechanic working on it for a few minutes, they got it started. We started driving down the road and the car wouldn't go higher than second gear. Our driver decided it wasn't safe to drive the 45 minute drive (half of it in a 4x4 track) there. We stopped on the side of the road and radioed for a new vehicle. Our new vehicle was an opened backed truck and our driver wasn't messing around. He took that 4x4 track and laughed in it's face. After a lot of bouncing around in the back and a few bugs in both my e...

Sunday, August 14th:   After our week in Kruger National Park, we headed north into Botswana.  It took us about 1 1/2 hours total to exit South Africa and successfully enter Botswana.  We drove roughly 9 hours to the Rhino Sanctuary, where we spent the night.  The campground check-in office was right off of the main road, and then you had to drive back to your campsite.  Considering our car's size, Jeff checked with the staff to make sure it would make it back there.  They assured us it would, so we set off for our campsite.  About 30 seconds into our drive we found that our poor Picanto was bottoming out in the sand drifts and didn't have enough power to plow through.  It got to the point that I had to get out and push so that Jeff could get the car out of the sand (please note that we weren't supposed to get out of our car because there were rhinos in there).  We struggled to get back to the check in area as four-wheel drive vehicles zoomed...

After two very long flights, we both made it to Johannesburg, South Africa. Since we took different flights, the next challenge was to find each other at the airport. Luckily, we landed in the evening and we were on two of the last flights for the day. Jeff was waiting patiently for me outside of immigration with our baggage. We somehow fit everything into our little Kia Picanto, which would be our wheels for the trip. After quickly adjusting to driving a stick-shift on the opposite side of the car, as well as the opposite side of the road, Jeff got us to our hotel for the night. The next morning we stocked up on groceries and camping supplies for a 5 week road-trip and headed out on the road towards Kruger National Park. It took about 4 1/2 hours to get to the entrance of the park. Our drive was quite interesting, as we passed our first shanty-town and saw more hitch-hikers in a 4 1/2 hour drive than I have total in my whole life. The Kruger National Park is the second-largest ga...

Welcome to our blog!  I have been meaning to do this for awhile now, but I just haven't gotten around to thinking of a name or a good reason for rambling about our life.  Well, I figured a trip to Africa and a two year stint in London might be justification for it! I will be posting soon with details about our trip, because we haven't had time, since internet has been extremely slow and limited.  Also, we figure since we have gathered so much information about traveling from other blogs and posts, we would share some of our insight and tips for traveling around Southern Africa, as well as visiting London. Stay tuned for future posting... Amanda & Jeff