The South Africa roadtrip 2009

We left on London on Friday bound for Johannesburg.  The 11 hour flight was relatively pain free, with hardly any of the usual turbulence on the route across Africa.  Traveling with BA was quite a change from the poor customer service and meals which have been provided by SAA of late.

Arriving as Johannesburg 'OR Thambo', the aircraft docked at the new international area.  Walking to terminal A1 took forever, worse than the rabbit warren that is Gatwick!  My trip through passport control was painless, however Mike's was another story.  I waited 45 minutes for him to get through.  There's absolutely no reason for processing passengers taking so long.

After we collected our luggage from the baggage reclaim area, we headed off to collect our rental vehicle from Europcar.  We were assigned a Nissan X-Trail, something I'm not happy about, after the cost of the rental and what we were expecting to receive - something to battle out with holidayautos.co.uk.  After leaving the rental depot and taking the car on the open road, we both noticed that it wasn't clean, being covered in a thick layer of dust internally, and the leather covering the gearbox area had come loose.  A matter to be addressed later!

The trip from Johannesburg to Durban was anticipated to take 5 hours, however it ended up being 8, after taking it easy through all the roadworks and not aiming to be another road statistic.  I think I did pretty well with all that driving after the flight, considering I watched 3 movies en route too!  After collecting the keys to the apartment (23ilala.com), we made our way to the local shopping mall, after taking a drive through the eco-estate, to stock up on some provisions.

Before having a braai that evening, we headed down to the pool and did a few lengths.  It had been quite a hot day with temperatures reaching 35 at times.

Sunday turned out to be a pretty relaxing day, I didn't get up particularly early, with Mike popping his head in around 9 to see if I was awake.  We had a leisurely breakfast, followed by me trying to fathom out what is customer service at Europcar in SA.  We made our way out to exchange the X-Trail for another and then took a drive around Durban.  The stadium for the 2010 World Cup is quite impressive and dominates the skyline of Kings Park.  The drive was followed by a late lunch at Spiga and a trip to Gateway.  Unfortunately I seem to always forget that things shut pretty early and Sunday hours meant that we weren't able to make the most of time available to us.

Mike wasn't feeling so good in the evening and lay down for a bit whilst I made dinner.  I decided today that I would start blogging again, not having done so for quite a while.  Piggybacking on a weak connection to an unsecured network in the vicinity has meant that I'm able to post this blog.