OK, so, now that I have rambled on for a bit, I must get back to the closing story. Oh, if you have not read the previous bloc (one below this one) I highly recommend that you do so as it will bring you up to speed.
When I last left you, I was at a park gate in Sodwana Bay, tired and hungry and debating (or really more pestering and whining) with some gate guards to let us through without payment so that we could just run in and check out the hotel before we committed to staying there. It was quite late at this point and all I wanted was food and a place to sleep for the night. The gate guys, for guards would be too nice of a term, could not make a decision if we should be able to run in or not. We even offered to leave one of us behind. Well, no deal and we ended up paying the fee to just run in, look at the hotel, find that dinner was already done and we couldn't eat there (everything else was outside the gates) and that there were some additional fees, such as renting the linens and park usage stuff. In any case, we opted to head back out (too hungry to skip dinner) and go to another place we checked out before we went in the gates. Why we tortured ourselves by going there in the first place (the place in the park I mean) you may ask? That is, instead of dropping our bags at the place we ended up going back to. Well, that would be too easy! No really, we had this great vision of sleeping at a place on the beach and hearing the waves crash while we slept but turned out that the hotel was not a hell of a lot closer to the beach than the ones outside the gate.
So, anyway, we returned to the option outside the gate - oh, and the gate guards were gone by the time we went back through - apparently they close and well, if we had waited 10 minutes we never would have had the issue in the first place. Back at the hotel, grabbed a beer, calmed the nerves, ordered dinner and ran across to the dive shop, booked a dive and returned to get some food in our stomachs. I cannot stress how much this helped the mood and the rest of the evening. If I didn't already mention it below, I am quite the terrible person if I am low on food and lose all ability to think, reason or function really and can become quite the pain (no, I am not always a pain for those of you who just thought that!)
Next day we went for a dive out in Sodwana Bay on 7 Mile Reef. It was a beautiful reef with lovely coral and loads of fish, but to be quite honest, not really my best dive. I felt a bit heavy in the water (maybe my weight was off) and had visions of crashing into the coral below me and along with that, my mask was a filmy mess inside so vision was quite poor. We didn't really seem to move much around the reef and with there being 8 of us with the dive master, were continually stopping to look at some thing or another creating traffic jams left and right. Otherwise, I highly recommend this beautiful part of the world for a dive...Just not my day I guess. We did get to swim with a group of around 50 dolphins on the way out to the dive shop. They were lovely darting around beneath us and occasionally popping up closer to get a look at us.
After the dive, we headed down to St. Lucia (also a World Heritage Site) to spend a night and get a little closer to our next destination - The Drakensberg Range. St. Lucia was nice but I didn't get a chance to see much. A couple hours at the beach with my book and a wander around town and that was about it. Wayne went for a couple of runs and ended up in an unsafe animal zone and also came across a few hippos, which is what St. Lucia is famous for. Was hoping to have one walk down the streets like the guide book said but given that the streets were paved and there was a lot of activity, I cannot really imagine that. Had a fab borewoer dinner (local farmer sausage that has some weird spicing going on that tastes great). The sausages are HUGE and you buy them in a large coil that looks a little like a dead skinned snake.
So, the next morning, after a little Curio shopping (craft shopping) we carried on up various minor highways to the Northern Drakensberg. We stayed at a place called The amphitheater that looked out at a sheer face of mountains called The amphitheater (funny that). A thunder storm was just about to start when we arrived so we were quite keen our bags out of the car and into the room. Alas, that was not to happen. The check-in girl was quite the blabber mouth and felt the need to go on and on and on about everything that we could do there. She was interrupted several times and ran off to answer the phone, then delayed us for a new guest and started her story all over again (sigh). We tried to escape at one point saying that we just wanted to get our bags in but she would have none of that and pulled us right back saying we would get our room information in a minute.
Of course by the time she was done with her various stories and tangents, it was pissing down rain. Got a bit wet brining in the bags but given that we parked the car right in front of the door of the room, it was not too bad. We were rewarded after the storm with a beautiful rainbow and that lovely deep purple grey sky that comes after a storm and right before the next one moves in. The mountains were incredible and created a wall all along the skyline.
The next day we headed off to hike Sentinel Peak, which is where (supposedly) the second largest waterfall in the world is located and the highest in Africa. However, before reaching the hiking point, it was imperative that we pick up more sunscreen. I was already a bit pink with lips that had blistered from the sun and salt walter and had no intention of adding more pinkness to my body. Well, try to buy sunscreen in an all black village...not really too easy. The best we could do was factor 23 - not water proof or sweat proof! Once we acquired that, we headed off a dirt road to the starting point of our hike.
And at that, it will have to be the ending point of my bloc today. The airline has just called boarding for us and I must run. Hope to update again in the next couple days once I have another computer and my feet are back on the ground.
PS - again sorry for spelling mistakes etc.
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