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South Africa again!
The border crossing from Botswana to South Africa at Martins Drift proved uneventful except for receiving a warning that we were not supposed to have petrol in the 4 jerry cans on the trailer (fuel is much cheaper in Botswana even though it comes from South Africa!)
Biting back the urge to point out that people have died in Botswana due to a lack of fuel, and that no information is provided either side of the border about what you can or can't bring in, I apologised profusely for my stupidity and ignorance and we were through, with the fuel.
With a hazy plan of making our way to the northern section of Kruger National Park we drove across the Limpopo province and right past the gates of Mapungubwe National Park, not a park we had heard of before. We decided to stay a couple of nights and are very glad we did. The campsite, on the banks of the Limpopo (big river this!) was brand new and for once, everything worked, including the hot water. The setting was beautiful and we went to sleep each night listening to baboon troops squabbling over territories.
Mapungubwe or Hill of the Jackals is the burial site of an Iron Age culture that flourished here between 1020 and 1290 AD. It is significant in Southern African history because these people went on to build Great Zimbabwe, the more famous stone ruins in Zimbabwe. It is also significant because the grave of a queen here yielded several gold artefacts including a small golden rhino with one horn, inferring that it was traded through from India (African rhinos have two horns). We learnt all this on a 3 hour guided walk with Moses, one of the most enthusiastic Parks' guides we've come across on our trip.
The other gems in this lovely little park are the sandstone outcrops which make a perfect backdrop for the game viewing, the tree top walk that takes you 500 metres through the canopy to view the Limpopo River (still not flowing here) and the Confluence viewpoint where the Limpopo is joined by the Shashi River and where South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe meet.
The icing on the cake in what turned out to be an all too short stay was a visit to a waterhole near our campsite. Most waterholes on our trip have yielded a Blacksmiths Plover, possibly a jackal but b*gger all else, this one yielded a herd of elephants swimming, drinking and mud bathing, so close we could almost touch them. (I was going to write "so close you could hear them fart" but Angela reminded me that our readership are quite posh, not sure who she was referring to though?) It was a magical half hour, shared with no one and not captured in photos or video, as we didn't take the gear with us.
Suffice to say after this national park gem, staying at the Forever Adventura Resort, Tshipise on the way to Kruger was a culture shock. It wasn't the 400 caravan pitches, 80 chalets and 14 bungalows that shocked us, or the 60 motorbikes of the Harrismith Harley Davidson Hells Angels weekend gathering, it was the fact that it was nearly full and we were easily the youngest people there! We'd found where the Gauteng (Johannesburg and Pretoria) pensioners come for winter. They are drawn by the winter discount rates, the warm weather and the hot springs.
We were drawn by the proximity to Messina, our last reasonable sized town and chance to stock up with food and alcohol before our 3 week trip in to northern Kruger!
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