The journey begins...

After a great couple days catching up with Paul and Colette, on Tuesday 16 September we fly out of Perth for Johannesburg. We arrive slightly ahead of schedule, and on our way through customs and immigration we chat to a girl that Mariska knows from World Vision, who is going with her mum to volunteer for a few weeks at an orphanage in Mozambique.
Our driver meets us at the airport (this is not a place to catch a taxi!) and we head to Amadwala Lodge, an hour's drive through the unending sprawl and development of Johannesburg. We spend the first two nights at Amadwala, meeting the other members of our Intrepid tour group, and we also visit a Johannesburg shopping centre which is an eye-opening experience.

The rapid modern development in much of Johannesburg is contrasted with a couple of shanty towns we drive past, where thousands of people live in a mess of corrugated iron, dust and garbage. Many of the inhabitants are Zimbabweans and Malawians who have come in search of a better life, but unemployment is high and so living conditions are terrible. The class divide between blacks and whites is wide - black workmen walk hours to work whilst newer cars are invariably driven by whites. But this is not so shocking as the attitudes still held by some (I stress some) of the whites towards their black brothers. We see some black employees treated terribly by their white employers, and one employer has the gall to refer to the black population as 'monkeys' in our presence. The apartheid regime is gone on paper, but it will clearly take longer for the attitudes of many to change.

Thursday morning and we're up at 5:15am, and the tour truck is packed and we're on our way just after 6. We battle our way through the Jo'burg traffic, heading for Kruger National Park about 9 hours drive away. On the way we visit Blyde River Canyon, the third largest canyon in the world. It is spectacular, with sheer rock faces rising from the river into mound-like mountains shaped like village huts.
Finally arriving at Kruger in the late afternoon, we take a quick drive around before setting up camp. The park is huge - some 19,000 square kilometres and 350km from north to south - and is home to literally thousands of elephants, lions, zebras, giraffes, buffalo and other wildlife. There is no shortage of animals to be seen here, and in an hour we spot giraffes, elephants, zebras and many others. Whilst the park is fenced, this is as close as one can now get to seeing them in their natural environment. It is a spectacular sight to see an old bull elephant feeding just 10 metres from our truck!

Back at camp (a fenced area separate from the animals!) we set up the tents and cook dinner - pork chops and warthog sausages with potatoes cooked in the coals. The group gels and we settle in for our first night of the tour.