I knew I had to check the tire this morning but to get to the tools was asking too much of me. So I asked the driver of the Funky Monkey safari truck if he had a spanner for the wheel handy and to my surprise he couldn’t find it. What standards do these operators of safaris have, I don’t know but the guy was not African. Needless to say one should check out their operations before making a booking with any of them.

We were uncertain where to head for upon leaving, either Johannesburg or South. I went on the internet to check if we had to go back to Johannesburg to catch a flight to KL but didn’t have much success. Alison, as far as I could tell was not in favour of going to Johannesburg, after all the stories she had heard about the crime rate there. Her thoughts must have been more disturbed after seeing signs of gun shops and firearm training just outside of Funky Monkey. I suggested we go to a travel agent on the way out and find out about flight arrangements. Unfortunately, we could see that most of the shops were closed and we opted to go south.

My Mayban card works with certain banks only, one of which is Ned Bank and we found one. We needed cash for diesel as so far all the petrol station would not accept credit cards. In that respect Malaysia is more advance than S. Africa. One up for Malaysia! We needed a detailed map of S. Africa which we had to ask for as they were not on display in the petrol kiosk.

Just as we were leaving Nelspruit I asked Alison to take some pics of the city and she complained that she could only do one thing at a time as she had to read the map. As she was taking the movie I thought she was being reckless with the camera and told her not to be an ars….e not expecting a violent response. A violent response was what I got! She said that I was being rude to her, for Christ sake!

The view driving out of Nelspruit was nothing short of spectacular but I had to enjoy it in silence after the bust up. We needed to find a place to camp for the night quite early as though there are plenty of lodges around they don’t accommodate campers. As we approached Piet Retief we found a camping site almost immediately and decided to stop at the Sundowners Lodge and camping. It had nice facilities, a large garden for Adrian to run around in and a place for brai.