13. Go Back To South Africa

Ian and I spent New Year in South Africa.  I love South Africa, it's one of my favourite places to visit so I've been really looking forward to this trip.

It was a bit hectic and stressful before hand as we were a bit worried that because of all the snow in Holland and Scotland that we wouldn't actually make it there.  The plan was to go home to Scotland for Christmas, come back to Rotterdam overnight and then fly out to Johannesburg the next day.  At first we thought that there would be problems with the flight to Scotland because of the snow in Holland but that cleared up in time.  On the day that we were suppose to fly back to Scotland Edinburgh airport was closed in the morning so we thought that our flight would be cancelled but luckily it wasn't.  When we got to Edinburgh it was -11 degrees and still snowing.  There was even snow on the beach at Port Seton!

When we were worried that we wouldn't get our flight back to Amsterdam in time.  Luckily we had already packed and left our bags for South Africa in the left luggage lockers at Schiphol airport so in the end everything was fine.

We decided to go to a new place this time and picked a place called Marloth Park which borders Kruger National Park.  Marloth Park in a conservancy area which means that there are animals wandering freely around and that the properties don't have fences around them.  We rented a lovely house called Khaya Romantica

On the day we arrived we saw giraffe and zebra wandering by the roadside and a huge warthog came to the house, climbed the steps to the veranda and lay down in front of the door.  I was a bit scared of the warthog as it was an older one and had quite big tusks so I ran inside to hide! 

The next morning when I was sitting outside drinking tea a huge bunch of about 30 striped mongooses (should that be mongeese?) came running over the path and then a few minutes later a kudu came to graze on the bushes.  We also had a rock monitor and a water monitor and more warthogs come into the garden (smaller warthogs this time so I didn't hide)