"Winter" approaches

We have a cleaner at the house. Its hard to predict what days she'll come on but she's around probably 3 days of the week. She does the dishes and general cleaning and sweeping although because its hard to know when she's coming I do a bit of the dishes cleaning since I usually need to use them most days. She doesn't do my bedroom and bathroom as she's only here for an hour and then goes to another cleaning job so I've taken on a cleaner of my own. She's through a lady at work so totally trustworthy. I had all my valuables in the room and nothing was taken. She did a fantastic job and spent about 4 hours doing two rooms! I've never spent 4 hours cleaning - ever! She probably took a break though because she asked where the tea and coffee were. We don't have any coffee but I showed her where the tea and kettle were.

Today is a perfect day outside. Estimated 24C with sunshine and blue skies with wisps of puffy white clouds. The weather here has been very mixed lately but nothing disagreeable since the temperature doesn't get cold. We had continuous pelting rain for about 3 days before Easter. So much that the outdoor goldfish pool/fountain overflowed and I'm surprised the goldfish didn't escape. The weather after that was cloudy or raining or muggy and not the crisp sharp lines of a bright sunlit day, like today.

Kruger National Park was a lot of fun over Easter. I thought that it would be hard to get a booking just for the 4 days over Easter and maybe I'd have to do a 5 day trip and take a day off work or "waste" a day sitting at home. Instead they were very flexible and got a 4 day trip on the exact days I wanted. The tour had a great bunch of people from Brazil, Columbia, America, Belgium, Holland, London and local Sth Africans as well. We stayed at a treehouse place which sounded intriguing at the start but not ideal in the end. Some of the cabins are up in the trees but if you got one of those you didn't have a bathroom and had to use the one on the ground which was built minus a roof and any locking doors. I can see why the Brazilian girls decided they couldn't stay there and transferred to a motel.

I was in a cabin that was built on stilts above the ground but not in a tree. I had an ensuite bathroom and thought that was a good swap for not being up in a tree. There were still a lot of bugs, lizards, frogs and one large rat in my room and I was pretty nervous the first night! Slept with the mosquito net around me. The cabin had a lot of gaps including two in the roof that leaked because of the torrential rain on the Friday night! Woke up to find my camera on the table soaked and the display fogged up! I wasn't too stressed as I was going to buy a new one anyway but it would be very irritating if I couldn't take photos on the trip! Luckily it was fine and now the display shows no ill-effects from the soaking although I'm sure that one day it will just stop working. The treehouse was a strange mix of camping and motel accommodation and I'm not sure I would stay in a place like that again.

Being in the country and seeing the stars in the sky on one of the clear nights was perhaps a highlight better than seeing any of the animals on the trip.

Kruger Park itself was good but not great. Comparing it to my Kenyan safari I would recommend that over SA any day! In Kenya they will drive closer to where the animals are without disturbing them but in Kruger they must stick to the roads so if the animal is far away and the grass is long, you won't get good shots. We did manage to see a large number of animals but not the leopard. We saw a herd of about 200 buffalos together and that was probably more impressive than Kenya as we didn't see many then. If you want to see animals and you don't really care that that they're not truly in the wild (ie. they roam but they get fed) then there are some great parks close to Pretoria/Joburg where you can see massive rhinos and lions as well as other animals.