Day 8 - St Lucia Estuary

Up again at 0600 this morning to put down the tent and have breakfast. 

We spent the morning on the road flying through tiny villages and towns, most of which looked really run down and pretty empty. The houses varied between standard rectangle brick buildings to round concrete houses with thatched roofs. 

We queued about an hour at the Mozambique border to enter back into South Africa. In the end Tshepo paid an official to fast track us to get our passports stamped so we could be on our way. 

At lunch we pulled over to a supermarket in a town called Hluhluwe (try and pronounce that!) and we fought our way through hundreds of people queuing at the ATM to buy some lunch. There was a market that day with people selling things from fresh fruit and vegetables to ducks all caged up on the back of a van. 

We continued our journey through South Africa and eventually drove through a pretty busy, mainstream town with restaurants and bars on either side of the road, we had arrived in St Lucia. We pulled into our campsite and set up camp amongst the large group of Mongoose that had gathered to welcome our arrival. After that we headed off to our Estuary safari. 

Once on the boat, on the top deck of a standard tourist tour boat we set off and then immediately came to a halt. There was a family of 5 hippos lined up near the entrance to the estuary. I’ve never seen hippos in the wild and knew that they were large but even in the water with just their heads popping up, they were huge!! We continued our 2 hour cruise up and back down the estuary. According to the driver there are approximately 1000 hippos just in that estuary and we were lucky enough to see about 20 with about 5 babies who were very cute. We saw numerous crocodiles all basking in the late afternoon sun and watched the sun set across the vast estuary in front of us.

We got back on the boat after our safari and headed off to a local restaurant for dinner. It was nice to sit down and chat amongst ourselves without having to sit in the dark with headtorches to see what we were doing. After dinner and a few beers we headed back to camp and off to bed.... late night for us, we were asleep by 8:30pm!