As the birds started singing, we zipped open our tents and slowly woke up. We ate our camping breakfast of premixed Pronutro, milk powder and sugar and packed our daypacks full of snacks.
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The dawn chorus started with offensively loud and persistent quacking from a pair of Egyptian geese – sweet music to our ears. It meant we had survived our long night of terror! As the early morning light blissfully luminated our tent, we unzipped our door, lay quietly and watched the sun rise slowly over the African bush.
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The Lonely Bull Trail is a primitive backpacking trail in one of the large wilderness areas in the northern Kruger National Park.
The trail stretches over 4 days and 3 nights and we had to carry our own tents, water and food and camp rough in the bush, with two armed guides to show us the way and make sure we did not get eaten.
This was the first multi-day hike for all of us and although we did loads of research, there was an enormous and somewhat scary unknown ahead.
My biggest fears:
So with these fairly serious animal and ablution concerns, combined with my track record as a seasoned unhappy camper, why on earth did we choose to do this?
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One year ago, we published an open letter to the universe, putting our travel dreams out there in the hope that they would morph from happy imaginings into something a bit more tangible.
According to Rhonda Byrne, The Great Secret of Life is the law of attraction. The law of attraction says like attracts like, so when you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you. Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think thoughts, they are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to the source – you.
This year, we put Rhonda’s theory to the test and the Universe delivered tenfold. Perhaps not always in the exact form we had imagined, but pretty darn close. So, on a scale of 1 to 17, how did we do?
Back in January, we wrote an open letter to the universe, putting our 2017 travel dreams into writing in the hope of turning them into reality (#17Adventures). Top of our whole family’s list was somewhere tropical. We weren’t too fussy exactly where – it should just be somewhere with warm turquoise waters teeming with fish, white sand beaches and palm trees swaying in the breeze. Although getting a family of five to these kind of places works out tearfully expensive, there was no way that we were going to let minor details like a lack of sufficient finance stand in our way of visiting a tropical beach this year.
To hell with it, we thought…let’s just drive there. And so began our 19 day, 6000km road trip from wintery Port Elizabeth all the way to Mozambique’s tropically warm Vilanculos via the Kruger National Park.
And boy do we have a lot of stories to tell! We saw and experienced so much, its hard to know where to start. After mulling it over, I thought the best way to begin is with a summary of where we went and why, how we got there, where we stayed and what we did.
