Brian's South African Travels

  I am writing this blog on my penultimate flight from Dubai to Melbourne before catching my last flight back to Tasmania tomorrow morning.   It’s a 12-hour flight, I wasn’t going to write a blog for the second part of my trip but this will burn some much-needed time. Our travel group left Kruger National Park nice and early and made our way to Eswatini, this was a 6-hour drive to the border crossing.   This was a whole new experience for me and I had never crossed into another country via a car/bus before.  ( Wales but doesn’t count lol ) We jumped out of the truck, got our passports stamped and walked over to another building where we got another stamp. The truck met us on the other side and we were officially in Swaziland. We would spend a total of two days here.   The group arrived at the Hlane National Park camping grounds around 3:00 p.m. and set up our tents, I was like a fish out of water and Patrick our driver noticed this and came to my rescue and pitched my tent in minutes,

  As I write this blog, I am watching the sun go down in Hlane Royal National Park, Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. I am looking over the watering hole and there are hippo’s, a number of impala and numerous animals I can’t name. This is only a hop, skip and a jump from our camp site, it’s all very surreal and a beautiful experience.    We started our Intrepid Kruger & Coast tour in Johannesburg, I arrived 1 night earlier and had a full day to fill in before meeting our group that night at 6:00 p.m.   I decided to do Atholl Parkrun, which was only a short 3 km from my hotel, I caught an Uber as this is safest way to get around South Africa. I am not going to lie, it was great opportunity to get a win at an International Parkrun, the course was more like a trail/cross country race with numerous hills and was situated at 1700m altitude which would be about 10 seconds per km slower on a sea level course. I ended up running 19 minutes for the 5 km distance, it was a prett