helbigadventures.com

We have been out of Africa for a while now, and venturing into China, but I wanted to post a few videos we took of some ‘fun’ moments while still in Africa.

So here you go!  Sorry for not compressing them, if you don’t have a good internet connection this may not work well for you.  Let me know for the future though!

RunningGiraffes

ElephantIsClose

WaterholeLions

You may just want to right click the links and save them locally.

Our 16th Country!

Lesotho is a small country that lies within the country of South Africa.  It is the 3rd poorest country in the world. The Ampitheatre Backpackers hostel that we stayed at offered guided day trips into Lesotho, and since it was windy and rainy outside, hiking in the mountains of Drakensburg didn’t sound like much fun, so we opted for a cultural experience instead.  We crammed into a small van with 12 other people and off we went into another unplanned country added to our itinerary at the last minute. 

We spent the last two days of our South African expedition in an area called Drakensburg.  With stunning mountain peaks and incredible hiking, Drakensburg had been highly recommended to us by several locals as a “must see” destination.  So we drove, and we drove, and we drove some more, and when we finally arrived, we realized that Drakensburg is exactly like Ellensburg, but much, much more rural.  It’s true that the surrounding mountains are beautiful, but unless you have camping gear (which we don’t) you can’t actually stay in the mountains.  You have to stay in the foothills, which are nothing but flat farm land.  It’s a good 1.5 hour drive to get to the nearest hiking trail.  We were literally in the middle of nowhere. Not exactly what we had expected.  But, here we were, and so we made the best of it.  We stayed at a nice hostel called Ampitheatre Backpackers.  They had a fully stocked bar which was the saving grace of being in Ellensburg for our last two nights!  

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We planned to get up early and make a break for Windhoek(Namibia) to catch our flight to Jo’burg(So. Africa) to catch a connecting flight to Durban(So. Africa).  We read in the little manual that the was left in our room to check out the night before if we were paying by credit card.  So, we figured we would try.  The night before we wanted to leave, we went to the reception desk and said we wanted to settle our bill before checkout.  They said it wouldn’t be a problem, and that we could do it when we checked out.  Well, we got up early the next day and tried to check out.  They couldn’t get the card to run, not that it was declined or anything, ‘it just didnt work’.  Of course, they tried for a half hour before we finally had to bail, otherwise we would miss our flight out.  They took an imprint, and we got out of there as fast as we could.  Luckily, we made it on all our flights and made it to Durban as planned.

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Into and around Cape Town…
Jane and I worked on coming up with what our plan should be.  We have near 3 weeks in South Africa before we have to fly back out to Amsterdam, and only know what we are supposed to be doing for 6 of those days.  Those 6 days are in early November, where we will be at Zulu Nyala on a private game reserve doing Safari. 

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