Robert's Travels

The eighth day of the tour began at a reasonable 6:00 with a wake up call. We got up, showered, packed, had breakfast, and were the on bus just before 7:30. This was set to be a long day of driving - our destination was Johannesburg and there were 400 km of road between us and it. The beginning of our drive followed the Panorama route, a series of fantastic natural views in the Mpumalanga province.

We left Hazyview and settled into the bus. I continued reading “Death’s End” while Todd started reading a James Patterson novel. It was about an hour drive to our first destination - a lookout point named God’s Canyon. This viewpoint looks out over the Drakensberg escarpment. It was slightly hazy when we arrived but we were still able to see the gorgeous panorama of the valley below. This stop was a quick one, and about fifteen minutes later we were back on the road.

Our next stop was at the Bourke’s Luck Potholes in the Blyde river canyon. It was about a half hour past God’s Canyon, and the scenery on the drive was fantastic so we spent the drive watching the countryside roll by. Once we arrived at the Potholes we learned that we had an hour to explore the area. We started by walking down to the river and then explored around. The potholes are named after to the shapes left in the rock as the Blyde river cut its way through this canyon millions of years ago - it reminded me of the inkpots in Johnson’s Canyon in Banff. We were able to explore the riverbed upstream of the first waterfall; we were also able to use a series of interconnected walkways and bridges in order to get a great view of the canyon itself. The sun had come out and it was starting to heat up as we walked around, and it was an all around great stop.

After the hour we returned to the bus, which then drove us a short distance up the road to the Three Rondavels View Point. This viewpoint gave us a view out over the Drakensberg mountain range. This was probably the most spectacular of the three sights we had seen; we were greeted by a sweeping vista across the river valley below and a series of mountains in the background. It was almost pointless to take photos, as no camera would be able to capture the immensity of the sight, but I tried none the less. We spent about half an hour here taking in the sights before getting back on the bus and continuing on.

The drive continued for several hours. There wasn’t much to do but read and watch the scenery fly by. Once we left the Three Rondavel’s viewpoint the countryside smoothed out and there wasn’t a ton to see. We stopped at Dullstroom, a small town in the Mpumalanga province for lunch shortly after 13:00. This town is notable for several reasons: it has the train station with the highest elevation in South Africa, and it known for having great fly fishing. Trout, in particular, is quite good here. We learned this secondhand while visiting - we didn’t do any fishing! The stop for lunch was scheduled to be about 90 minutes. We had lunch with the Aussie and Finnish friends we had made; I ordered trout and it came as the full fish (including the head!). I had never eaten a full fish like that before, which was an experience, but the fish was quite good. After lunch we wandered through the town - it was quite small so it didn’t take long for us to explore it.

We got back onto the bus around 14:30 and continued on to Johannesburg. There was not much to see outside the bus - there were a number of farms and grain silos, and for a good part of the drive it felt very similar to driving on the prairies. Every once and a while we would see a set of large cooling towers on the horizon; Belinda explained to us that these were cooling towers for coal mines that are in this area and are not for nuclear reactors (as they could have easily been mistaken for). We also saw some controlled brush fires right beside the road - this appeared to be the way they cleared grass off the median of the highway. I finished reading “Death’s End” shortly after lunch, and spent some time on the drive working on my coding project. Our tour guide, Belinda, also discovered that my birthday had been a couple days prior, and she gave me a hard time for not letting her know.

We arrived at our hotel in Johannesburg right before 18:00. We were staying in another Protea hotel, the [Protea Fire & Ice!]](https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/jnbmr-protea-hotel-fire-and-ice-johannesburg-melrose-arch/). We checked in, then went for dinner. We had pizza at the Piza-e-Vino pizza restaurant a block from our hotel. We took a quick walk around the area, then came back to the hotel around 20:00. I wrote down the day’s activities, then we went down to the hotel bar for a highly recommended milkshake. I had the Elephant’s Trunk, which was an Amarulla-based milkshake, while Todd had a fruit gummy one. They were both delicious. We went back to the room and relaxed and were in bed by 22:00.