Friday, Sept 7th (Posted Sept.20th!)

Our time in the Kruger National Park had come to an end, it was time to move on. As planned, the two groups split up and Vic, Carol, Chris & Linda left in the hired SUV to begin their journey to PE via a little town called Clarens in the (what used to be called) Free State. They had a 600K journey to make and would be skirting the Lesotho Mountains on their way.
Alison and I traveled in Ted Turner’s car with Diane and we drove back to Joburg, about a five hour journey arriving at Ted’s home at about 1.30 PM. There’s all sorts of construction going on around Joburg in preparation for the 2010 World Cup Soccer which SA is hosting. They are even building an underground “Metro” or “T” from Joburg to Pretoria and there is lots of blasting going on and they close sections of the freeways while they blast. It is a mess and nobody we met thought they would be ready!
I mention this because we had been held up on our journey into Joburg and there were big traffic jams around the airport. Consequently, we left the Turners in very good time to get back to the airport (where there is more construction going on). That evening we flew from Joburg to East London (150 miles east of Port Elizabeth) and were met by our long time friend Barry Murphy whose son Shaun (see earlier post) was getting married the next day. Barry took us straight to Miranda’s (his daughter) house where a “pre wedding braai” was in full swing and where we met the rest of the Murphy family, including the groom, whose first question was “Did I bring the fishing reels?” I should mention that that the World Cup Rugby championships are in process in Paris and the SA team (Springboks) are currently unbeaten and gave England (who won the championship four years ago) a real hiding. This Friday night was the opening game of the championship, so there was a crowd of guys gathered around the TV at 9PM. We retired to Barry & Anne’s house, joined by his other daughter Belinda who came in from Cape Town for the wedding. It was a lovely reunion with our very long time SA friends.