Travel day today.
We had a driver picking us up early (10:00) for our ride to the airport so we decided to forgo the morning game drive. The staff, however, was excited about a ‘special event’ breakfast out in the bush and insisted we attend. We assumed this was to celebrate Christina and Jeremy’s wedding, so we had one of the guys fire up a land rover and drive us to the site. Nothing for the newlyweds, but pretty special – a ‘mimosa and flapjack’ breakfast. Good fun.
Right on schedule our driver arrived at camp and we bid goodbye to the Rockfig staff. Our drive to the Hoedspruit Airport took a little more than an hour. The port is the main access point to Kruger National Park and the Timbavati Game Reserve.
The airport has an interesting history. Hoedspruit is actually a South African Airforce base. In the late 1990’s an unused portion of the base was converted to a civilian airport known as Hoedspruit Eastgate Airport. It was also an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle. Surrounded by game reserves the airport had a huge problem keeping the runways cleared of wildlife. The issue was resolved In the 90’s after the base introduced three cheetahs to the airfield.
From Hoedspruit we flew via ‘Airlink’ to OR Tambo Internation (Johannesburg) was a little over an hour. Our layover in Johannesburg long – almost 9 hours. At least there was a brewery on site! We both slept well on our 16-1/2 hour redeye from J-Burg to Atlanta. Whew. The customs and immigration checks in Atlanta were a breeze and we easily made our connection to PIT. Our luggage arrived quickly as did our Uber to St. Clair.
What a long day & a half of travel! We departed the safari lodge an 10:00a (4:00 EST) and arrived back in Upper St. Clair at 2:00p the next day. 34 hours end-to-end!!