Today we planned for a much more reasonable start to our journey into the park, arriving at the gates at around 9:00am. We didn't intend on staying in the park for as long as we had during previous days and so we thought we would take a route that kept us quite near the entrance gates and not so far into the depths of the park. Our previous exploits had taken us towards lower Sabie and so today we decided to take the first left turn we could away from Sabie and towards the Paul Kruger gate. We saw almost nothing on our last trip, a herd of buffalo and a herd of impala, a baby mongoose and one elephant. The Ellie made up for not seeing any more game because even though he was a musth bull, he did not try to charge us and simply trundled along next to the car for around 20 minutes.
We left the park at around half twelve and headed straight for the tourism shopping centre that Pioneers is situated in, to see if there were any interesting shops there and if we could have lunch. Unfortunately, bar Pioneers, there was nothing interesting there, and we tried to have some sushi for lunch at a seafood restaurant but they had broken their rice machine. We left and drove to the place we had enjoyed our R25 breakfast as they had a brewery there. It was not an actual brewery, it was a bar that sold homemade beers but didn't have any in stock! Dan had a castle instead, and they did make sushi so we each had 8 pieces of rainbow roll before heading home.
When we returned home I wanted to sit and have a few more drinks while Jenny was a bit more active and persuaded me to join her on the trampoline for some exercise disguised as fun. While we were playing on the trampoline a fairly young man and his four year old daughter joined us at the play area. Jenny continued bouncing on the trampoline inviting his daughter to jump with her while I struck up a conversation with him. Turns out he is from Zimbabwe and was more than willing to share his advice about traveling into the semi-tumultuous region. He recommended that we reconsider our route to avoid the Zimbabwean border post Beit Bridge at all costs, which was advice we took gladly. After a while chatting to Heath we found out that he is an electrical mechanic and we asked him if he would have a look at the land rover to see if he could diagnose the cause of its continuous engine problems. We brought the car up to Heaths house and he had a listen to the engine. His advice to fix our troubles was that during the time the car had been left idle before our trip there was likely a growth of fungus in the fuel tank that was now clogging the injectors. What he suggested was that we get an anti fungal fuel injector cleaner that you add to the fuel, and to possibly get the radiator cleaned as the coolant was very brown with rust.
By the time that we had chatted to Heath about the car for a short while it was getting on to dinner time, so we said goodbye and thanked him for his advice. We took the car back to our house and changed to go to dinner at the Pioneers Butcher and Grill for a second night in a row. This time around Jenny and I both ordered the fillet (hers a 200g and mine a 300g) which were by far the best steaks we had tasted in a long time. So much so that we were shocked that our dinner, including a desserts and 2 glasses of wine only cost R350!!! After we finished our fantastic meal we headed home for an early night in preparation for our early departure to Botswana tomorrow morning.
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