Long drive to Cape Town

We reluctantly left the desert (again, reluctantly) to start the long 3-day journey toward Cape Town and our flights home. Things are much less interesting from tarred roads than from sand and gravel. We are still on vacation, but the melancholy of it coming to an end started as we moved closer to highways, cities, and airports.

Day 1: 670km from Sesriem to the Fish River Canyon
We camped at a gorgeous spot at the park entrance, narrowly escaped loosing our coffee to a resident baboon, and drove out to look over the edge. (Fish River Canyon is second only to the Grand Canyon. It didn't have the depth the colour or the size, but it was huge. The river was only a trickle and dry in many places, so the really amazing thing here was how it could have carved out such a deep, wide canyon.) The big perk of Fish River was getting to see quiver trees at close range.

Day 2: 720km from Fish River Canyon to Cistrusdal

It took 2 hours to cross the border back into South Africa, and we didn't even have any problems. That was normal bureaucracy about moving cars over the border and not taking food into South Africa. We kept driving for too long, and ended up arriving in a town at dark. I neglected to read that the campsite I picked was another 20km+ down some dirt road. We didn't have a print guidebook for the Cape, so we went to the first inn we found a sign for at the main road in town. Fortunately, it was clean, affordable, and had space - a kooky old place that felt like being in someone's grandmother's house.

Day 3: To Cape Town without a proper map or GPS
We headed off to the city, hoping we would find our hotel. Our GPS had conked out about a week ago, so we weren't sure how this would go. We were lucky. We checked into our nice (if not particularly African) hotel with a rooftop bar overlooking Table Mountain and reluctantly handed the truck back to the Bushlore rep.

With a day to kill in Cape Town, we decided to mark the end of our trip with a visit to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was kept for 18 years as a political prisoner. We had to go as part of a guided tour, with all the drawbacks of guided tours (such as being stuck on a bus with too many people wearing too much perfume, spending too much time on things we're not interested in and not enough time exploring what we really want to see). Still, it was moving to see the conditions these men worked in for so many years, for the sole crime of wanting to be treated as human beings.

We're now on our long way back to Canada. 2h from Cape Town to Jo'berg. 8h in Jo'berg airport. 17h45m from Jo'berg to Atlanta. 21/2h in Atlanta on account of missed flight. 2h to Toronto. 1 day in Tillsonburg. 5h from Toronto to Vancouver. Only 3 1/2 days.....