Sun 20 March – Off to Antelope Park

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Today was a long day of travel. It started with getting up at 6am to get to our plane in Johannesburg for Harare. We were a little concerned at the route the GPS was taking us, through a bunch of back streets that were only 60km/hr when we knew that we should be able to use the motor way. After awhile we pulled over to double check the route to make sure it was in-face taking us to the airport and not some random suburb. After we were satisfied that it was taking us to the correct place off we went again.

Once we were on the motorway there are lanes marked with a plane outline which makes it a lot easier to ensure you’re in the correct lane etc.

The hire car dropoffs weren’t marked very well at all and we came to a split with probably 15 names on it and had to physically stop to find the correct lane. After safely dropping off the hire car we tried to check-in with their kiosks. It took about 10 attempts before it’d accept our credit card against both of us and then it wouldn’t scan our passports. So we abandoned this idea and went to the normal check-in counter. With tickets safely in hand we now had quite a few hours to kill. Johannesburg airport is quite modern.

We boarded our plane on time and off to Harare we went. We arrived safely at the airport and then needed to purchase our visas. There were two pay for visa lines but turned out that one was the actual pay line and the other was the we stick the visa to your passport line. This was quite confusing and a lot of people got caught out queuing in the wrong order.

This took a good 45 mins to get through with a relatively short line. We grabbed our bags, went through to the arrivals area and were greated by Simba from Antelope Park. We had to wait a few hours for 3 others that were flying in. After everyone had arrived we headed off on our 3 1/2 hour drive, with a quick stop off at a local supermarket to buy beer supplies. 5 hours later we arrive at Antelope Park, given our room keys and setup with dinner. The food was great and we were so hungry having not really eaten since 6am.  Then it was off to bed to crash for the night.