Some things do not work out as planned.
The plan: Drive early morning 6 km from Tugela mouth, put the boats in the Nyoni river and row to the Amatikulu river mouth. Sounds fun and easy. One of the attractions of this plan was that the children could sit in the boats and would not need to walk.
The reality: We spend more than an hour trying to fix the boats before we even get into a car. They are inflatable rubber ducks that have not been used for ages. One boat has two holes, gnawed by mice in storage. Enormous holes. After several attempts to fix these we leave the one boat at the tent. Despite having a very good map of the area that shows even small roads, we spent more than an hour driving in this very rural area on muddy roads without finding access to the beach. The area is lovely; the roads would have been fine had they not been muddy. Lots of huts on the hills.
After an hour we gave up and returned to the camp. The men leave again to find a road. In the end they were gone for 5 hours. The women and children play, ride bikes, swim, play chess and board games, play on the beach and walk about 500 m to the river mouth and back. It is rainy all day, with sporadic rain.
The men went to Amatikulu nature reserve. They drove as far as possible south in the park. They tried walking to the beach in two places. It involved a lot of bundu bashing. They only found a tiny trickle of a stream. It was lovely scenery and total desolation. Just beyond the stream they got stuck and decided we would never be able to get a boat or a child through this.
Amatikulu was abandoned as a plan for the following day – or any other day including children or boats. They were back to exploring the back roads with the map. Their map reading abilities were great, once they found their location on the map, which took about 30 minutes, thye never got lost. They ended up at a game ranger of the Red Hill Nature reserve, a very friendly man who answered all their questions with infinite patience.
Now we had a plan for the next day. We were prepared and excited. We did not do any hiking today, but did important planning for tomorrow. We spend the evening around the fire and laughed ourselves silly at the children’s silly concert. They pretended to do a radio broadcast, white noise and funny accents included. The show ended with the weather forecast for tomorrow. No rain will fall inside the tent- because it had a roof. The other children cracked themselves up about this. It rained again during the night. We are kind of tired of being wet.
Kilometers driven: Too many
Kilometers hiked: Too few
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| Dad braaing |
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| The camp site at Tugela mouth |
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