South Africa – Saint Lucia

A colleague of mine suggested we would go to the Wetlands, because the nature reserve was great. So, why not?

Since we had been out of WIFI, and therefore internet, reach for several days, we could not use Booking.com to find a hostel. We normally use it to filter out the hostels which are below par. This time we couldn’t.

You know, it’s not difficult to see hippo’s in Saint Lucia (a few of them walk through SL every evening), monkeys? Easy. Crocodiles? Possible. Good hotels? Dream on, babe. Most of them have easy business hours and coming into town late is a problem. Well, we found one with the beautiful name Jo-a-lize lodge. The rooms were extremely small and a little damp. Did I mention there was 1 (one) program on tv? And that the rooms are small? And that the staff is an expert in not being friendly? I had the common sense to ask the frontoffice lady if the AC works because it’s important when it’s more than 32 degrees. Yes, it does. Ok, Ok, the rest is not that important then. We’ll sleep. NOT. Ofcourse the AC didn’t work .So back to the lady. Did I mention the business hours? Nobody there. F%ck , F@ck F&ck (remember the RSA has eleven official languages, so I should say fuck in a few more different ways). No sleep that night.

The next day was hippo day. If you ever want to see hippo’s come to SL. You go into the estuary by boat and within two hours, you have seen more hippo’s than you like. Luckily, there are a lot of birds as well. The rest of the day can be spent of the beach. It is magnificent (no irony here). Swimming is out because of the currents, but the beach is great.

After complaining we got a new room for the next night. Unfortunately, there were more creatures living there (which we saw in the evening). Cockroaches the size of my car, but that would be a bit overstating it. They were, however, about 10 cm. Look at the picture, if you don’t believe me. Remember the business hours?

The next day would be photosafari day. I’ll let Nonna talk about that in her next story.