Day 5 - From Livingstone / Zambia back to South Africa to Pretoria

July 2, 2019

Today we can sleep in for a change.

After breakfast, we calmly pack our suitcases and take them to the reception.

The 3 days at Victoria Falls in Zambia are already over. Today at noon we will go back to Johannesburg. We spend the morning again on the terrace by the Zambezi.

At 11:30 we take a taxi to the airport, our South African plane takes off on time at 1 pm towards Johannesburg.

Beforehand, we watch the plane land and the driver of the 'stairs' seemingly cannot decide where to drive with it. The spectacle lasts almost 15 minutes until the stairs finally arrive at the plane on the runway after its wanderings.

Unfortunately, this time I did not get a window seat, but the kids tell me what there is to see.

Shortly before three in the afternoon, we land in Johannesburg. After we have our luggage and have gone through immigration, we pick up our rental car at AVIS. Just like in the Australian Outback last year, we get a "Toyota Fortuner 4x4".

Great, we already know it and hopefully we can operate it - and just like in Australia, on the "wrong" side.

It takes us a while to leave the Johannesburg metropolitan area via the highways. We reach Pretoria around 4:30 pm and drive directly to the Union Buildings and the corresponding Union Buildings Park.

The view of the city from up here is great.

In the distance we also see the Voortrekker Monument, which we want to visit tomorrow.

We walk through the park, visit Nelson Mandela, who is standing here as a giant statue, and then walk back to the car through the park.

The street vendors who sit everywhere on the wall, approach you and constantly chase after you, already annoyed me a lot on the bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Get out of here quickly!

Pretoria only serves as an overnight stop, so we don't really have anything planned except for the view of the Union Buildings.

Therefore, we drive directly to our booked hotel (Manhatten Hotel) and we are glad that we don't have to get off anywhere anymore....

The hotel is ok, nothing special, but clean and the family room is very spacious. We enjoy the shower (which is more comfortable here than in Livingstone) and then book a table in the restaurant. Tonight there is a big buffet and since we don't feel like leaving the hotel again tonight, we stay here. The buffet is really great and (almost) everything is very delicious!

There are also some African specialties that are unfortunately too spicy for us in some cases (e.g. tomato-chili soup)

In the room, we watch some TV before we fall into bed. Tomorrow it's time to get up early again!