South Africa

Second day in South Africa - Pretoria
Alarm set for 7.45. A huge expensive breakfast waits for us downstairs in the hotel. The room is full of young teenage boys from a sport team in Argentina. We decide to sit and have our breakfast outside, in the “peaceful” garden where you can hear the car running outside, the loud minivan carrying around people and the people talking loudly in the streets.

After breakfast we pick up our bags and we are ready to drive to the cradle of humankind! Huge expectations and tons of energies with us.
The drive is easy and pleasant, we put some music. The roads are large and straight. At some point it starts raining heavily and we are happy to be inside the car.

We arrive to the caves and we are welcomed by the guide that invites us to buy the tickets and start visiting a small museum dedicated to the human history and than start the tour of the caves at 11.00
The museum brought us back to primary school, learning the different kind of “homos” and observing the creation of the earth.

At 11.00 we start the tour. The guide is a funny guy that tells a lot of interesting stories about the Stone Age, about the anatomy of the first men, about the explorers that found the fossils. The caves themselves are not that interesting. The only remarkable part is a 60 meters underground lake that according to the guide is longer than 50km and no one knows how deep it is.

After the visit at the caves we move to the museum. A perfect experience for families with children, we found it a bit useless.
A trip on a boat (amusements park alike) explains you how the earth was created, and after that an exposition teaches you everything about Stone Age and evolution. In the middle of the exhibition the electricity shout down. Everyone stayed calm, put out their phone and lamps and kept visiting the museum. We wondered if that’s something they are used to. We looked around a bit worried, nobody came to say something about the electricity. We kept going around, but soon enough we got bored and tired and we left the museum.

We are now back in the car, direction: botanical garden.
Once there we immediately look for lunch, is now 3pm and we don’t eat anything since breakfast. We find a small bar with tables under big trees and a lot of little birds jumping around. We order a sandwich and a big smoothie.
Happy and recovered after the food, we start exploring the park. We are looking for Tassies, small chubby animals that live in this area. We found tons of them walking around and enjoying the sun. We manage to take a lot of pictures.
The garden is nice! There is a waterfall and a lot of plants and birds.

After checking the garden out from our list, we move to the shopping center where the Hard Rock Cafe is situated. Fuffi collects her t-shirt and we buy a 5 liters bottle of water for the trip of tomorrow.

Is now time to decide the plan for the evening. We would like to go some nice place to have a walk or to drink something, but we are a bit scared by the experience of yesterday. We decide to check the area of the university by car. We drive around for a long time, in the end we find a street with some restaurants and bars. We decide to leave the car in a guarded parking and then we go exploring. My head is now exploding for headache, I’m tired and not hungry. The place apparently has only fast foods that don’t look so interesting.
In the end we find a bar decorated with hearts for valentine that seems quite fancy and upper class to be safe enough.
We enter for a cocktail and we order some appetizer. The cocktails are really nice, the food is good and the boy that serves us is really nice and interested in our trip and our life in Europe. He chat with us a while and says that he hopes we will meet again. Happy and tired we go back to the hotel. Is now time for a shower, some phonecalls and a good night of sleep.Read more