Another Day Around Marloth Park

Nobody slept well last night.
Because of the load shedding where South Africa distributes it’s power to where it is most needed all of the power went off at 12:30am and didn’t come back on until gone 3am. This meant no air conditioning in our little oven of a house and also it is extremely stuffy and with no fans there’s not even any air in the room.
Just gone 1am Ellie worked out how to open the windows and pulled the curtains back and atlast there was air but there were lots of strange noises outside and we’ve run out of mosquitoe spray so we got eaten alive. It was a really terrible night and when I got up at 6:30am Pete said his night was pretty much the same, although I had heard him upstairs wandering around most of the night. This is also an extremely noisy house, with creaky floors and every door and cupboard in the place squeaks.
We had nothing much planned today except for looking further around Marloth Park and seeing what the community has to offer and we sat at the breakfast table feeding the warthogs while we all had teas and coffees. It was pretty cool.
Pete had run out of rizlas and weed and as I went to get dressed he went to the shop to get rolling papers and get cash from the atm.
When he returned he said he couldn’t get the cash out until 10am because the needed to count the money in the cash machine, but he did have rolling papers.
Personally I don’t think there was any money in his account whatsoever and Ellie gave him R100 which is £5 in England so he could by some weed from a Mozambiquen guy at the side of the road. To be fair he did get the equivalent amount of weed that would have cost £150 back in England for £5, but I really don’t miss those days of panic when I’d run out of weed, papers or tobacco.
After the weed stop around 10am we visited the tourist information office and spent ages talking to the couple in there about hikes, bike hire and what the volunteers around the community offer and it turns out you can become a volunteer ranger and they will teach you all about the indigenous plants of the area and hold talks on animals a couple of times a month.
Then we went to the shops and we found 2 large convenience stores that stock pretty much everything, a bottle store because alcohol has to be licensed differently. A laundrette, a butcher’s, 2 security companies and hardware stores. This place has everything all within a couple of kilometres of each other.
From the shops we took another small game drive around Marloth park looking for animals and looking at the different style houses. Some of the ones along the rivers edge are absolute mansions. Then it was time to head back home for some lunch.Read more