Durban to Hermanus - the longest journeys ever!

Well firstly what I forgot to say in my last blog about ST Lucia was that I got bitten by a spider!! I have been totally freaked out for the past week. I went to deliver a school uniform to one of the children, Sfundo on the monday and sat on the grass outside his hut taking pictures etc when I felt a bite - didnt think anything of it - next day it was a bit of a mess so just thought id been scratching it during the night! put a plaster on it with cream end of my worries! oh no, thanks to the generosity of Andrew and others at the house, they decided to tell me as a wind up that it looked like it could have eggs in it!! then they said it looked like a spider bite with eggs in it!! AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! barely slept that night with thoughts of these hideous things running out of my leg!!! anyway it seemed to get a bit better and then went to see someone (actually it was to have a pedicure so i could have pretty feet for just a few days - im shallow i know!) and she said what happened as it looked like a spider bite! OMG! completely freaked out. it is healing thankfully, no eggs or hatched spiders thankfully but yuuuuuk!!! i hate spiders more than anything. not good.
anyway enough about my phobias which also include ghekkos and chameleons - not good with the scurrying stuff! im now back with Sam - ahh bless I hear you all cry! we met up in Durban with me having had a bit of a fright at the airport. A lady asked how I was getting to my hostel, so I said probably taxi - Apparently no - i couldnt posssibly go in a taxi alone it wasnt safe - she said I should use the bus but as I didnt know where the bus went or how to get to the hostel then that wasnt safe either!! well what the F am I going to do! i took a risk, jumped in a cab and thought do i hide on the back seat or just be brave. I was brave and got to the hostel, wasnt mugged or shot - pheweee!
Sams good and thankfully not as tanned as me which was my main concern, obviuosly her welfare and safety whilst overlanding was too but hey! we had a curry in the evening as thats the thing to do in Durban, shed been shopping! im trying to restrain her but its to no avail! next morning we got the BAz Bus (mini bus)at 6.45am to Port Elizabeth - just a 13 hour drive so thats not too bad!!! luckily there were only a handful of us in the bus so we had some space to move. but I think if we had hired a car and driven it would have taken us half the time - it took the driver 2 hours to get out of Durban as he seemed to be running family errands!! Not as bad as the journey from PE to Hermanus which whilst only 10 hours or so, the driver put on a DVD called Eight below, all about a team of huskeys that had to survive a winter alone in the antartic, with them dying and being attacked, not my kind of film, i put my MP3 on but could still hear them howling - i cried! hate films about animals getting hurt! not a good choice, then he put on 40year old virgin which was hysterical but we had to get off for our drop off before the end - typical!
anyway back to PE, nice place, weird hostel we stayed in!! the lady had just taken it over and it was in a dodgy drug area bit like thetford really! We had dorms to ourselves and then we realised, well i realised - im 36 years old and sleeping in bunk beds!! ive regressed! anyway we had a mooch about, got one of the crazy taxi buses just outside the Norwich fabric shop! we went shopping for a bit in the black only area -or so it seems but we kept saying hello to everyone because we didnt want them to tthink we were the stupid white south africans! who really are vvvv stupid and incredibly ugly alot of them!! clearly you shouldnt be white and live out in the sun of Africa for a few hundred years - it doesnt do the skin anygood!
In the evening we thought we would head towards this AFrican bar that was on the map, the lady (by now we had worked out was a hick, with hicksville friends who sat about drinking castle lager all day) said no, it wasnt safe! but that we should go to the Stage Door pub just up the road so long as we were back before dark because it was such a dodgy area! with this in mind we legged it to the pub, or as the lonely planet describes it a rough and seedy place! they sell rooms by the hour and this is noted on their menu which also whilst only having 4 food dishes on it, says that if you want good food dont eat there, if you want good service go somewhere else! there was sawdust on the floor but there was championship league football on so....! we had omelette although we wondered whethe they may have drugged it and then we may be sold as women for their hourly rooms but thankfully, it wasnt! then we realised it was nearly dark - this felt like the moment out of I am Legend film, our watches beeped and we had to get back in time before god knows what happened!! we did actually freak ourselves out a bit by this thought, well mainly i did! anyway we managed to get in the door just as the sun set! no from Dusk til Dawn moments! phew.
we then left the next day with the intention of staying in Plettenburg Bay, but then when trying to arrange our baz bus from PB to Hermanus for 3rd ready for Death with great whites on 4th, we were told there was only space for 1. rethinking and alot of money wasted on the mobile and we decided to skip PB and head straight for Hermanus, which was a blessing despite the long journey and sad movie!!PB had a teen end of term rave on so maybe not quite our thing!!
Hermanus is fab. had a few beers in the bar of the hostel with some guys and then listened to some guy snore through the night in our mixed dorm - and for those wondering yes we were in bunks again!! i get the lower bunk, think Sam thinks it safer for me so i dont have so far to fall out!! anyway today was amazing, Hermanus is the place to watch whales from the coast, so we did, we went for a 5 hour coastal walk (yes with some sunblock although one foot is defintely darker than the other and sams backs a bit patchy but we have time to fix all this) and we saw several Southern Right Whales including mums and calfs, within 100m from the beach. fantastic. pictures are crap as its too hard to capture just what we saw. I kept high fiving myself much to sams annoyance i think - but OMG how lucky are we!!! This is definitely the life. It may be the end of my life by tomorrow as we go Great White Cage Diving at 7am, Sams now joining in the fun or not so much fun as horror tomorrow. Her main fear is getting in the wet suit which if thats all she is worried about, im sure she will be fine. Im slightly more concerned about getting bitten in half by the GW but well, what a way to go!! so fingers crossed and will let you know how it goes. SOrry but this is so definitely the best decision ive ever ever made!!! x

Durban to Hermanus - the longest journeys ever!

Durban, South Africa