When most people think of Africa, they think of big game: lions, leopards, elephants, and the like. Somehow, we made it through our first three weeks in Africa without seeing anything more exotic than a monkey. ¹

Accordingly, after leaving Johannesburg, we set our sights on Kruger National Park, arguably the most famous game reserve in Southern Africa. We left Johannesburg late on a Friday afternoon but, because of Kruger’s popularity on the weekends, didn’t want to arrive until at least Sunday morning. We conferred with our guidebooks for potential sights between Johannesburg and Kruger, and discovered the Blyde River Canyon in Mpumalanga’s Drakensburg Escarpment.

Our guidebook referred to it as “one of the world’s great gorges,” and we whole-heartedly agree. The gorge was almost indescribably beautiful: rolling green mountains studded with rocks, and beautiful, fog-filled valleys. In some places, the fog was so thick that it felt like we were driving through a cloud, and so we skipped some of the vistas where we wouldn’t be able to see anything more than a foot in front of our faces (we were also running a bit short on time as the drive had taken longer than anticipated because of some “extreme potholes” along the route).

We stopped at the Bourke’s Luck Potholes and the Three Ronadavels, both of which took my breath away. Frankly, the area was so incredible that I can’t believe we hadn’t heard of it until we found it in the guidebook.

Where We Stayed

On Friday night, after we left Johannesburg, we stayed the night at the Old Mill Hotel in Machadodorp. After having spent most of the day at the Apartheid Museum, we had left Johannesburg in the late afternoon, and quickly discovered how dark the road gets, especially when it is raining.² At a rest area along the toll road, over a meal of fast food (shrimp wrap for Marc, veggie burger with an excessive amount of peri-peri sauce for me), we used Kayak to find the Old Mill Hotel and called them to verify that they had a room.

When we pulled up (after driving around blindly in the darkened town, having realized that the hotel was not located where Google Maps had pinned it), we saw that it was advertising itself as “Accommodation, Restaurant, and Gaming.” The restaurant was closed (good thing we had had that fast food) and the gaming turned out to be a couple of video slot machines in a smoky bar, where the guy that rented us the room was tending bar. The accommodation, however, was clean, comfortable, and, most importantly, got us off that dark road at night.

As we discovered in the morning – when we were finally able to see our surroundings in the light of day – the area around Machadodorp looks like a high mountain plateau in the Rockies, or as our guidebook described it, the Scottish highlands. This resemblance has not been lost on the South Africans, who introduced trout into the streams in the area, which is now mainly known for a fly fishing destination.

On Saturday night, after we toured the canyon, we stayed at Hazyview Adventure Backpackers. We only wanted somewhere to rest our heads before heading off to Kruger at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, but the place turned out to be a lively spot with a restaurant packed with locals and a live band (an Afrikaner band which inspired table-dancing among the locals and covered The Doors), a bar (where the friendly staff charged both of our camera batteries), and cool backpacker accommodations including tents with permanent beds and a pool. Our earplugs came in handy, as the revelers continued long into the night – but, if we hadn’t had the early wake-up call for Kruger, we would have joined them.

¹ I’m referring solely to land animals here – on the dhow safari, we saw plenty of interesting ocean life.
² In retrospect, planning to make our way east over two hundred kilometers, all after 5:00 pm, on our first day driving around Africa was probably a poor decision.