Today we drove from the Cathedral Peak Hotel high in the beautiful Drakensburg Mountains all the way to The Royal Swazi Sun Hotel.
Cathedral Peak Hotel has a world famous buffet which we just had to give a severe testing. The buffet won, but we did manage dishes from around the world.
Molly is begining to struggle with the extra weight this rally is inflicting on Julie and I.
The journey today was one of the hardest on the rally, we left at 8.12 our official start time and did not get to The Ryal Swazi until well into darkness.
During the drive we had another time trial, which Molly cleared again, still no penalty points and therefore still joint leaders ;)
From here we drove along some pretty rough gravel roads to Rorks Drift and the famous battle ground the film Zulu was based around. Phillip Young not only organises great rallies he is also an authority on this moment in history. He gave us a very informative talk the night before about this British disaster. This insight really helped understand what happened. We now need to re-watch Zulu, Michael Caine at his best and without any ‘doors to blow off”.
We then drove from South Africa into Swaziland. The border crossing is managed very well, we pay our 50 Rand road tax and off we go into country number 2.
Its a long drive to the hotel and even keeping Molly above the 110km speed limit we still arrive in the dark.
Driving in the dark in this area is quite exciting, some cars have lights, some have one light, some none at all, some are doing 30KPH and some way over 130KPH, there are street lights but they are a bit like the cars, some work most don’t, and all of this is on the motorway.
When we turn of the motorway it really livens up with crowds of people milling around, some on the pavement ( gravel track) some on the road. Now trying to be all PC :) its quite hard to see some of our Southern African friends at night. Even more so when they can’t believe what they see in the shape of Molly coming towards them and they stand in the road trying to get a better look. Some got a closer look than they probably wanted, but we all survive the ordeal in one piece.
We arrive at the Royal Swazi Hotel to find it is hosting The Swazi Open Golf Championship. It appears to be part of this Championship to drink huge amounts of alcohol and shout about every shot you hit at the top of your voice. As you may be able to tell we are really loving this place, especially when we find our room is over the air conditioning plant for the whole hotel. How do we manage it.
Swaziland itself is really lovely. It appears to be a proud prosperous nation with fantastic scenery a bit like West Sussex with mountains.
They also have lovely policemen, especially the two who pulled us is over. When this happens your brain goes into overdrive trying to remember the speeds you have been doing through the towns and villages.
These two police men turn out to be women, one of which is an Indian lady with a mixture of Indian and hard South African accent.
We got the usual questions - name? where you from? ( so far so good ) where you going, I don’t know so Julie helps out, and then the killer question ‘ are you in a race or rally ??’
'No certainly not' we reply again so far so good. Then it all goes a bit pear shaped when 4 other rally cars pull up alongside ‘to help out’ They see that things are not going too well and drive off again. Thanks guys :) Julie and I carry on chatting with our new official friends and tell them how wonderful the country is and how pretty they look in their uniforms and how shiny their guns are. Think it worked OK, they took a photos of themselves with Molly and let us go. Phew !!
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