Unexpected Welcome

Many people told us that "there is nothing to do in East London", and they were pretty much right. The place is barren and sparsely populated, but that didn't bother us as we had a long drive ahead.
The drive from East London to Durban was estimated at 8½ hours. Given the conditions of the roads yesterday, we were looking at potentially 12 hours. So we wasted no time. We woke up at 5am and got ready to do the drive.
The road was thankfully a lot better than yesterday, however there were a lot of roadworks along the way which slowed us down a fair bit. We took the journey in 3 hour shifts which worked well.
The main thing that struck me about the road was how impressive it was in scale. The N2 winds up into the mountains and through forests. It really is one of the most gorgeous roads I have ever been on. After around 12 hours we hit Durban, and things didn't quite go according to plan...
Durban was in complete darkness thanks to power cuts from the national supplier. All the traffic lights were out causing chaos with the Saturday night traffic. Add to that some horrifically humid weather. It certainly was not what we needed after a 12 hour drive.
Another bit of advice we got from people was "don't go to South Durban, it's a bit dodge". So we headed off to South Durban as that's where our next bnb place was. We drove into the car park of a massive, crumbling block of flats in pitch black darkness. We had to get the torch out as we navigated up to the 4th floor to get to our room (elevators were out due to the power cut). As we entered the flat I shone the torch on the floor and spotted a cockroach which quickly ran back into the darkness. Then, another cockroach ran from out under the couch. We spotted another in the shower and even one in the toilet. Within 2 minutes we'd spotted 5 of them. The place was infested.
The wife and I looked at each other, we were both thinking the same thing, "we need to find another place to stay tonight". So we got back into the car (in the pitch black car park) and searched for a hotel for the night. We rang around and most places were either too expensive or fully booked. Finally, after about 2 hours of searching, we found a place. They only had one room available and it smelled of damp. But, at least it was cockroach free!
We finally got to catch up on some well needed rest.