Skint Adventure

After an epic 4595km trip around the country, the road trip has finally come to an end. It's been a fantastic journey and one that we will remember for the rest of our lives. However, as covered in some of the posts, things didn't always work out according to plan. So, for people who may be planning a similar trip, here's a little analysis of what worked and what didn't. In case you haven't read it, here's the post on some of the planning we did before the trip . Let's get to it. Data Connectivity Having data connectivity got us out of some sticky situations, especially when we were looking for last minute accommodation. The Huawei modem was a lifesaver, it worked pretty much flawlessly. As for the networks, MTN performed pretty well. There were some areas that were complete signal blackspots, but overall, it worked. Blogging Blogger itself is a nice platform. Unfortunately Blogger's mobile app is, well, a bit rubbish. It's really old and in desp...

It was meant to be an 8 hour drive from Ficksburg to Kathu but, as with most of this trip, things didn't end up as we expected. We are now driving into the Northern Cape. The lush green hills slowly disappear to make way for barren desert. After about 7 hours of driving we stop at a small town to fill up the car. As we pull away, our phone directs us through the town. We expected to be sent back on the highway, instead we were being directed to a long dirt road. There was no way the car was going to be able to do this, we would have to crawl through it and if we were to break down, there probably was very little chance of being picked up. I checked the map, we were miles off course. We must have taken a wrong turn a couple of hours back, and the phone was desperately trying to get us back on track, even if it meant going through hostile terrain. We decided not to take the dirt road, instead we got back on the highway where we were going to get to the nearest town, Upington. From t...

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 suppl...

Today we decided to wander out in the rain and explore Knysna town centre, which as it turns out is only a 5min drive from where we are staying. Score! Since it wasn't really beach weather, we decided to check out the local attractions instead. Knysna central has a bit of a weird setup with a couple of local malls within walking distance of each other and mostly outdoors.  Needless to say that the outdoorsy malls left us quite wet and longing for a nice warm cuppa. While wondering around Knysna mall we came across a quaint little store called Dinky Cakes. This place epitomizes cupcake heaven and I fell head over heel in love. Aside from the delicious cupcakes, they also sell a variety of niceties and tasty treats, such as milkshakes, date balls, cute pink stuff, coffees, sandwiches and my personal weakness, Coconut Ice. With such a wide variety of cupcakes to choose from, Kaif and I found it really difficult to decide on just one cupcake each, some of the flavors included: KitKat, ...

That's us, the crazy ones :-) Hello and welcome to Skint Adventure. I'm Charné , a South African and my hubby Kaif is a Brit. We moved from London to Cape Town nearly two and a half years ago and have been calling Cape Town home ever since. During our time here we have seen some of what this beautiful country has to offer, however since we will soon be moving back to Europe we decided to take full advantage of the gorgeous landscape and embark on a road trip of epic proportions around South Africa. Skint Adventure is our little travel blog where we'll be sharing stories from our journey. The initial concept and planning for our South African adventure began way back in August 2014. Our list of stop-overs was extremely long at first and the toughest part was having to scale down and crossing some gems off our map (Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, etc.). The next challenge was coming up with some kind of budget for this trip, we've tried to be as frugal as possib...