We are back to the USA of Africa, South Africa!!!
The moment we crossed the border the extreme difference of South Africa to all the countries we had seen in the last almost 5 months struck us immensely, it felt like entering a different planet.
First of all, the map changed from having one clear road to follow to a spider-web of roads, so many options and all tarred! Apart from that, the roads are overloaded with cars, all of them! Driving on a 4-lane highway was a clear shock to the system and after 2 hours we needed to break and recover.
From being the or one of the fastest on the road we end up here being the slowest, even massive trucks fully loaded with 20 or so cars overtake Cruisi on the highway while the poor engine is struggling to keep up with a ambitious limit of 120 kmph.
There are petrol stations all over the place, no more thinking and calculating whether we can reach our planned destination with the full tank or whether we need to fill up jerry cans. For the first couple of days we thought that there was a fuel shortage in South Africa because cars were cueing at most petrol stations we were passing, it took us plenty of kilometres to realise that there are simply more cars that need to refill than anywhere else, no fuel shortage whatsoever!
Its incredible how quickly one can forget and adjust to a different way of doing things.
We do not have to be planning our stops anymore but whenever we get tired we just stop at the closest campsite as there are so many around. With the festive season coming up and many people being on holidays already the campsites are pretty full.
It is quite interesting to swap from being the obviously wealthiest people around to feeling like the last gypsies. It is incredible the level to which those people here have taken camping! Apart from the amazing campsite facilities like having access to 25 meter swimming pools (!), washing machines and driers, boiled water on demand, firewood and even a sauna once it can become something like a campsite hobby to stroll around and marvel over the facilities people bring with them (one of our neighbours was
doing so completely unembarrassed with binoculars...)! Amongst the top of those (excluding TVs, play stations and freezers) rank air-conditioning (not joking), garage tent for the precious car and automated ventilators to get the fire started (blowing seems way too much effort). 
So obviously we have the most basic things, the oldest and dirtiest car, we don’t speak the same language as 98% of the people up here are Afrikaners and on top of that we seem to be the only people out of the sometimes up to 100 (!) on the site that are braaing butternuts and potatoes,
no meat (and no, not even chicken), which seems to be the biggest sacrilege of all! Despite all this once people are not too inhibited anymore to speak to us they are all really nice.In the same way we had somehow forgotten the level of development and non-Africanism of South Africa we had also managed to put on the side of our memory how incredibly beautiful and diverse South Africa is! We feel really happy in a way to be back and have the opportunity to discover parts of this country which we had not seen before and which make us love it even more and travel with such an ease.
We entered South Africa in a region called Limpopo, nobody ever told us that this is an area worth visiting and so we did not expect much of it, the greater our surprise was of how beautiful it is here.
It is very mountainous and full of dense pine forests; it feels much more than driving through Europe than anything else. By choosing country roads, after experiencing the shock of the highways, 
which of course are also tarred with two lanes, we reached wonderful little villages that could have been any little place in the Eifel of Germany. We found amazing campsites next to rivers full of trout (Forrellen) amongst the pine trees. So strange!
We discovered the cutest organic farm making their own cheese, and inevitably went for the first wine and cheese feast in plenty of months. This is definitely one of those things that reminds you that it cannot only and always be routes adventure!
After leaving green Limpopo we entered the rather monotonous but nevertheless beautiful Free State.
Farmed land and cattle grazing fields as far as the eye can see for kilometres on end. In our 4 years in SA we had not visited the famous Drakensberg so we did so now and it was truly worth it.
The Drakensberg is the highest mountain range in Southern Africa and a UNESCO world heritage site. All those impressive green hills and escarpments, the rivers, gorges and rock pools make you feel more like in Scotland than anywhere in Africa. The perfect place for hiking! We spend a couple of days here walking, acclimatising and surprisingly enjoying the finishing stretch of being back 
P.S. The baboons’ policy people follow here in Kwazulu Natal (a district of South Africa) is quite different than the rather friendly approach of Cape Town!
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