#Nature

I’ve been dreadfully uninspired lately, struggling to think of anything I want to blog about despite having a long list of great ideas (many of which you, my readers, provided in September). I’m finding it hard to feel positive about life at the moment. But on Saturday Thorsten and I got the chance to visit Indwe Park, an indigenous garden and sculpture park in Braamfontein, and I knew I had my topic for today.

Our recent visit to St. Lucia was a stop along the way to the final destination of our KwaZulu-Natal road trip: Mtunzini, a coastal town off the N2 highway, where we spent five days hanging out on near-empty beaches and wandering through tropical forests.

St. Lucia, the tourist town along South Africa’s northern KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) coast – not to be confused with St. Lucia the Caribbean island – has near-mythical status among South Africans. The town is completely surrounded by iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is famous for its ubiquitous hippos, who spend most of their time in the St. Lucia estuary but are also known to stroll about town at night.

As mentioned previously, Thorsten and I (a.k.a. “the Blogitects”: one blogger + one architect) recently got back from a roadtrip to the Northern Cape to celebrate my 50th birthday. I had never properly explored the Northern Cape, South Africa’s largest and least populated province, and passing the half-century mark seemed like a good reason to finally do it. After overnighting in a retro Campovan in Kameel, our first stop in the Northern Cape was Augrabies Falls National Park.

The Drakensberg Mountains fly under the radar in South Africa’s tourism scene. Everyone goes to Cape Town and the Kruger and the Garden Route, but the Drakensberg doesn’t often make it onto that “must-see” tourist itinerary. Even I’m guilty of neglecting the Drakensberg; I’d dipped in once or twice over the years but had never done a proper Drakensberg weekend until last month, when Thorsten and I stayed in Royal Natal National Park’s Thendele Camp and did the Tugela Gorge hike. Now I’m appalled at myself for sleeping on this spectacular part of South Africa for so long.

Those of you who follow me on Instagram may have noticed I’ve been hiking a lot lately. I’ve always loved to hike. But for some reason – maybe because I now have a car that can take me to any hiking trail in South Africa – I’ve started wanting to hike a lot more. So when Ezemvelo, a privately owned nature reserve less than two hours from Joburg, invited Thorsten and me to come check out their hiking trails a few weeks ago, I was excited to check it out.