Nelspruit/Mbombela

Today involved a mightily long journey from Johannesburg to Nelspruit to the farm where Shaun and Karen live. Shaun maintains all the machinary on a massive orange, avocado and macadamia nut farm, and they live on site. The place is absolutely amazing from our point of view, so lush and green. The perfect place for a kid to grow up, too. At the moment, Carl's neice, Lindsay is here as well. Lindsay is technically Miranda's only first cousin, but there is an age gap between them of 23 years! Lindsay is now married to Gerhard, and has three kids, Olivia (nearly 5) Abigail (15 months) and Gabriel (5 weeks!). So poor Karen has a houseful of babies!

Our journey should have taken us four hours, and would have done if it weren't for South African roads. These parallel Peruvian roads in their ridiculousness. The main free way out of Joburg has four lanes in either direction, and seemingly no speed limit. Worse, no one has any sense of lane control either, and we were frequently overtaken on both sides at once, which was more than a little unnerving. Outside Johannesburg, it got worse: two lanes in either direction, again with no lane control but also, no central reservation, so if you wavered over the painted line just a fraction, you could end up hitting a truck coming head on at 120kmph!
Of course, this sort of system invites accidents, and about 20 miles outside Nelspruit, we got stuck. We never found out exactly what happened, but whatever it was involved the police, ambulance and a massive tow-truck to remove the cars involved. And then they closed the road. Everyone still on the road (ie, us!) just had to sit there and wait for it to clear. We moved about 100 yards in 45 minutes!!! Aaargh. Poor Miranda had been asleep while the car was moving but woke up as soon as we stopped in the traffic jam. She was bored and hungry and had filled her nappy, and was highly pissed off. Her pissed off cry is deafening, but there was very little we could do about it at that point!We eventually got through the accident zone, and then promptly got lost. There is a new road, built for the World Cup stadium over the summer, which completely bypasses Nelspruit, and once you are on it, you can't get off. And there are no sign posts at all because they are trying to change the name from Nelspruit to Mbombela, and all the signs say Mbombela and we didn't realise it was the same place. And of course, my phone was rapidly running out of batteries, so we couldn't call Karen for directions for longer than a few minutes. And it was getting dark. And Miri was yelling her head off....

Once Carl had realised we were on the new road, he exercised his right as an almost-local to Insane Driving, and did a U-turn on the dual carriage way (sometimes the lack central barrier is a useful thing!). We randomly found a drive-thru KFC and parked there, tried to pacify Miri, and got Shaun and Gerhard to come and rescue us! Turns out we were incredibly, frustratingly close to where we needed to be, and that this new road actually cuts through part of the farm!! Never mind. We were welcomed with beer and yet more braai (exceptionally good boerewors!), and all three kiddies. Last time I saw them, Olivia was only 18 months old, and the other two hadn't even been thought of. Olivia is now a beautiful, sweet little girl and very much her own person, Abi has the most expressive face I've ever seen on a toddler and lovely spikey strawberry-blonde hair, and little Gabriel looks so tiny and sleepy in comparison with Miranda who is only 3 months older than him. Surreal. Miri seems fascinated with her new cousins though and got over the trauma of the long car journey very quickly when she had been fed, changed and became the centre of attention again! I think she will enjoy her stay here.