The day before the big day finally arrived. Even though we have been planning and shopping for almost a month (yes, not very long), we still had a long list of things to do. We went to Cape Gate Mall with Hugo’s brother, Rossouw.
After standing in line at Nedbank for more than an hour Hugo got told that he should have phoned in as they cannot help him with allowing his card to work overseas.
Caro also had to go to Capitec to activate the banking app on her phone, but their systems were offline for almost two hours. At least we bought some outstanding items like Tracks4Africa and a mosquito net.
Back at Hugo’s parents’ house our travel companions arrived with an Uber. Despite their laid back appearance (long hair, sleeveless shirts, tattoos, backpacks and even an Ukulele), they showed up exactly at 14:00 as planned. We ‘met’ Mario and Sam on Couchsurfing after posting about our planned trip. They’re two young guys from Switzerland, which might explain their punctuality.
Our first traveling companions
We packed everything out of the MonkeyMobile (our recently bought Toyota Hilux KZ-TE 3.0 2003 4×4) to make sure that we don’t forget anything, but it was too hot so we decided to first go to some grocery shopping with the Swiss.
We went to Makro and bought food for R800 (excluding meat) which should last the first week. Back at the house we checked everything off our packing list and packed it back in. Everything fits, but 3 clothing bags still need to fit in.
Hugo’s parents prepared a big traditional South African braai and we all ate enough to last almost the whole trip.
After dinner we still had to finish some work and only got to bed after midnight.
Packing list
View our initial packing list here. We will try and update it with what we used or what broke, etc.
Hi Hugo/Caro,
Have been reading your blog. Love it. You mention a packing list, I can’t find it, could you supply it please.
What would you take now that have done the trip and what you would not bother taking.
Kind regards
Hi, thank you, we’re glad you love our blog. You can find the packing list by clicking on the word ‘here’ in the above article under the Packing List heading. I see now that it is not very clear that it’s a link. Also, I’m seeing now that the list is not updated after our trip even though I remember updating it somewhere.