South Africa - Round The World Tour 2003 Day 14

Sodwana bay

Wednesday 26th March

It seems the seasickness tablets that we paid so much for at the front desk the other day (R5 per tablet – four tablets each per day) have paid off, as today’s dive was completely nausea free. As an added bonus, the dive this afternoon was a much better one than yesterday with a lot more marine life as well as a more interesting reef environment. We had a good dive master and a good group of people on the dive, again at two-mile reef.

The big news of the day was that our dive master from yesterday was this morning bitten or stung by a Scorpion Fish and had to receive medical attention later in the day after the morning dive. Luckily, he is OK.

We have decided to go on two dives tomorrow with the first being at eight o’clock in the morning and the second shortly after at eleven thirty. We are going to five-mile reef tomorrow morning and back again to two-mile reef (the shallower dive) later.

I called Helen this evening and she told me that she was worried about us after hearing about some political unrest in Swaziland. Apparently there were some problems between the monarchy and the people. We noticed nothing out of the ordinary whilst there. Perhaps we were fortunate. It’s somehow comforting to know that we are still being thought of and that Helen is just at the other end of the phone.

As ever, I’m a little unsure about where we will be going next, after our time here in Sodwana Bay is up. Since beating the nausea problem, we’ve decided to stay another night so that we can get all of the dives that we’ve paid for in. They would have refunded our money for dives not completed but I thought it best that we get an early and rested start to the drive to the next destination (wherever that be) as opposed to on the heals of two exhausting dives. We have a few options. We can either contact Mike’s parents (just North of Durban) to see if it is convenient for us to visit them, or we can head for the Drakensberg range for a couple of days of scenery. It would be too much of a drive to try to make the Garden Route in one stretch which means that we must break up the trip into a couple of days or more. We don’t want to be on the road at night so we are limited to the number of hours of driving that we can do and still have the problem of finding accommodation along the way. We might be able to make it as far as East London in one go but that still remains to be seen.

A lot of people have told us to skip Durban but this mostly seems to be related to the night-time violence that plagues areas of the city. Some of the stories that I’ve heard make me weary of Durban but Helen painted a different picture on the phone this evening. Indeed, the guidebook claims Durban to be a very popular holiday destination. The promenade in particular seems to be a big draw. We’ll see.