I believe I managed to get a couple of hours sleep, Mona had perhaps a hour in total so we were somewhat sluggish as we tumbled through passport control to pick up our luggage. Following the signs didn’t do much good and after seeing the same bag pass for the third time I felt that probably our luggage didn’t make it despite the promises of the luggage guy. Then Mona appeared with our bags and a smile, the bags had just been placed on the wrong conveyor belt 🙂

We found the pick-up van labeled Viva Safari and a sign with “Maria Karlsson” and said hello to a couple from Hong Kong, Chen and Alice. Apparently a bunch of other guys were scheduled to join us but their flight was late so off we drove. We stopped for lunch at a fast-food restaurant(?) with the wonderful name Wimpy’s. I was slightly surprised to find that they had vegetarian friendly offerings – however that was you were able to get the hamburgers without meat, for as far as I could tell the same price. I had a dangerously colored milkshaky-thingy together with some chicken wraps instead.

We continued the drive as the others joined (and had to eat in the car), they spoke German but said their flight came from Stockholm. They spoke fluent Swedish, always a good thing to know in advance who would understand any well-timed comments about the War. After a good drive of about 6 hours in total we reached the lodge of the others. We switched car and had a quick nightly game drive to watch the sun set as well as caught a glimpse of what we were about to see in Kruger next day.

After the nightly game drive we got in the car again to head towards Marc’s Treehouse lodge where we would spend the upcoming days. We arrived, ate some rice/chicken/vegetable stuff and as we walked to our Treehouse we almost stepped on a black snake. It wasn’t that big, perhaps 40-50cm and quite thin but still, we watched it wriggle and then saw another wriggling body, brown this time, approach the first one. We were fortunate to be able to watch the snakes start a amazingly fast fight, going at each other and attempting to tie knots. At some point the brown one got the upper hand though and did a good ol’ “I’ll swallow you piece by piece” at the black one. They kept twisting/rolling but the black snake slowly bit by bit disappeared in the brown one.

The very long day was finished with a well-needed shower. The shower and bathroom were some bamboo walls with water and electricity somehow working there. The wind was blowing up and not far away was a intense lightning storm so while showering one would see the sky above light up in flashes every half a minute. After the very nice shower we crashed in our awesome awesome treehouse…