The week that was
* Trips & Tours
* Ben 10 V3 Tour Day 4 (Series)
* Great South Africans (#5 Series)
* South African Cities (#6 Series)
* Pass of the Week
* Words of Wisdom
Trips & Tours
Swartberg 2020 Tour: As you read this newsletter our tour group will be winding our way through the beautiful Swartberg range. Our Swartberg tours are always popular, so if you missed out on this one, we will be repeating it again in 2021.
Mpumalanga Panorama Tour: Bookings closed
Wild Coast Tour: Fully Booked
Mpumalanga Highveld Tour: 5 places open
Atlantis Sand Training Day: 4 places left.
Ben 10 V3 Tour Report Back (Day 4)
All or previous Ben 10 Tours were run over 4 days. For the 2020 version we decided to build a spare (contingency) day into the programme in case of bad weather or vehicle breakdowns. We had a loose Plan B plan for this day, in case everything was running smoothly. As things turned out, for most of our guests, the spare day delivered a fantastic adventure.
Geudeon van Zyl is the father of the Ria Reabow, owner of the Mountain Shadows Hotel, which we use as our base for these tours. Geudeon, who is a cattle farmer both locally and in the Free State, happened to be visiting during the time of our tour, and offered to "show us around"- and what a day it turned out to be.
Some of our guests opted out for the day and took a drive through to Rhodes to check out the local cemetery (a historical hobby of theirs), whilst others revisited their old family farms in the Elliot area. We were minus 3 vehicles for our little excursion. We departed promptly at 08.30 heading for a tall peak visible from the hotel called Dawid se Kop, which stands a respectable 2515m tall and is frequently snow capped in winter.
Looking at the peak from the southern perspective, it seemed impossible to get up those vertical krantzes, but Geudeon guided us around to the northern side of the peak, all the while regaling us over the radios with fascinating snippets about water arteries in the mountains and the finer points of sheep and cattle farming. We crossed two private farms, which our guide for the day had gone to some trouble to collect keys and permission to cross private land.
[Read more...]
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