Sadly we left Kruger behind and embarked on a 500 Km journey due west towards the Botswana border. 

It was a journey passing by, or through, many townships that did not invite any sort of stop.  Despite numerous warnings to M from many friends about SA cops and speeding, we were unsurprisingly pulled in by ‘Traffic Enforcement’ and told by the first policeman we were doing 79 km in a 60 then the second said we were doing 71 in a 60.  Were they making it up, we think so, but we decided not to argue or aggravate the situation and paid our £20 at the local police station.   Heading back to the main road for our onward journey, we stopped at a fruit shop and the cops looped back to see me for a second time.  This time they just called me over to tell me to get out of town as it was not safe for us in this area.

We finally arrived at our farm guest house only a few Km from the Botswana border and a felt somewhat uneasy at the amount of fences, locks, security patrols and guard dogs that never stopped barking every time a tree rustled.   We had also just been on a big shop and subsequently found out the Botswana government were clamping down on fresh food imports, so we could expect to get all of our dairy, fruit, vegetables and meat confiscated.  M refusing to loose his meat portion to a grumpy Botswanan customs man, had beef for supper and a pound of mince beef for breakfast.

We have crossed many borders by car or foot and this was not the most daunting, but it was well up there. It seems a global trait that if you are not grumpy and or aggressive, you can’t get a job in immigration or customs.  That said, we sailed out of SA and got through the Botswana customs with surprising ease. Customs told us the list of items we could not import, so we put a few tomatoes and apples in the top of our fridge to invite confiscation and K hid the rest.  K had been spying on the severity of the search so she was confident in her hiding ability.  In the end the customs team were so lazy they opened our fridge, saw all the banned items, ignored them and said ‘drive safely sir’.  He seemed more concerned that we had wiped our feet on a wet hessian mat to stop the spread of foot and mouth than importing 10 types of banned food.

Without wishing to offend any South African's, it was great to be out of SA and into Botswana which, fingers crossed, is viewed as one of the safest countries in Africa along with Namibia.