Our Three-Week Adventure in South Africa 2
Getting to South Africa
South Africa has quite a bit of everything when you consider landscapes. It’s a beautiful country, but getting there from the U.S. can be a challenge. Unless you can find a direct flight (they’re available but none worked for us), it’s going to be multiple legs. Multiple LONG legs. We think our country is big but the African continent is huge! We flew Qatar Airways and went from Dulles International Airport (Washington, DC) to Doha, Qatar, for our first leg. That’s about a 12- to 14-hour flight depending on direction. On the way over we had a 9-hour layover until our next flight to Cape Town, South Africa. Then the flight was 11 more hours in the air. We left on Saturday, May 29th and arrived in Cape Town just before noon on Monday, May 31st! I tell you this not to scare you off but just to warn you that going there and getting home are the hardest parts of the trip! It’s well worth the effort though and it’s because of this that we decided to stay three weeks. If you’re going through that much to get there, why stay just one week?
Remember, when it’s summer in the U.S., it’s winter in South Africa! At home we had had scorching days to kick of the summer. Temps into the 90s Fahrenheit (32°C+), but the day we left Lynchburg, temps were in the low 70s F (21°C+) which made wearing warm clothes up to Dulles much easier. June can be a rainy month in South Africa, but we lucked out and had only two rainy days out of the 23 days there. Otherwise, the weather was quite comfortable. It was never freezing cold and, in fact, we had many warm, balmy days. #pemburytours #southafrica #southafrican #capetown
My go-to for such travel places is to take a warm but light pullover sweater and a balled up windbreaker. For the latter, my choice is a Patagonia Houdini windbreaker. This combo does a great job of keeping you warm and the Houdini by itself is perfect for cool, damp nights. Balled up into its pocket, it fits nicely in purse or small shoulder bag.
Our approach to money abroad is to charge whenever possible. More cards are now doing this but we got a Capital One card because they don’t charge a transaction fee on every charge. We also have an Apple Credit Card and it has no transaction fee. RE cards, I used Apple Pay with my iPhone about 98% of the time. Practically every merchant, waiter, or vender device accepted Apple Pay payments! Wish that were true here at home! For cash, we confirm that our bank’s ATM card will be accepted where we’ll be traveling then use ATM machines to get cash. I try always to use bank ATM machines. For this service there are transaction fees, of course. Something we did this trip because we were traveling with our granddaughters is to get the 1-month International Service from Verizon. AT&T has the same and the cost for each is about $100. Because of this we could use our phones to text when separated, to call restaurants, etc., and to use Apple Pay.
Check out this map showing how many large countries can fit inside Africa: https://sma.ie/how-big-is-africa-as-big-as-the-usa-china-india-and-europe-together/. #pemburytours #southafrica #southafrican #capetown
Begin reading this travel series begins here!
