It´s october and the weather is already rainy and cold here in austria. Winter is coming. This would bother me a lot, if I would not be packing my suitcase for the next trip to South Africa at that very moment.
Yes, I am going to South Africa again but this time my girlfriend Anna will be with me. (#whothefuckisanna? Here you go: ) For her it will be the first „big“ journey and more important: the first time to Africa! So someone is going to be infected with the well known „Africa-Fever“ 😉
So as Anna did not do such a journey before, she asked me to set up the list of things to bring with us so she won´t miss out on anything. As you might find yourself in the same situation sometimes, you can download and print out the list at the end of this post.
As you will find out when downloading the said list, all these things are quite a bit to carry around but as there are about 30kg of allowed checked baggage at most flights, this will not be a big problem at all. And you know what: Its NOTHING compared to what I will be carrying as carry-on luggage this time.
If you have read my previous blog-posts, you already might have questioned yourself: „will he be carrying that bazooka-lens he got some time ago with him to Afrika?“ …well YES I will. That comes with some „limitations“ for my flight but hey – its worth it!
Which Limitations am I talking about? Well here are some:
- The carry-on luggage on emirates flights is restricted to 7kg. My Lens has got 7,2kg on its own. (Yes, we will be flying with Emirates again)
- As the lens is as heavy/heavier as the weight restriction allows: I can not take anything else with me as carry-on luggage.
- 7kg are quite heavy, especially if you are carrying it around Airports for hours and cant use obvious „Nikon“ labled camera-bags as you do not want to get robbed at arrival in Johannesburg.
- Try getting through security with that thing withour being asked 200 questions and forced to do a explosives-test. (Spoiler: no chance)
You might think thats not worth the effort but I am sure you will be thinking differently seeing the resulting pictures in future posts 😉
So when will we be flying? What did we have to plan in advance of the trip? Here are some things + their costs we needed to take care of:
1) Transfer to the Airport:
Sure the plane wont pick us up at home, so we decided to take a FlixBus (If you do not know whats that: Read this). Why? It is cheap, there is wireless lan (its a 2hours drive) and its guaranteed that everyone has a seat (not as it is with trains).
That 2hours trip will have to be done two times as we also will take a FlixBus back home when we come back from Africa.
So this will cost us 23€ per person/per trip means 92€ in total.
2) Flights
So you will agree that flights are quite an important thing when going half around the world so we where looking for „cheap“ flights on the Internet again. We (again) ended up with booking at Emirates, as I liked their service quite a lot the last times I was flying with them.
The bad thing about their flights to South Africa: They are all routed via Dubai. This means 4hours of transfer and waiting at Dubai Airport. Although, this saves us money and so we will „only“ pay 650€ each, means 1300€ in total.
3) Car
As we will be doing this journey on our own again, there will be no tour operator and therefore no car. So we again will book a car with Avis. Here we will be taking the Toyota Fortuner 4×2 again as I really loved this car last time.
As our trip will last for 11 Days, this will cost us about 700€ (around 63€ a Day).
4) Lodge/Hotel
We ill be staying at a apartment at South Africa, so we where looking for an cheap but good Deal online. We found a place like „Meerkat Manor“ which we will try and write about later on this blog. When asking them for a fridge they already upgraded us to the apartment for free (we where thinking about a room for 2 at first) so it could be quite a win.
Talking about costs this will be even cheaper than hiring the car. This will „only“ be about 470€ for 11 Days.
5) WildCard
We first thought about buying the WildCard (Thats the „entrance card“ everyone needs to enter Kruger National Park) on the Internet, but had to realize that they have not yet be able to set up a working online-shop, so we decided to buy it at the entrence.
Costs for this card will be (as we will take the „Couple WildCard“) around 238€ (1 Year subscription).
So that quite everything we (and propably you sometimes) will need to start our journey to South Africa. We will be back with more when our trip starts.
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