After our stop in Mossel Bay and our first wildlife experience in the Botlierskop Game Reserve our trip continued into the famous Garden Route Nationalpark. The Park consists of three sections, Wilderness, Knysna and Tsitsikamma.
Unfortunately I wasn´t feeling very well during that time. That´s why we could not hike that much and our accommodation was actually the highlight during these 3 days. We booked into one of the many Africamps here in South Africa. Africamps is some kind of Luxury Camping or Glamping or whatever you want to call it.
This is not an ad, we do not get money from them or free accommodation, we simply fell in love with the idea of it.
Funny how clean our car still was at that time
Africamps is a franchise and the concept is pretty easy. You will mainly find them on huge properties like farms or wildlife reserves. It always consists of up to 10 Luxury tents and you will either have a big pool or your own wood fired hot tub, depending if it is a colder or hotter region.
They´re also fitted with two bedrooms, a huge bathroom with hot shower as well as a fully equipped kitchen, a barbecue and a fireplace insight the tent.
This was the AfriCamps at Oakhurst, which is a big dairy farm not far away from the small town of Wilderness. I´ll give you a little tour.
Since every tent has 2 bedrooms there is easily space for a whole family or even 4 adults, but for us two it was like a castle. It´s super clean and very comfortable and you even got electric blankets for the colder nights.
But the highlight here definitely is the wood fired hot tub. This was one of the main reasons we´ve booked it. In our imagination we were laying in there at night with a cold drink and watching the stars...and this is what we actually did all 3 nights :)
One night we also made a Braai which is the South African Barbecue. It´s not really worth it to fire up a barbecue for two persons but its a must while camping.
I forgot to mention that where there is a dairy farm there are also cows and they were directly opposite of our tent.
Although I did not feel well we went on a hike on the second day. You´re not in such beautiful nature every day so you try to get out as much as possible from it.
The walk that started near a campground is one of many in this Nationalpark and actually it is a pretty nice one. We were walking under trees most of the time and it wasn´t really that hot but I was feeling so weak that day that we could not even made it to the end. It bothered me a lot as it was leading to a waterfall that I really wanted to see.
Anyway we tried and it was nice, see yourself.
We also saw lots of wildlife on that walk including the Vervet Monkey a little snake and some kind of antelope. Unfortunately I wasn´t quick enough to capture one of them. Anyway, there will be lots of wildlife on my blog in the coming days/weeks. So for now you have to be satisfied with pictures of the wonderful river.
All in all it was a really nice 3 night stop although I did expect a bit more. The camp was definitely the highlight and the nights spent in the hot tub something we won´t forget.
It is to be noted that many of the hiking trails in the whole Garden Route Nationalpark with all its different sections are pretty long, several day walks and nothing for unexperienced hikers. I guess that if you do these hikes you won´t regret it but for us it was simply too much these days.
