The smashed window and an unexpected visitor

After 5 days of clouds and even rain the sun is back in the Lowveld! This week the beds and mirrors arrived for rooms 1 and 2. We bought accessories for the bathroom and I started abrading the frames, they needed a serious new layer of varnish.

On Friday Sander and I went to Polokwane for an interview with someone from the SARS office. As a business you need to be SARS registered to pay and claim your VAT (BTW). The trip from the lodge to Polokwane takes about 3 hours. Well normally it would, but with us you never know ;-) Chuck was doing fine so no worries about that. We were driving on the R71 towards Tzaneen when all of a sudden we heard a loud bang! It turned out that one of the man working on the side of the road had accidentally hit one of our car windows with a stone. Result: a shattered window and a heart beat of 200….. Luckily one of the guys came to help and gave us the number of the company in Tzaneen (turned out we were not the only ones hit by a stone that week). In Tzaneen we met the owner of the company and within an hour we had a new window :). Now that’s what you call a quick and neat service.

So back on the road towards Polokwane with an hour delay. The interview in Polokwane took us 15 minutes and that was it! He asked us several question, filled in a form and looked at our bank statements. And that after a 4 hour journey! The good thing is the road from our lodge to Polokwane is beautiful. It takes you through Magoebaskloof or you can choose the way around it (which we prefer, because we think it is even prettier with greater views and lovely flora and fauna). So although it took us the whole day, we really loved the ride.

Today we had an unexpected visitor in room 1. Mariam cleaned the whole room yesterday, because we will have guests. A little bird decided to pay her a visit, but could not find his way back out of the room. This morning we had to catch him because he was shitting al over the place. We tried to catch him with the swimming pool net, but no luck. I finally decided to make it tired and with a little bit of luck, caught it with a blanket. We gave it some honey in warm water on a spoon. Sander was sceptical but very surprised when it indeed started drinking. Once it had enough it flew away back into the lowveld. We had a look in the bird book and found out that it was a little collared sunbird. Beautiful in yellow, green and blue.

For the rest everything is going well. We saw quite a few animals the last couple of days: waterbucks, impala’s, a giraffe, wildebeest, a porcupine, a bushbaby and Sander just saw 3 elephants on the way to the security gate. The vervet monkeys are very irritating, trying to get into the house to find food. They even sat on the porch watching me write this blog. Well at least one of them learnt a lesson today: he got his hands on a raw onion, boy did he have watery eyes for a while :)