OKAY, the good news is that you can now fly direct to Durban from Harare three times a week by South African Express (SAX), which is the baby brother airline of South African Airways (SAA).
Travel with Dusty Miller
If you read my story on the food and travel page of yesterday’s Zimbabwe Independent you’ll be fully aware of the various fairly serious teething troubles we encountered, but it’s certainly better to have this two-hour flight available on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays rather than do without it and be forced to fly via Johannesburg.
Our mission was to see as much as KwaZulu-Natal as possible for the benefit of travel writers’ readers and travel agents’ customers, so it was a very hectic week-long trip, culminating in attending the ritzy-glitzy Vodacom July Handicap horse-race at Greyville, just outside the Durban CBD.
Colleagues from Zambia and Botswana had arrived on the Sunday or Monday and enjoyed two nights at Durban’s Suncoast Towers Hotel, which they reported as being superb and of world class. The itinerary called for them to have Monday night supper at the famous Roma Revolving Restaurant but, oddly, I don’t remember any of them mentioning it.
But then, given various exigencies, odd weather and the like, the itinerary itself was a bit of a work of fiction!
We got there mid-afternoon on Tuesday and caught up with the rest of the party at uShaka Marine World, a theme park which isn’t as dreadfully naff as they can be, globally.
I thought I’d “done” uShaka once before, but now realise we were simply whisked through its peripheries to an excellent brunch at a beach-side restaurant called Moyo (allegedly run by Zimbabweans) before swiftly departing on a cruise up the Mozambique coast.
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Eventually, with time to spare (on the Friday), I really enjoyed most of the uShaka experience, especially the walk-through aquarium, the fifth largest in the world, which is built in, around and under the rusty wreck of a 1920s phantom ship.
Hammerhead sharks The aquarium occupies a large slab of the 16 hectare theme park on Durban’s Point, between the CBD and the harbour and 32 giant tanks holding 17 500 cubic metres of water display marine fish from those the size of marine guppies to ragged-tooth, spinner, hammerhead and cat-sharks, enormous rays and eels.
I could have spent hours there; I could have watched the fascinating dolphin display at least a second time, but found the seal display too much like a children’s pantomime for my taste. Had my grand-children been with me, and not 10 000km away, we’d have lapped it up together, though!
You can learn to scuba dive there and, having qualified, take part in ocean walks.
I would like to do the shark-cage dive when the weather is nicer than the first four days of our Natal trip, when it was fairly grey, grim, guti and sometimes unpleasantly cold.
There are scores of restaurants, coffee shops, burger joints and the like spread around the theme park and we arrived just as our fellow guests from “land-locked countries” had finished lunch at one of them built into the phantom ship: Cargo Hold.
Our first night was at the Peermont Mondazur Hotel in the San Lameer holiday complex estate, near Southbroom, on the KZN South Coast.
This was allegedly a four-star hotel (three stars would be more appropriate) offering 40 suites and rooms built in terracotta-coloured rendered brick and decorated in what is described as an Indonesian style.
The hotel is built on four levels; no lifts; an awful lot of steep stairs. Definitely not handicapped friendly.
Mondazur sits on the edge of the almost unpronounceable Umhlangamkula Lagoon, surrounded by thick mangrove growths and forests, with its own private beach on the Indian Ocean. The weather was just too inclement to even think about swimming in lagoon, ocean or unheated swimming pool, but it had been strongly suggested we take swimming togs. I did. They remained unused on this trip!
In theory, the place should have been perfect for birding, but apparently most of our feathered friends didn’t like the weather either. Despite being awoken by the haunting cry of an African Fish Eagle, I only managed to spot and photograph a pair of Hadeda Ibis, some Egyptian Geese, a noisy flock of Red-Winged Starlings and ubiquitous Pied-Wagtails.
Downy pillows It was perhaps a little too ambitious to offer a full a la carte dinner menu to a party as large as ours was by this time. The list was safe rather than sensational, cooking middle of the road, service rather slow, when most of us wanted to try the deep free-standing bath poking into sleeping area, then hit soft, downy pillows on beds the size of snooker tables.
And that was before we were told we had to RV at 5am to drive to an Ocean Safari!
“Why 5am?” I demanded. “What the hell time does the sun come up here?”
A big tick to all my fellow hacks and travel agents, the SAX lady and Tourism KwaZulu-Natal guides for being in reception mainly well before the dreaded hour of five o’clock. (I was up at 4am the previous day to catch the 7:20 flight to Jo’burg).
We reached Shelly’s Beach at just after 5:30am. It was as black as Old Nick’s hatband. I heard the guy in the lighthouse shout to someone that a 30 knot gale was blowing off the headland and just knew this was an aborted mission!
At 6:20am, with just a hint of a thin, reluctant dawn breaking out to sea, the word came that the boat we were supposed to go out in hadn’t even been booked and was thus under routine maintenance.
By 0655 we were back at the hotel, hungrily demanding eggs-and-bacon, thirsting for strong coffee from a dining room staff who insisted breakfast wasn’t served until 7am!
They were politely told to think again!
More about Durban and KZN next week. [email protected]
