Day 86 – Maputo – Safari Day 1

Day 86 Mar 31st Maputo and Safari Day 1

This is the first post of a 4 part series that describes how we planned our 2018 safari along with details from the trip.  Links to the next day posts are located at the bottom of each post.

Here is a 1 minute video of or first day

Our first glimpse of Mozambique was the twinkling lights of some coastal residences silhouetted against the ever-lightning morning sky. As the sun cleared the horizon we could start to make out the city skyline and more details of the buildings. Our scheduled arrival was 8 AM, but the Amsterdam was planning on arriving around 6:30 am to allow the Mozambique Immigration Officials time to process our visas and clear the ship.

Arrival

We didn’t have our first line across until around 7 AM and the port only had one team of line handlers, which meant they could only secure one line at a time. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, taking 15 minutes for all the lines to be secure and ready to put the gangway ashore.

We had heard horror stories about massive delays in clearing ships into Maputo and we were braced for major delays. Other ships had reported that Maputo officials had required face to face meetings with every everyone, but today they processed our passports and issued our visas without seeing anyone. The officials processed over 200 passports with sticker visas in about 1 hour and 15 minutes. We picked up our passports at 8:30 am from the front desk. The front desk is always very efficient, and this morning they did an exceptional job processing the passports quickly.

Different Safari Options

Over 200 people were leaving the ship today for various safaris in and around Krueger. The ship offered two overnight safari options – a luxury version and a more modest version. The Luxury version would go to the Jock Safari Lodge inside Krueger and cost about $6000 USD per person. The less expensive version was priced at around $4000 per person. They were both 4 days and 3 nights and would rejoin the ship in Cape Town. Some passengers found a nice luxury tour thru Abercrombie & Kent for $5000 per person. The cost for our luxury tour came in at $2500 per person. I booked everything directly with the various vendors and didn’t use a travel agency.

Our Safari Cost

Here is our cost breakdown per person for 5 people using 3 cabins (no single supplement)

Safari Planning

Before I continue with our trip, let me pause for a second and walk you thru some of my thinking about how I arranged this safari.

There are a lot of choices for a South African Safari. You can go dirt cheap at a bare bones “Motel 6” type accommodations for less than $100 a night, or find an all inclusive luxury lodge for around $1000 -$1500 per night. We went on the high end and chose Kambaku River Sands as our lodge. This is an all-inclusive luxury lodge with air-conditioned cabins, gourmet dinners including beer and wine, along with two game drives daily with no more than 6 people per vehicle, included. Check out their website for a full list of their extensive amenities. We booked this in August 2017 and by that time all the luxury lodges closer to Maputo were already reserved which left us with fewer choices at this price point.

Kambaku River Sands is 220 miles (6-hour drive not including time for border crossing and rest stops) from Maputo. Here is a map that shows the relative location of several lodges used by Holland America Guests. The HAL sponsored tours went to Jock Safari Lodge and Kwa Madwala.

Your first decision when choosing a Safari Lodge is whether you want to be in Krueger (or visit Krueger on your game drives from lodges near Krueger) or stay at a lodge on a private game reserve that is near Krueger.

Krueger has a wide variety of lodges available from bare bones camp sites, huts, tents, cottages all the way up to the luxurious Jock Safari Lodge. Visit the Krueger website HERE to review the various lodging options available.

The downside to Krueger is your safari vehicle must have a roof and higher sides (which restrict visibility) and you are not allowed to leave the roads to observe animals. If you book at a lodge on a private game reserve, your vehicle will have lower sides, no roof and will be able to drive off the road to get a better view of any animals. Private game reserves tend to be less crowded as they can restrict access to only those people staying at their lodges, where Krueger is open to all and you will be competing with people in their private cars as well as other game vehicles.

I spent several days reviewing lodges on trip advisor as well as the lodges website before choosing Kambaku River Sands.

Getting from Maputo to our Safari Lodge

The biggest source of concern for this trip was setting up the transfer from Maputo to the Safari Lodge – in our case the Kambuku River sands. I looked at every option possible:

** Renting a car in Maputo for a one way rental
– No one way rentals available
** Transfer to the nearest big city – Nelspruit and self drive afterwards.
– There is no value in having a car once you get to the lodge and I didn’t consider renting a car any further.
** Charter a van from Maputo to the Safari Lodge
– I found Mr Chubby Shuttle – that runs a scheduled service from Maputo to Nelspruit daily and even though they don’t advertise charters, they were happy to charter their 13 passenger shuttle all the way to our Lodge for about $500 total per vehicle.
– Abercrombie and Kent quoted me a price of $400 per person – or 4 times as much as Mr Chubby. We went with Mr Chubby.
** Fly to the nearest airport in South Africa and self drive or taxi to the lodge – The only reasonable flight left at 11:30 am and would arrive at Nelspruit around 4 PM after changing planes in Johannesburg along with a 3 hour layover. After we arrived in Nelspruit, we would be facing a 3-hour drive from the airport to our Lodge, arriving after dark. The only advantage of this option was that you avoided crossing the land border between Mozambique and South Africa – which can have long delays. The airfare was about $278 per person and then we would have to add in transportation from Nelspruit to our lodge.

Leaving Maputo

Our group of five met on the ship a little before 9 AM and headed ashore to meet our driver. After talking with various people aboard ship, I was able to nail down our exact berth location which would be close to the Maputo train station. This would be where we would meet our driver, unless he was able to get onto the pier itself. Having a cell phone with international service was helpful because I was able to call our driver and discuss our exact meeting location.

A couple hundred yards down the street from the ship, there is a temporary roadblock that restricts traffic onto the wharf. If your driver says he’ll meet you outside the gate, this is the gate he is probably talking about. Very close to this gate is the Maputo train station which would be an alternate meeting spot if you can’t agree on another location. Our driver waited near the train station until we called and told him we were off the ship and then he moved closer to meet us at the gate.

Our drivers name was Freddie, and he is from Maputo. Another advantage of Mr. Chubby was they are from Maputo and have greater local knowledge of the city as well as the border crossing. The other agencies I spoke with would have sent drivers from South Africa, spend the night in Maputo, and then pick us up the next morning. This is one reason they cost more since we had to pay for the driver’s hotel room the night before. The Mr. Chubby shuttle had a capacity of 13 which gave us plenty room for the five of us. The shuttle was air-conditioned and would normally have Wi-Fi but Freddie forgot to bring the Wi-Fi box which required us to rely on our own phones 3G service.

Freddie had to fill out some paperwork and it took about 10 minutes before we were on our way. 90 minutes later we arrived at the border. Along the way we had a nice conversation with Freddie as we discussed life in Mozambique and shared experiences from our hometowns.

We had heard many stories about the terrible delays at the border crossing and that there may be unscrupulous people offering services to expedite the process. Freddie assured us that crossing the border would be no trouble as he did it almost every day and knew how everything worked.

Yesterday was Good Friday, and tomorrow was Easter which made us concerned that this holiday weekend might have longer than normal delays. Everyone must have traveled the day before as traffic was surprisingly light and we didn’t experience any delays along the way to the border. The roads were very good with the speed limits about 60 miles an hour.

Crossing the Border

Arriving at the Mozambique side of the border, we got out of our vehicle and entered a single story brick building where we found the Mozambique immigration officials sitting behind an L-shaped counter. This line was short, moved quickly, and we barely stopped walking. The officials opened our passport, looked at the visa, stamped our passports and we were on our way. The whole process took five minutes. It was like a Holland America reunion in the parking lot as every other tour, both private and from Holland America, was crossing the border at about the same time.

A few minutes later at the South Africa side, we once again got out of the van, and entered a similar single story brick building to clear South African immigration. There were about 20 people in line and it was moving slow as each person had to have their fingerprints scanned while the immigration official made some entries into a computer. After about 10 minutes, our driver motioned to us to go around the building to a different door where they were opening another line on the other side. This line moved quicker, as there was not a requirement to scan fingerprints. Clearing South African immigration took about 25 minutes. The entire process took about 45 minutes and later we were told that this was extraordinarily fast. I would recommend future travelers plan for more time crossing the border.

Nelspruit

The roads in South Africa were excellent divided highways and we stopped at the first turn off to use the restroom and pick up some refreshments. We arrived in Nelspuit around 1 o’clock. Our first stop in Nelspruit was the Riverside Mall where we planned to visit a bank to change some money, but it closed at 1 PM since it was a Saturday. Since I had enough Rand to last until Cape Town, we decided to quit looking for money changers and grab a quick lunch at a nearby McDonalds.

The roads for the rest of our drive to the Safari Lodge were two lanes, not quite as good as we experienced earlier, but they were OK with an occasional pothole.

Arriving at Timbavati Game Reserve

Poachers are a real problem in South Africa as rhinoceros horns are quite valuable and can fetch prices over several hundred thousand dollars in Asia which makes them quite a tempting target. Consequently, there were two levels of security to get to our Safari Lodge. The larger game reserve had its security gate, and then a few miles down the road there is another security gate for our specific lodge’s area.

After we passed the second gate, a security vehicle led us a few miles to the dirt road turnoff for Kambaku River Sands. The last mile to the lodge was a single lane dirt road that we would travel on over the next several days. About halfway down this road we spotted a dazzle of zebras and we paused for a few minutes to take some pictures.

Kambaku River Sands

Johan, the on-duty manager, greeted us when we pulled up to the entrance. Hot towels were waiting for us and before we even checked in they asked if we wanted to catch up with the late afternoon game drive. We said yes and after a radio call the Safari vehicle appeared in about 10 minutes with two guests who started earlier.

Game Drive #1

Nick was our driver and guide and Douglas was our tracker. The tracker sits on a chair welded to the front of the vehicle which gives him an unobstructed view of everything to the front. The guide, in addition to driving the land rover adapted vehicle, provides commentary and insight along the way.

In a few minutes we came across a small herd of elephants. Stopping to observe for a few minutes, we got a kick out of watching one of the smaller, younger elephants as he tried to act like a tough guy, bellowing and flapping his ears to make himself look bigger. I have to admit, even though this was a smaller elephant, it was pretty intimidating to see one take a few quick steps toward our vehicle before he stopped. After about 10 minutes we continued down the dirt road spotting some zebras, impalas, and cape buffalo before we stopped around sunset for a snack. Once the sun went down we spent another half hour driving around with the tracker using a flashlight to scan the trees and terrain looking for the reflection from an animal’s eyes. They hope to spot a leopard or cheetah in a tree but we didn’t see any and headed back to the lodge, arriving around 7 PM.

Checking in and Dinner

After completing our check in process, we were escorted to our cabins. This lodge has only 10 cabins so there’s usually no more than 20 people here at any one time. After dark, we were required to be escorted to and from the lodge and our cabin.

The five of us went into the first cabin for our group and we were given an orientation by our escort. The cabins have a large king-size bed, a sitting area with  two chairs, a dresser, a minibar and a closet. The minibar is well-stocked with water, soft drinks, beer and wine. There is a large bathroom with double sinks, large shower with two heads with a door that opens to an outdoor shower and a small room with the toilet. The cabin is air-conditioned with lots of large windows and has reasonably fast Wi-Fi. Outside the cabin is a wooden deck with some chairs. There isn’t any television.

After we unpacked it was time for dinner and we met our escorts and the rest of our group on the path to the main lodge about 100 yards away.

Dinner is served on a long table that seats 30 people. There is enough room for all the guests plus either our tracker or guide who would join us for dinner. Some light appetizers were available along with beverage service before dinner. Beer and soft drinks are included but there is a small charge for wine. One of the cooks appeared in the center of the dining area and after getting everyone’s attention, announced the evenings menu. There are two choices for each dinner and tonight it was either a pork dish or a lamb chop. Note: if you had special dietary requirements, the lodge was more than happy to accommodate them.

The food was fantastic and it was fun to be able to talk to our guide over dinner and discuss what we saw earlier in the day as well as our plans for tomorrow. I’m not sure how other lodges coordinate their game drivers but we will have the same guide and tracker for our entire stay.

After we finished our coffee and tea we found our escorts and headed back to our cabins to get some sleep as it was a long day and our wake-up call would be 4:30 the next morning.

Click HERE for Safari DAY 2