Sunday 13^th July……6 am we hit the road this morning…oh boy it was challenging getting dressed and packing up in the dark…..then we had to travel that 50 kms of real bad road to get back on to the main roads but it was a full moon and as dawn broke on the barren landscape with all the local settlements coming to life, it really was a picture even if it was very cold!!!!  It was very interesting reading about the Root family who came out from England and settled in these mountains in the 1870’s….they had 2 generations farm here and what a hard life they must have had, particularly for the women, until the mountains came under government management……..It truly is a South Island landscape here in SA…..just rolling country side but very barren, acres and acres of corn and the burnt landscape…..we’ve never seen anything like the burning they do here not to mention the pollution it causes…. and always a mountain range on the horizon somewhere….after about 3 hours we came to Kokstad and this is where the Zulu land area finishes and the Eastern Cape (formerly called Eastern Transkei) area begins….Kokstad had lovely homes, upmarket suburbs in fact amongst the local settlements and there were 3 big churches that we saw on our drive through, all very English in design…..then it really has been a barren landscape all day with the local settlements for as far as the eye could see….all these villages miles from anywhere…..just getting wood would be a problem as there are no trees…we saw women washing clothes in what looked like very dirty creek water and they had walked a long distance to get to that water….we are convinced that they could never know the actual population of SA or the unemployment percentage…..it just was more and more of the same landscape but here in Eastern Cape they love to paint their houses and it certainly makes for a colourful landscape…..all the out houses (toilets) are often quite a distance from their dwellings and even the better homes seem to have the outside toilet…..we  drove through many small towns and never a white face in sight….one town was Mount Frere and it is the oldest town in Eastern Cape with the British coming here in the 1700’s……we stopped and shopped in Mthatha which is Mandela territory…he came from this area originally but went to live in Soweto where he was arrested….we went to his house in Soweto which is a museum now and the house today is a big flash place that they built for him (presumably the ANC Party) and where he came to when he came out of jail….and so it has been another long day of nearly 600 kms in the truck…..one hour from our destination tonight there were a lot more scrubby bushes on the barren landscape as we got nearer to the coast….the flowering cacti have been beautiful today too…..and so we are now in an Eastern Cape Bushveld setting with views overlooking the Great Kei Game reserve and the Indian Ocean…..Michael and I did a chuckle at the road into this lodge tonight…as always a real goat track…we are convinced that they want you to have this wilderness feeling………M &  F