Flashback Friday Travel Photo Memories 25 – Honeymoon in St Lucia

The final leg of our South African tour took us over to the east coast of the country, up near to the Mozambique border – to a small town call St Lucia.  We had toyed with going on to the Maldives, but it felt like a bit of a cliché, so instead we chose St Lucia as it would give us some opportunity for beach and warm water before flying home from Jo’berg later on.  St Lucia is known for hippo’s and crocodiles!  In fact if you go out at night they do tell you to be careful as the hippo’s explore the streets at night looking for food!  Our first sighting of these dear chaps was over sundowners at the ski-boat club – we were standing on the jetty taking in the view and spotting hippo’s and croc’s on a sandbank when out swum a snappy crocodile from underneath our jetty! To say I was surprised would be an understatement, but no one else seem bothered so I just ‘acted casual’ and didn’t order a second drink… It was turning to dusk at this point, one can’t be too careful!

Relaxing place for a sundowner… with the hippo’s in the middle and croc’s underneath the jetty…

After the reptile incident in the bush I was very glad I had picked a cottage location, rather than something rustic!  I could keep the windows and doors firmly shut!  We stayed at Parker’s Cottages where we had a simple but comfortable apartment as well as use of the proprietor’s garden and swimming pool.  We were fully relaxed in these final few days of holiday and so being in a location where there was a great choice of restaurants 5 minutes’ drive away was perfect – plenty of seafood as you might expect!  Gorgeous beaches too – with warm water as well (very different to Cape Town) – there were plenty of monkeys around the beaches, but we didn’t see any brave hippo’s or croc’s on the beach (much to my relief)!

Stunning empty Indian Ocean beaches

There are two particular areas of interest in this area.  Firstly St Lucia hosts the Greater St Lucia Wetlands Park and secondly the sanddunes along the coast are some of the oldest in the world (albeit covered in vegetation so without research a visitor might not realise they are dunes) in the Eastern Shores Game Reserve.  Plenty of UNESCO guides and sites in the area as a result.  And plenty of ‘beware’ signs about getting out of your car!  We enjoyed our tours of these areas – it was all self-drive – and even came across a rhino and its cub, we just drove round a corner and there they were grazing in a field! Quite incredible to see!

We made one day trip tour during our stay over to a reserve for another safari – Ihuhluwe Umfolozi Park.  This was superb as we saw giraffe, buffalo, zebra, wart hogs etc.  The wart hogs were some of the cutest animals we saw – ugly and noisy, but cute!  The highlight of this trip was seeing a pack of wild dogs.  Wild dogs are a dying breed in South Africa and our tour guide couldn’t quite believe his luck when we came across them! In fact within minutes all of the park guides were quietly parking up around us to watch the pack!  For sure – it wasn’t an elephant, but it was rare and so it was good to see the animals in such volumes! Terrifying looking animals though, I’m glad we came across them when we had a ranger with us!

Meeting the neighbours

We were incredibly lucky with the timing of our flight home – while we were in South Africa there was a lot of volcanic activity in Iceland that had shut most of Europe’s airspace.  It was particularly challenging for flights in from South Africa as there wasn’t the option to fly into, for example, Spain, due to Shengan visa restrictions.  Thankfully we were on one of BA’s first flights out of the country which was a relief!  This was also at the time of all the cabin crew strikes and so we had a personal visit from the Captain after take off to apologise for the fact that first class was empty but he wasn’t able to upgrade us (as requested by a BA captain buddy of ours, and his) because of the angst.  He came with a bottle of first class fizz though, which was sufficient since we were really just glad our flight was actually going to take off!

I recently read that Jo’berg is the lightening capital of the world – I didn’t know that when we flew through, but I did see lighting from both the plane in from Durban and our flight out to London!  So I would say it’s true – 2 out of 2! I remember being quite surprised by it having never seen it in a plane before!

I haven’t been back to South Africa since our honeymoon – a trip back is well overdue, along with some time in Namibia and exploring some of the garden route too!  And with beaches like this, St Lucia is a great place to head to in the South African autumn to be sure of fine and hot weather and warm water…

Paradise to ourselves (not even a hippo or a croc came onto the beach!)!