day 8

We packed and exited the park through the same gate we came in. First a final 30-40 kilometers of dirt road and then tarred road for the remainder of the trip.
I did the first driving of the day. Since we had a lot of kilometers to do, I punched the accelerator pedal: about 80-90 km/h on the dirt road.
After 40 kilometer, the dirt road became tarred again: wow after 10 days of dirt road, driving on tarred roads is funny but a lot more comfortable!!
The road is brilliant! It’s a straight stretch of road for miles and miles through an arid landscape. I had to drive quite a few kilometers until the first really big town.
This road is being used by the government for road testing: they test different kinds of asphalt on erosion, speed, durability…
We passed a sign saying max speed allowed was 250 km/h !!! (but for official vehicles only…)

I told Pete we were an official car as well so I pushed our rental to its limits. I wanted to test the maximum speed of our car and I wanted to get this first stretch of road done as fast as possible since we left later than expected at the camp.
So I did about 180 km/h for about 3 hours. It’s quite demanding driving that fast for a few hours. So after a while, Pete took over for a bit.

We drove all day! I killed a few birds by accident… I couldn’t do anything about it. They just flew up and went for the middle of the road. I was going too fast to start avoiding them or brake so I took 3 full frontal.
I felt sorry for the birds but what the hell are they eating grass near the highway…
We arrived in Jo’burg at around 8 that evening, completely exhausted of the long drive.