Today was our first full day in South Africa, but also the last hop on our journey. After a bit of a sleep-in we flew down to Cape Town. We will be spending the next 8 days here, before flying north again.

Although exhausted, it was not a restful night, and so the goal for today was to make it to Cape Town, get the rental car and find the hotel. Checking in was long a tedious, we will forever appreciate NZ’s automatised bag drop facility which stops the hour-long queues to checkin. The flight down was uneventful (another struggle at the gate to work out if the baby stroller was to be collected at the plane or the carousel) but we arrived. Checked in, then went to dinner with the kids crashing within minutes of the lights going out.

The hotel we are staying at for a couple of nights has large outdoor walking area. While we were waiting for dinner, we explored this and found lots of interesting things to look at in the garden, and a hidden kids playground.

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Cape Town was experiencing a very warm day today (30 degree high) and so off came the jerseys and long pants. Hopefully the nice weather and heat continue for a few more days so we can visit some of the sites of Cape Town. Don’t worry, this blog will get more interesting and there will be more photos once we get over the journey/ jet lag.

Good night (or should we say good morning)

Chris, Dan, Karl and Issac

We always knew that it would be a bit of a compromise between just wanting to get the horrible travel over and done with and breaking it up into more manageable pieces. Having both Karl and Isaac wake up overnight (in AKL) meant we started off the day without really enough sleep.

Overall we were up for about 26 hours, from 6am NZ time in Auckland to 10 pm SA time in Johannesburg. Isaac slept for 2 hours on the AKL-PER flight and having the seat with the bassinet really helped. Two hour layover in Perth (this was a good amount of time) and then on to the next one.

The PER-JNB flight was almost full, so there was no using spare seats as we did on the first flight. Karl was up until about 11pm NZ time and then finally fell asleep, Isaac went down, but woke every hour or so and needed to be resettled, Chris and Dan got under an hour apiece.

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After an hour long wait to get through customs, and a few confusing directions to find our hotel at the airport, we checked in about 10pm local time (9am NZ time Monday morning).

An average night sleep, and we are ready for our first full day in SA.

Here we go… This is our first time travelling since we went from this:

To this:

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Day 1, and we have travelled to Auckland. We are staying at a hotel in Auckland overnight before we begin our long journey tomorrow.

Nothing too exciting for today, just a quick flight down that was onetime (go Air NZ!), the walk to the hotel, a quick bite in the executive lounge (Isaac thought this meant we bite the table), a ride on the green bus for the fun of it and dinner at Auckland International airport.

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Early wake up tomorrow then the long haul flight. There might not be a post at the end of day 2, we will get that up as soon as we can.

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Good night all, next stop Johannesburg (via Perth).

Chris, Dan, Karl and Isaac