Ladysmith to Melton Wold

 We left Ladysmith just as the sun was rising on 17th December, we were heading for just past Victoria West which was about 8 hours drive away, so we had a long day ahead of us.

 It was pleasant travelling to begin with as it was a bit cloudy and still quite cool.

We took the road to Bergville which you can see on the left in this photo and just in the haze the Drakensburg Mountains can be seen.

We took the road over Oliviershoek Pass and from the top could see these dams, and in the distance was Spionkop Dam. From this distance, the dams look fairly full but on the whole South Africa is very short of water as there hasn't been a lot of rain over last rainy seasons.

I had forgotten how long and straight the roads were in the Free State and then down into the Karoo.

By this time, I was driving for a change, note the serious face concentrating hard and Rob was in charge of the camera!!!

I wasn't speeding but anyway I think the police were having a sleep.

We eventually arrived in the small town of Victoria West only to discover we still had another 40kms to drive which seemed to take forever.

 At last, after 10 hours driving (we had stopped a couple of times) we found the gate to Melton Wold Guest Farm. We rang the bell as asked and eventually the gate opened.

 After driving down a dusty road for a couple of miles, we came to the reception area.

 I must admit I chose Melton Wold because of its name. It has been a guest farm since the 1930s and only recently had incorporated a caravan and camping site but had been a farm since the1830s. It was named Melton Wold by a family from Cape Town, Melton from imported merino sheep from a farm called Melton Stud in Australia and Wold as his family had come from the Cotswolds in England.

This is the old post office which was situated on the farm.

After booking in we then drove onto the camp site and chose our spot for pitching our tent.

 However before we could start setting our tent up we were greeted by this emu who proceeded to chase me around the car. We eventually discovered there were 4 of them and they were forever being chased off the site by various campers.

This large tortoise also walked through the campsite every afternoon.

This was the small swimming pool but even though it was very hot here the water in the pool was a bit too cold to swim in,

We spent two nights here and on the second night we had a very nice meal in the guest house consisting of homemade soup, roast lamb with vegetables and fruit mousse for pudding. We could have had venison pie as well but thought that would be a bit greedy. Even though it was very hot here during the day, it got quite cold at night so after the first night, we went into Victoria West to buy a couple of blankets.