The Travel Tale that is exactly that...
Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2017 1:11 pm
...a travel TALE 
With lots of words and only a few (and not very good) pictures 
But first things first: Spots and I landed at O.R. Tambo on the 8th April with some delay. The original plan had designed that we'd rush out (after having been dragged through immigration, that is) with me getting the luggage and Spots fetching our vehicle to collect myself and our first-timer friends who would touch down only an hour later at the arrivals. It was meant to speed up the process of getting down to the park since we knew it was a tight schedule to actually make it all the way to Biyamiti as was booked for. Since we were late, that plan had gone down the drain very quickly.
But then...
a nice welcome: we passed immigrations in record time and made up for a good amount of the time that we had lost with our flight. Still, we dropped the idea of separating to take care of luggage and car since we got close to the time when our friends should have landed. From experience, the big birds usually come down a bit earlier rather than later on long haul flights. Leaving the terminal towards the car rentals it quickly became clear that we had made a wise decision anyways since the rental companies are just across the pick-up access road at the Arrivals. Hence easy to direct our friends over - or easy to welcome them in the building.
The car rental business however took ages again. A looong queue and slowww staff made sure that people had to be patient. When it was finally Spots' turn, we got our first "surprise"
An upgrade on the booked car category. Might work in most cases... in ours it was one of the reasons that we never made it into the park on the first night. We had been given a bigger minibus than the one we had booked and with that we had been given a speed limit of 100 km/h. Officially we lost about half an hour by this, inofficially even more because Spots knows his car driving in SA by now
Anyway... our friends arrived and despite a warm greeting all around, we were chop chop packed up in the car and ready to go. 11 pm. Close to perfect (we hadn't been aware of the acceleration cut off yet...). Next a real and a pleasant surprise: All stop and goes gone from the N4. Free ride all the way through - apart from the tolls, of course... But the minibus was definitely setting us back.
And the heavy rain we encountered in the Waterval Boven area (there is a good reason that it's call "Watersomething", I guess). What severed our neck further was the car rental company at Mpumalanga International Airport (which happened to be exactly the same as at O.R. Tambo...) where we had arranged to swap our one bus into two 4x4s to go into the park. Surprise, surprise : We received yet another "upgrade" because the incompetent morons at BIDVEST hadn't managed to provide the car category we had ordered. Plus, despite being the only people who were being processed at that time, it took them ages to deliver. 
So, we ended up with two busses, both 8-seaters. Sure, you sit higher than in a 4x4 but the latter are way more comfortable driving gravel roads. The icing on the cake however was that after our EXTREMELY efficient and EXCELLENTLY prepared shopping stint one of our busses wouldn't start anymore and that was when everyone realised we would not make it into the park that night and that we would lose accommodation worth R 5600.00 because we had being played by BIDVEST. The a**hole members of staff at Mpumalanga International had known exactly that something was up with the car because they had turned on the ignition of one bus but not of the other - it was the one that later wouldn't start anymore... And still had they let us go with a faulty car, just so we wouldn't give them a stick right there and then...
Never, ever again will we book with that company. Out of 6 bookings they got 3 totally, totally wrong and our car in P.E. later on the trip only didn't end up being yet another "upgrade" because we were barking orders from the very start.
Definitely not worth the competitive prices they might offer. There is a good reason for it, as it became clear from the quality of their staff members. 
With lots of words and only a few (and not very good) pictures But first things first: Spots and I landed at O.R. Tambo on the 8th April with some delay. The original plan had designed that we'd rush out (after having been dragged through immigration, that is) with me getting the luggage and Spots fetching our vehicle to collect myself and our first-timer friends who would touch down only an hour later at the arrivals. It was meant to speed up the process of getting down to the park since we knew it was a tight schedule to actually make it all the way to Biyamiti as was booked for. Since we were late, that plan had gone down the drain very quickly.
But then...
a nice welcome: we passed immigrations in record time and made up for a good amount of the time that we had lost with our flight. Still, we dropped the idea of separating to take care of luggage and car since we got close to the time when our friends should have landed. From experience, the big birds usually come down a bit earlier rather than later on long haul flights. Leaving the terminal towards the car rentals it quickly became clear that we had made a wise decision anyways since the rental companies are just across the pick-up access road at the Arrivals. Hence easy to direct our friends over - or easy to welcome them in the building. The car rental business however took ages again. A looong queue and slowww staff made sure that people had to be patient. When it was finally Spots' turn, we got our first "surprise"
An upgrade on the booked car category. Might work in most cases... in ours it was one of the reasons that we never made it into the park on the first night. We had been given a bigger minibus than the one we had booked and with that we had been given a speed limit of 100 km/h. Officially we lost about half an hour by this, inofficially even more because Spots knows his car driving in SA by now Anyway... our friends arrived and despite a warm greeting all around, we were chop chop packed up in the car and ready to go. 11 pm. Close to perfect (we hadn't been aware of the acceleration cut off yet...). Next a real and a pleasant surprise: All stop and goes gone from the N4. Free ride all the way through - apart from the tolls, of course... But the minibus was definitely setting us back.
And the heavy rain we encountered in the Waterval Boven area (there is a good reason that it's call "Watersomething", I guess). What severed our neck further was the car rental company at Mpumalanga International Airport (which happened to be exactly the same as at O.R. Tambo...) where we had arranged to swap our one bus into two 4x4s to go into the park. Surprise, surprise : We received yet another "upgrade" because the incompetent morons at BIDVEST hadn't managed to provide the car category we had ordered. Plus, despite being the only people who were being processed at that time, it took them ages to deliver. So, we ended up with two busses, both 8-seaters. Sure, you sit higher than in a 4x4 but the latter are way more comfortable driving gravel roads. The icing on the cake however was that after our EXTREMELY efficient and EXCELLENTLY prepared shopping stint one of our busses wouldn't start anymore and that was when everyone realised we would not make it into the park that night and that we would lose accommodation worth R 5600.00 because we had being played by BIDVEST. The a**hole members of staff at Mpumalanga International had known exactly that something was up with the car because they had turned on the ignition of one bus but not of the other - it was the one that later wouldn't start anymore...
And still had they let us go with a faulty car, just so we wouldn't give them a stick right there and then...Never, ever again will we book with that company. Out of 6 bookings they got 3 totally, totally wrong and our car in P.E. later on the trip only didn't end up being yet another "upgrade" because we were barking orders from the very start.
Definitely not worth the competitive prices they might offer. There is a good reason for it, as it became clear from the quality of their staff members. 
The office in Cape Town behaved in a completely different way than the the O.R. Tambo one and we were paid back in a couple of days.
..I hope!! 
