First Impression: Marloth Park
First impression? This is absolute paradise.
We arrived at the little airport in the city of Mpumalanga (also known as Nelspruit) in the mid-afternoon, got our rental car, and started our easy ninety minute drive on the paved N4 toll road to our Airbnb. Jim was already accustomed to driving on the left side of the road since we were in Malta just a few weeks earlier. A bonus was having spent the last four months in the same time zone, so there was no jet lag to contend with. All things to make an easy transition!
We’ve been to South Africa before, but spent all of our seven weeks in and around Cape Town right before Covid shut down the world. We loved Cape Town so much, I was excited to come back to explore more of this huge country with diverse landscapes (for comparison, South Africa is about twice the size of Texas). I knew we had made the right choice coming to this area of South Africa when not even out of the airport, we saw an impala grazing next to the side of the road.
Impala hanging out on the side of the road-one of a million we would see.
I had found Marloth Park through a friend of a friend's blog. (Chris at Eat. Walk. Learn. posted about something and Tom from World Wide Waftage commented on it. Tom and his wife Jess have spent a lot of time in Marloth on their travels and have written a lot about it on their blog.)
Seeing animals everywhere—on our walks, in our backyard, even on our way to the grocery store—entertained us every time.
I think one of my favorite moments was when we found the baby bush baby in our “safari” bedroom one night.
First: What’s a safari room? Basically it's a room with a roof and three open walls with screens. It's like sleeping outside, but without the tent.
Second: What's a bush baby? Bush babies are tiny nocturnal monkeys. Many people in Marloth have bush baby houses on their property much like people would have birdhouses in other places. The houses even look a lot like a bird house. People also frequently put out food for the bush babies each night (bananas and yogurt-yum!) and some try to domesticate them.
Bush babies also like making nests in thatch roofs. Of course, the house we rented while in Marloth had a thatch roof. Thatch roofs are popular in the bush and many people love them because it gives a real “staying in the bush” feel. We are not really those people! Mostly because the thatch is an ideal place for critters like snakes (and bush babies) to live. I love critters, but I believe in a bit of social distancing with the animals.
See below for our encounter with a baby bush baby caught in our mosquito netting. This little guy weighed less than an ounce! Mom weighs less than a pound 😮
Our baby bush baby 💗
Mama bush baby concerned about her baby under the mosquito netting.
First impression? We're going to really like it here.
(I know I'm a million months behind on posting about our travels—so this post is no surprise since you already know we are under contract on a house here!)