After a shower with spiders and a tasty breakfast, we packed up at Sani Lodge and headed to Port St. Johns. It was a horribly foggy drive, and for a while we couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of our car. We finally reached Port St. Johns after driving 132 bends around a mountain to find that the city was under construction, to be put nicely. We were rerouted around the town, and far from impressed. Once we finally found our supposed hostel for the night, we decided it was too dodgy and decided to continue driving to our next destination: Bulungula Lodge.
Travelers Tip: Don’t waste your time with Port St. Johns – just suck it up and do the full day drive from Drakensberg (near Underberg) to Bulungula.
The drive from Port St. Johns to Bulungula was supposed to take four hours. Needless to say, it took us about six and a half hours. The fog was so dense that we had to inch down the road with our hazard lights on because we honestly couldn’t see the road. As nightfall was approaching, Google Maps was saying we were still an hour and a half from the Lodge. By the time it turned dark, the clouds finally began to lift so that we could actually see the road again after six hours of driving with zero visibility. The directions to Bulungula were both extremely specific and extraordinarily vague. If you make one wrong turn on the dirt roads leading to Bulungula (in the dark), you’re pretty much screwed since there’s not a soul in sight and no street signs. Amazingly, after an entirely stressful day of driving, we conquered the fog and dirt roads and arrived at Bulungula! All thanks to my co-piloting, of course…
The Five Foot Traveler 