track our trek

after a few claustrophobic days at diamond diggers, we decided to make our way out of johannesburg to see some other parts of south africa. we met natassa, an englishwoman travelling on her own, and decided to split the costs and driving for a rental car. so we arranged for a car for two weeks to drive to capetown - (even the car was delivered directly to the hostel!) - and headed north through pretoria and on to nelspruit, which is outside kruger national park...an hour outside of pretoria, we had a tire blow out at 120km/hr on the highway! fortunately for us, it was a rear tire, so were able to safely pull over to change it on the side of the road. turns out the tire had been poorly patched...we found the patch in the smoking, shredded remains of the tire! a quick 15 minutes later, we were back on the road, driving cautiously & looking for a service station to have the tires balanced. not even 20km later is when we saw our first "no stopping - hijacking zone" sign!! what?!?! we continued to see them for about the next 30km. between the signs and all the people walking leisurely across the highway, our nerves were pretty frayed when we reached the next big service station. i was thinking, "what the hell have we done? renting a car in this dangerous country with no idea where it's safe to stop!" no one warned us about carjackers on the highway before we set out! no worries though...we reached nelspruit without further incident & fell into funky monkey backpackers w/ relief! the peace corps crew we met there (the first we've run into on our trip so far) had a good laugh at our adventure & assured us that we'd passed the most dangerous portion of our journey & wouldn't have any more such signs to strike fear in our hearts. jeez!