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Tue May 20 2003 (Kokstad to Durban)

The early night did the trick as I woke up not too long after 6am, and made the most of the fact the girls were still snoring to get first use of the bathroom. Showered, shaved and packed, still no sign of life from the ladies, so I went out into the early morning sun to give Rob a call and check what his travel plans were. Bad news, he won't be able to make it down for the game, but hopefully I can meet up with him between Durban and Joburg a day or two after the game.

Soon after, the girls finally came to and after they'd sorted themselves out I got the car filled up, whilst they paid the hotel bill and bought some bits and bobs for the final leg of the journey to Durban. The bloke filling the car just about had his head inside the nozzle watching the fuel go in, never seen someone make such a fuss of putting petrol in. When he was done, he made a point of showing me it was really full by rocking the car so that petrol spilled out of the filler cap. He looked at me for confirmation. I quickly gave him the thumbs up as I was concerned that he'd tried to force a bit more in if I showed any signs of hesitation.

Most petrol stations here seem to have ATMs, so I withdrew another 500 Rand while I had the chance and we set off down the N2 again. We made it fairly quickly back to the sea at Port Shepstone. After all the reports I was expecting the last dash along the coast to be a bit of a nightmare, so was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be the best stretch of road on the whole journey. Proper motorway, although there was a toll to pay (just a couple of quid). There is a slight difference with motorways back home, as you don't tend to get people strung along the hard shoulder of the M1 trying to flog fresh oranges, pineapples and mangos.

We made it into Durban in early afternoon. The first thing we saw was a huge shanty town that looked far worse than anything on the journey so far, thousands of makeshift shacks scrambling for a place on the side of the hills. Emma navigated us through to Morningside, the suburb where both of our hostels were situated. As I pulled up outside the Tekweni Hostel to drop them off, we were greeted by the guard on the street that looks after cars.

I'm staying a couple of blocks away at the Traveller's International Lodge. This is a pretty strange place, run by two late middle-aged women, one with a shaved head, the other with a completely dry personality. You get in by walking around the back after avoiding the two dogs. My room has a double bed, bunks, an offputting array of dolphin pictures, huge turtle transfer on the wall above my bed and all kinds of weird stuff (dreamcatchers, etc) hanging from the ceiling. Next door is the communal bathroom containing a toilet cubicle, sink and two curtained shower cubicles. This could get interesting when it's busy.

I had an hour relaxing on the bed, dumped a bunch of stuff out of my pack and then set off to collect the girls from their hostel. Originally I was going to drop the hire car back myself, but the pep talk from the hostel owners had scared the wits out of me so I didn't fancy going alone. They even gave me a tourist map and used huge "NO!" signs to show the areas that are most dodgy. A couple who had been in the hostel a day or two earlier had been mugged by 8 blokes the first time they set foot on the beach. Nice place. I put anything of value in the hostel safe and just kept the bare minimum cash in my pocket.

We drove down to the seafront for a quick look at the beach. It was beautiful clean white sand - and completely deserted. We jumped back in the car pretty quickly, had a short drive up and down the seafront, then dropped the car. For an extra 30 Rand I drove the car back to Morningside with one of the hire car staff and he then took the car back to base. Sara nipped into the travel agents to check her options for getting back to England, then I took a quick look at their room (really cramped shared dorm for 5 people), before we headed down to the mall to use an internet cafe. This was a fairly wasted journey for me as the connection was pretty unusable and my ISP's webmail was as poor as ever.

I went back to the Tekweni to gatecrash their barbecue and steal some of the food Emma and Sara had fetched from the mall when they checked in. At the barbecue I recognised a couple of lads, Andy & John from Bournemouth. They'd sat behind me on the Vienna-Paris plane coming back from the Slovakia away game, and Andy had entertained us with his drunken attempts to woo the Austrian airlines cabin crew. The girls' food was very nice (ta!), I had a chat with Emma about the kind of people who stay in hostels and we agreed there was a hardcore of dickheads who just want to drone on about all the places they've been to, it can all be a bit cliquey at times.

Then we caught a taxi down to Joe Cool's, which is a pub on the beach and was full of England fans. Sara was meeting a couple of friends there who turned out to be the Scunthorpe and F****t fans (Mark & ?) I'd met on the way to the plane at Heathrow. Also we bumped into the England fans we'd seen at Buccaneer's. We walked back to City Lodge with the Scunny and F****t lads, they have really cheap rooms there (it's a business hotel) and we are beginning to wonder why we didn't do that. We got a taxi back to the Tekweni and I walked back to my hostel from there.

I started moving the stuff off my bed that I'd dumped there earlier in the day, when a cockroach ran out and disappeared under some other bits of my kit. I managed to chase it onto the floor and killed it. I carried on moving the stuff and another one ran out, even bigger this time. I chased it around but it disappeared under the bed. I was too drunk and too tired to bother so I moved the last of my kit and crashed on the bed.

Photos from today