Hey Lize
Sorry its taken so long to get back to you but things have been hectic since our return.
Please find our thoughts below.
Transfers : It was absolute ly lovely to be met at the airport with a professional driver who is holding our name card!!
All the transfers you had organised were on time and most professional and made the transition from the long flight to our accommodation very pleasant.
Waterfront Village apartments. 1st rate apartment within very easy walk to main centres of Capetown. This accommodation was very clean and well maintained with friendly staff. Highly recommended as we spent many great hours exploring the town from this spot. One of the big pluses for us was the affordability of the food and drink in South Africa.
Schulpoek Sea Front Guest House at Hermanus. I was a bit hesitant to be staying at a small guest house but I have to say this was one of the high lights of our stay. The Host was lovely and did not intrude on our stay at all with the dinner and wine on site top rate and eating with the other guests was an experience that we all enjoyed immensely. The host gave us a few ideas on things to do around town were we had a beautiful lunch in town, right down by the waterfront with wales passing by at regular intervals and a lovely Saturday morning at the local markets. We also did the great white shark dive from this spot as it was only 40 mins up the road. I would highly recommend this place for any of your future guests.
Franschhoek Country House. Once again a lovely old style accommodation the only complaint we had was this was the only accommodation not to offer a king size bed. The breakfast was very good but possibly the dinner offered was not up to our high expectations of what we had had before but this is a very small negative. We accessed a great wine tour organised from the front desk that fulfilled all our wine tasting requirements and on the plus side as we had to leave early to catch our flight to Kruger the kitchen staff organised a very early Breakfast in our rooms that was much appreciated.
Avis rentals. Exactly on time with a very new car that was very easy to drive and we certainly enjoyed the freedom of driving ourselves. The only tip is to make sure you fill the car before getting it back as to fill it from empty would cost approx $120 but to bring it back without a full tank they charged our credit card the full $200
Ngala Safari Lodge. This was by far the best experience we had in South Africa! The staff all went out of their way to make our stay so very personal with the guide already having our names memorised before we arrived and the novelty of having your own personal butler was something we never expected. The accommodation was absolutely beautiful with the house keeping staff doing the most wonderful job with our rooms and our washing always pristine. We had a most wonderful experience of an out door Boma in the bush on our first night and to have our guide Dan eat dinner with us was something we enjoyed very much. Everyone on staff at Ngala seemed to have our best interests at heart but most special was Dan our guide who went out of his way to see we had anything we needed and to find all our individual preferences for seeing the beautiful wildlife of this area.We were very sad to leave this place and I would have loved to have had an extra couple of days with this wonderful outfit at Ngala.
Kirkmans Camp. Possibly if we had done this camp first they would not have had to live up to the expectations of our previous stay at Ngala. The camp is certainly a different style of accommodation than Ngala but saying that it also was very good. Our guide I think suffered from the brilliant experience we had had previously and we all felt we did not get the personalised attention we enjoyed before but in saying this it still was a brilliant 3 days that we all enjoyed. The food at both camps was top rate and the highlight at Kirkmans was our waiter Cynthia who was the most lovely lady who stuffed us full of food and beverage every time we sat down that we all came home a few kilos heavier than what we left.
Andbeyond are a very professional organisation that take the job of looking after their guests very seriously which reflect the experience that we all had at the game parks as one of total enjoyment and something that will stay high in our memories for years to come.
Most of all thanks to you Lize for helping Alex organise this trip of a lifetime for us as everything was perfect and we are already looking forward to the day in the not to distant future that we can return and I look forward to using African Travel Gateway again.
Many thanks
Mark and Ingrid Odgers