Hi Friends,
It was my parent’s third trip to South Africa and this time we wanted to show them Cape Town for sure but as we started planning for the same, an idea came to travel the Garden Route as we also have not seen the same since we are here in this country from the last 5 years. Earlier, I wanted to buy Honda BRV to take on this trip and during that time the car was going around 20k ZAR on sale too. I was adamant to take my own car on the Garden Route trip. After getting approvals of leaves from office, we started planning the distance and cities to stay during the trip and found that it will be difficult if we start traveling in the car from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth and then back from Cape Town to Johannesburg.
Also, my parents were against the car travel as my father suffers from vomiting in the closed space of the car and also we will need to take some breaks to cover 1200km and it will at least take 12 hours to reach Port Elizabeth in best case scenario within road speed limits. My wife told that it’s better we check an early morning flight from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth and then a late evening flight back from Cape Town to Johannesburg. I have never booked a domestic flight within South Africa so asked some enlightened people who travel a lot. They all said book from Lanseria Airport, flights are cheaper there, book on this website and that website, on this day or that day but here I was totally confused during the weekend finding it difficult to book flights and accommodations as per our confined dates of the trip.
Travelstart came to my rescue early morning when I came across some random post on Facebook and thought of using the same when we all sat for final bookings of places to stay and flights. My first thing was to book flights because if we don’t get flights we won’t get go ahead. My wife’s first preference was good accommodation for the extended family with kitchen specifically as we had a 1-year-old baby with us too along with my vegetarian parents. So my mom and she started looking at accommodations and she started booking them closest to the locations we intended to stay and paying them using her card and email id. I and dad were busy with flights and passport numbers to be entered and age details with right times to start from OR Tambo or Lanseria Airport and finally decided to go with Travelstart website to make our final bookings. My overall experience of using the website was awesome and I am really looking forward to using some great travel trips with them from their packages section.
The overall final itinerary looked like
Flight to PE from Johannesburg: At 6:50am in the morning (2hrs)
Early Check-in at PE and Overnight Stay in PE
2nd Day - Travel to Plettenberg Bay and stay for 3 nights
5th Day - Travel to Pearly Beach and stay overnight
6th Day - Travel to Cape Town and stay for 3 nights
9th Day - Evening flight to Johannesburg (2hr 30min) and reach home by 11pm
It was a total of 1650km for 9 days rented car with all the most visited places seen and captured in memories and images with no traffic fines and no tension to the driver and relaxed Garden Route for everyone in the family!
