We slept quite well during the night. When we woke up at 0630 it was quite cold outside, though fortunately not as cold as expected. I don't think the temperature dropped below zero during the night. After a light breakfast and packing our stuff into the car, we left at 0745 and drove more or less straight to the Lesotho border.

Not so far from the "Gates of paradise" there is a signpost with signs showing the distance to some of the world's major cities. We had seen these in other countries before, but we were quite surprised to find one in the middle of Lesotho. According to the sign we were 10205 km away from Oslo, quite some distance!

At the Lesotho border we had a funny experience. May Tina was first in line as we waited to show our passports. The woman working there had a strange look on her face as she studied May Tina's passport. "I have not seen this one before"" she finally said, and proceeded to show the passport to the other people inside the office. "Look, here's a new passport we haven't seen before!" They were all very excited about it! I guess Lesotho doesn't have visitors from Norway very often..

Back into South Africa, Kurt announced that he had a surprise for us. In itself, this was not very surprising because he always had "surprises" for us, but this turned out to be the best surprise of them all. We drove to a small town called Wepener, which looked a lot like Ficksburg, i.e. quite nice. Here we stopped at a place called Lord Frasers Guesthouse to have a proper breakfast.

According to Kurt the breakfast here was the best in the world. When somebody claims that a place has "the best food in the world", it usually means that the food is very good, but nobody seriously believes it to really be "the best in the world". However, in this case I'm inclined to believe that Kurt's claim was very accurate, because I just can't see how the food could possibly have been any better!

We both ordered a chicken mayonaisse sandwich at 9R, each receiving a large plate with two sandwiches, french fries and salad. I also had a strawberry milkshake. I am sure that this was the ultimate breakfast experience -- everything was absolutely perfect!

We ate outside in a very beautiful garden. Someone had left the water running during the night, creating a beautiful ice pattern in one of the trees. Temperature must therefore obviously have dropped below zero last night, but even so early it was quite pleasant sitting outside. We recommend Lord Fraser's Guesthouse very highly, and I think everyone in the group agreed about this.

We were now in the Free State and it was clear that Afrikaans was the main language here. All signs were in Afrikaans first and then English, and some were only in Afrikaans. In the beginning I thought the Free State looked somewhat better than Lesotho, but after having driven for a while the scenery became more and more desolate. It started resembling a desert except that there were quite a few bushes around. It was also mostly flat, except for some mountains which looked like sand heaps. We seemed to be driving for ages without seeing any houses or other kinds of civilization.

After a while we came onto the N1, which is South Africa's main road and runs through the whole country. Only stopping briefly for lunch, we drove on the N1 for a while before turning south. Just as we were really getting tired of all this driving, we suddenly stopped at a place called Good's motel. Time was now around 1600.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Good's motel was situated in the middle of nowhere! There was absolutely nothing else around! This area was known as the Karoo and the scenery looked pretty much the same wherever you looked, desert with some bushes and very flat.

However, this turned out to be the best accomodation so far, if thinking about space. We had a huge room with private toilet and bath. The only drawback was the lack of electric heating, but fortunately we were given lots of blankets to help us through the cold nights. Our group seemed to be the only guests at the motel. Considering the surroundings, this was not really surprising!