The Shopping for the expedition

After greeting our friends Anna and Alberto, who left to Botswana, we moved with the help of the offline maps by Google Maps for a very important mission: shopping!

Sure, because in Johannesburg we are certain to find shopping malls with supermarkets that do not make us feel the nostalgia of our Esselunga while along the way we will find only a few shops with little supply and local markets where usually there are only tomatoes, onions, potatoes, the ubiquitous bananas and some seasonal fruit.

In the area of our hotel, Kempton Park, there is more than one Mall, we choose one and start the adventure; the shops are not bad, before we go round, then we eat at Spur, an American food chain where we often go when we are in Nairobi.

Finally we go to the supermarket, it's gigantic, and apart from a first disorientation to understand how the goods were, we started off with our mileage list of the things to buy and started filling the cart.

We buy all the food we find in cans, such as soups, meat, fish, cheese, fruit and vegetables; we also make some kind of risky purchase such as spaghetti and tortellini in cans, we are just curious to try them, it is ages we see them on the shelves of supermarkets around the world and we decided this time it was a good moment to try these "delicacies" 

Canned food is convenient for a trip like ours, not only it will last for a long time, but it is better resist to the bumps when we drive on the roads and dirty tracks; we'll also have to cross the border the day after tomorrow and, from one state to another, we cannot bring fresh foods of any kind.

We also buy some bottles of South African wine, both white and red, we certainly do not want to wait to get to Stellenbosch or Franschhoek to drink it.

The most important buy is water, at least from the point of view of the volumetric size, because, besides drinking it, we also need it to cook, certainly it is not going to last for the entire trip, but in the meantime we spare and then we will think of buying it again along the way.

We also bought some local products such as biltong, dried meat, that is perfect for a snack or with a drink at sunset, the famous sundowner, when the sky warms up with the intense colors of the African sunshine; impossible to describe, you must live it to find out its magic.

Last but not least, in our galley we could not miss 2 musts of our trips to Africa: the Savannah cider and the Amarula, a cream made with the fruits of marula, a South African plant with which even the elephants sometimes get drunk, eating the ripe fruits fermented in the sun.

Finally, after filling 2 carts, we ended our shopping, went back to the car park and loaded the car; at the moment we put all the supplies inside, tomorrow we will calmly arrange them in the best way because the day after tomorrow finally we leave.