bad water
 

anyone else had problems in South Africa with bad water. We stayed in a lodge south of the Kruger Park in October. 3 out of the 4 people in the group got sick, one quite seriously, from the water. When we went to the doctor in the closest town it was full of people from the lodge. Turns out that the water was tested and proved to be unsafe. This even ended up being reported in the newspapers. It had become contaminated. This pretty much ruined the trip. The lodge sent round 1 bottle of mineral water and a note to appologize!

by the way, none of us actually drank the water. We all drank bottled water. So we must have got sick from the food that was washed with the water. Or from showering/brushing teeth?

We didn't have any problems with water in South Africa (and I have a fairly pathetic constitution) and did use water from the tap to drink and for cooking in Kruger, Ithala, Hluhluwe-Imfolozi and also across the Garden Route.

Where we did have a nightmare with the tap water was in Windhoek in Namibia but that's a whole different story!

Hello,

I spent a month in SA and drank tap water at many different places across the country -- Cape Town (including a stay in the township of Khayelitsha), the Winelands, Sabi Sands, and Joburg, among other places -- and I never had any problems.

Cheers,
Julian

The fact that the event made the newspapers shows just how rare such a thing is. The tap water in SA is perfectly fine, no matter what you hear. The agricultural practices that affect tap water in central and south america, for example, are not practiced in South Africa. I strongly suspect that some individual food handler at the lodge in question didn't follow simple sanitation rules.