Terms and notices
Short, and worth the two minutes. This is a private, non-commercial reading site about car hire and short-term car use in Mpumalanga. Reading it is free and comes with the conditions below. If you disagree with any of them, the appropriate response is to stop reading rather than to rely on the pages and complain later.
Last changed 15 October 2026
What this site is
A set of written notes kept by private individuals who have worked at a hire counter in the Lowveld. It publishes opinion, description and indicative figures. It is not a hire company, not a broker, not an agent and not an intermediary of any kind, and no contract for a vehicle can be formed with anyone through these pages.
The enquiries page is a way to ask the people who write the site a question. It is not a booking channel. Sending the form reserves nothing, holds nothing and obliges nobody to provide a vehicle.
Figures and prices
Every rand amount on this site is indicative. Hire rates in Mbombela move with the season, with fleet availability, with the class of vehicle and with how far ahead you book, and the winter peak here can lift a rate substantially above what the same car costs in the wet months. Excess bands, waiver costs, deposit holds and border charges all vary between counters and change without notice.
Treat the numbers here as a guide to the order of magnitude and a basis for the questions you ask. The only figures that bind anybody are the ones written on the agreement you sign.
Not professional advice
Nothing here is legal, insurance, financial or mechanical advice. A contract read-through described on the price list is one experienced reader's opinion of a document, not a legal opinion, and it does not replace advice from someone qualified to give it where the amounts involved justify that.
Decisions about waivers, cross-border travel, gravel roads and vehicle purchase remain yours. We give you the questions and our view. You sign the paper.
Driving and the road
Route descriptions, pass notes, gate hours, tyre pressures and clearance figures are written from experience and can be out of date within a season. Road surfaces on the escarpment change after heavy rain, gate hours shift with the month, and a gravel approach that was graded in June can be badly rutted by February.
You are responsible for the condition of the vehicle you are driving, for the applicable speed limits, for the laws of any country you enter, and for your own judgement about whether to attempt a road. If a route here looks wrong when you are standing in front of it, trust your eyes and not this site.
Use of the writing
The text and the photographs are the work of the people who keep the site. Quote a sentence or two with a clear reference back if it helps somebody, which is the whole point of writing it down. Do not republish whole pages, do not feed the site wholesale into a product that resells it, and do not present the writing as somebody else's.
Translations and adaptations are not permitted without asking first, mainly because a mistranslated sentence about an insurance exclusion could cost a reader real money.
Links and other sites
Where a page points to somewhere else, it does so because it seemed useful at the time. We have no control over what those places publish afterwards and no responsibility for it. A link is never an endorsement of a company, a counter or a lodge, and no payment is taken for any reference on this site.
If a link has gone stale or now leads somewhere unpleasant, telling us is a kindness and it will be fixed or removed.
Liability
The site is offered as it stands, without warranty that it is complete, current or fit for a particular purpose. To the extent the law allows, the people who keep it are not liable for loss arising from reliance on anything published here, including excess claims, damage charges, border costs, missed gate times or a purchase you later regret.
Nothing in this paragraph attempts to exclude liability that cannot lawfully be excluded under South African law, and nothing here is intended to limit the consumer protections that apply to you.
Governing law
South African law applies to the use of this site and to these terms, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.
If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Nobody has waived a right here by not enforcing it immediately.