We made it coast to coast!

From the cold to the… dusty. Never have we been to a place as dusty as Namibia, and since it is such a huge country (bigger than France and Spain put together), that means an incredible amount of dust.

But dust, just like dirt, can be fun. In Namibia it comes in the form of sand dunes, the highest and mightiest of the world, a far distance out in the middle of nowhere, yet filled with Italian tourists climbing it (or, in most cases, climbing a few metres, having the picture taken and going back to the bus).

The desert is undoable without a car, so we hired the worst piece of junk we could find (actually the only piece, everything but this was rented-out, it is high-season now meaning that you sometimes see several cars per hour on the roads), and went out in the sand, dwarfed by all huge SUVs that somebody makes a good business out of making people believe that they need (ours was an old Golf with four different sized tyres which gave it a limping-jumping way of moving).

Before that, we had the joy of the overnight train from Windhoek, Namibias smallish capital, to Walvis Bay, the main port and sort of gateway to the desert. It is mainly a freight train - there was only one passanger car, between endless rows of mainly petrol wagons. Spoilt by fancy East African trains our obvious question was “Where’s the dining cart?!”, but the conductor warned us about the only thing available - the vending machine; “I wouldn’t trust that thing…”. But in the beautiful early morning mist over the desert, we slowly rolled into Walvis Bay and had thus made it - Africa coast-to-coast by train!

The train ride had not permitted much sleep, so we had a quick shower (very quick since there’s a water shortage all over Namibia) and a quick power-nap to quickly get back into shape. Then it was time for some action! We managed to get a guy to take us to the famous Dune 7 nearby to go sand boarding on the dunes. Luckily we were the only people out there, so it was a great experience! Need to get on that board more often - sand, snow, or whatever… Tove surfed in her cowboy hat (but it is on a doctor’s prescription - not for the attitude!) and looked as the snow board princess Mattias has always dreamed about!

Then we moved on to Germany. Well, it was only a 15 min drive - the town of Swakopmund is really Germany in Africa. Very weird indeed! But we also got a great guide to take us into the nearby desert, where he helped us to understand how things manage to survive there. Like the beetle that stands up on it hind legs all morning to gather moisture on its body, or the springbock that stands still on a hilltop to get moist in its’ fur, and then licks it, since there is no water…

And then, the dunes around Soussousvlei -all in our little rental (yes, Mattias drow too hard (“Pappa! Du kör för hårt” as Alicia would have put it!) and manage to blow up a tyre being too eager to beat the 4x4 South African rental cars…), so we missed the sunrise among the dunes. But it was still very impressive, amazing shapes, great colours, little bugs and lizards that we now knew more about… We even got away from the Italians and Germans who came in their overland trucks, and were in beautiful, eerie Hidden Valley all by ourselves. Then on to Lüderitz, ex-German little town on the south coast, complete with Bismarck Strasse, Bratwurst and all. Just outside, colonies of Jackass (yes, that’s their name!) penguins and fur seals, and the cold, cold ocean so different from “our” lovely warm waters on the East coast (actually quite like a Norwegian fjord with kelp, Norwegian whaling stations and all!). And then the ghost town Kolmanskop, Quickby abandoned when the diamonds ran out, now open for exploring the old, crumbling buildings covered in sand - a great experience!

Last day on the trip; Aua Game Lodge just half an hour from the airport, where we rented mountain bikes and came rally close to elands, kudus and other animals that are mildly boring if you do a jeep-safari but a lot more “real” when you’re just on a bike… Plus another two birds to the list of never-before-seen…

All in all, a great trip, not least because we actually made it coast-to-coast, with many places to come back to, some great people that we hope to meet again, but also a desire to go back to Nairobi, warmer than most places on this trip, and a lot less dusty than the desert….

The 17th Alicia will be back with us, and we will probably switch back to Swedish on this blogg. All the best!

M&T

(There is something weird going on with the Blogger website, so the pictures do no turn out the way we want them to... more will be added later!)

Okavongo in our hearts

The mechanics in Chipata dismantled the whole steering wheel of the car, worked at it for about an hour with various tools (including a saw!) and since it was a Toyota (like almost any other car in Southern Africa) they had the small spare part for the ignition that we needed to be on our way…

The three hour delay meant we couldn’t make the Livingstone-train leaving Lusaka that night. But Katja and Nicolas, the Germans who gave us a ride, let us stay with a friend of theirs in Lusaka and the next morning we all set off for Livingstone in their car. Only a flat tyre delayed us this time, so we arrived in the afternoon to enjoy gin&tonics overlooking the Zambezi river!

Livingstone was crowded with backpackers - something that we had not encountered earlier on the trip. All affordable places were full, but we were lucky again - another friend of Katja’s lent us a tent and we borrowed enough blankets to survive the cold, cold nights (well, we did “borrow” a couple of big pillows from the sofas of the backpacker’s place and we did wear three layers of cloths and our woolly hats as well!).

Normally this time of year the Victoria Falls are running a bit low, but this year the flow was still high and mighty. 1,7 km wide and pouring more than one million litres per second down the 108 m high falls, creating spray that could be seen from miles away. Wow! was about all we could say. We walked around and also made the more adventurous climb down to the rock pool, wading over some of the smaller tributaries. Down by the rock pool we sat and watched the even more adventurous guys that were bungee jumping from the bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe. But we thought the price of USD 100 for about 30 seconds was a bit too much…

Vic Falls are impressive but Livingstone is not - a dusty main road like the Wild West and too crowded with 19 year olds riding on organised tours with overland trucks and drinking too much (all wearing the same sweat shirts with their names on so that they wouldn’t get lost). So we decided to move on - next stop Botswana.

A shared taxi took us to the boarder, we crossed the Zambezi on the pontoon ferry and found a minibus to the closest town Kasane. The bus onward had already left but after only 2 minutes on the highway we got a lift with a police officer who was going all the way to Maun - the gateway for the Okavongo Delta. We stayed in Maun for two nights to be able to shop around for a good deal to get into the delta and we also managed to go horse back riding and kayaking nearby the town, which gave us a small taste of what to come - even though we didn’t see any hippos while kayaking, just as well!

Okavongo is the story about a river that gives up halfway to the ocean and forms a huge inland delta, to the delight of all kinds of animals - and well-off tourists. Botswana has decided to earn much from each tourist rather than having super many, so there’s really no backpacker scene and everything is on the expensive side - this is what we’d been saving up for! And boy was it worth it!

The delta is exciting from start to end - to be able to get there you pretty much need to fly in, and we boarded a six-seated Cessna, with Mattias as ecstatic co-pilot (the only instructions; “Don’t touch anything”), for what must be one of the most scenic flights ever, ending on a small dust strip. Then, three days of sheer luxury at the private concession of Little Kwara, with mokoro-rides (dug-out canoes is the idea, but to save the last large trees these days it is mainly glass fibre) on the shallow rivers, boat tours on the deeper, game drives at dawn, dusk and night, safari walks… and in between soo much food and drinks (all inclusive). With only five mansion-tents, guests are never more than ten, though most of the time we were only four, easily outnumbered by the people there to take care of us. And the wildlife; seeing a cheetah with four cubs resting in the sun and later coming back to see the cheetah-mother hunt for impalas, succeeding at the third attempt and then sharing the kill with the cubs… that is amazing, and doing that without ten other cars around you is unheard of. Later, we saw lion-teenagers trying to get buffalo steak, along with countless elephants, hippos, and around fifty bird species we hadn’t seen before, all much due to guides that really did some serious tracking (including leaving the car for long spots, and one guy sitting in the very front of the car only looking for tracks). And the flight back rounded it all up with even more game viewing from above; the whole 30 minutes back we flew at less than 200 metres, seemingly only just above the heads of elephants and giraffes.

All good things come to and end, and expensive stuff ends rather sooner, so we then boarded an overcrowded bus for Ghanzi, halfway to the Namibian boarder, right in the Kalahari and home to a tribe where women must wear hats that look like buffalo horns and will have their two upper front teeth hammered in once they marry. Stay single, seems to be good advice here.

From Ghanzi we moved on further west and crossed the boarder into Namibia, thanks to getting a lift with a cool South African/Britt/Isle of Man guy (when we had almost given up and were getting worried about sleeping on the side of the road out in the semi-desert) and got off in the dusty town of Gobabis. From there we were excited to get back on a train, but the trains had stopped running - seems like our inter rail is turning into a hitch hiking trip! So here we are in an oversized hotel/camping with only six guests and they don’t even do bush walks or other touristy stuff on weekends. So Windhoek here we come - we have already tried out the beer!