Our arrival at Windhoek spelt the end of the penultimate, and start of the final, leg of our trip. Aaron and Katherine, goodbye; Adrian and Leanne, hello!
On our way to the Namibian border we called in to see the rock art at Tsodilo Hills. The guide book described a 30 minute drive up a brand new dirt road but in reality it was 40km drive along a no longer new dirt road taking over 1 ½ hours!
Camping was free and we later discovered why. The toilets and showers where anything but clean, with no hot water despite a line of solar heaters outside. Resident cows had made a mess of the campsite, inviting a host of flies and keeping us awake all night (we were also repeatedly warned that the cows eat clothes, so not to hang our washing up to dry).
We had a tour of the paintings, following the Rhino trail the next morning. The best point of the tour was when the guide took us climbing through some of the caves, he obviously enjoyed this part the best. For the rest, he was no more interested in the paintings than the names carved into baobab trees.
The first paintings were put on about 10,000 years ago. We don’t know how they know that, as the first remaining ones are about 3,000 years old. Still a pretty impressive time for a mixture of charcoal, blood and fat to cling to a rock face.
Our easiest border so far has to be crossing from Botswana into Namibia, taking only 15 minutes and the majority of that time was spent waiting from Andy at the toilet! Botswana, Namibia and South Africa are all in one customs union, making it more similar to old-style European crossing than other African crossings.
Delta!
There are two readily accepted ways to see the Okavango Delta. One is by aeroplane, and the other by Mokoro (an unusually stable dug-out canoe, punted from the back). Multiple day camping trips are arranged by every campsite and lodge along the bounds of the delta, and we arranged one via Old Bridge Backpackers – it was much cheaper than those arranged through Audi Camp, where we had holed up.
Aaron and Katherine didn’t fancy the remote camping, so opted for a one day trip, with a day in Maun afterwards. Louise and myself took the first and second day off on the whole trip that we haven’t spent with some form of trip-related work, and packed our Coleman tent, MSR stove, Rab jackets and Thermorest mats (sponsorship welcome!).
After a 45 minute speed-boat trip, we piled into the dugouts and all headed in a line into the swamp, with Louise and I at the front, breaking the spiderwebs and clearing the flies for the others. After an hour or so, Obusetswe (or “Obi”) pulled us off for a break – the other mokoros were all day trippers, so we had a little more time for the journey.
We all ended up in the same area, although with water levels the highest for 35 years we’re not sure if it was actually the same island any more. The day trippers had a couple of hours for a wildlife walk on the island and a picnic lunch, before returning. For us the relaxation began once the flies were brushed off and the webs shed.
We had a beach to ourselves, and so it stayed for the next 24 hours. It passed in a cloud of books, diaries, wood carving and sleep, mixed with walks through the islands, scattered with herds of antelope, zebra, elephants etc. Fresh lion footprints indicated we were being watched much of the time!
The delta itself is rather odd. Unfathomably big, it is near uniform depth all over – any tourist foolish enough to fall in, provided they were not chomped by a hippo or snapped by a croc, could wade through the reeds indefinitely. Neither of us could get our minds to snap out of the feeling that we would soon reach either the edge, or open water. But for hundreds of miles it continues, the same depth, full of reeds, palm trees and bushes growing up through the water.
As the floods recede in a few months, more islands will appear, and only the deepest channels remain. But for now, the people around the delta are loving the bountiful conditions the unusually deep water brings.
As we prepared to leave Kasane, Louise carried out the routine fluid level checks on Finn. The coolant was very low; closer inspection revealed a sheared mounting bracket (leaving one side of the radiator hanging lose). Time to take out the radiator… As it came out, it turned out one of the two remaining bolts mounting it had ripped through the bulkhead. The radiator was hanging on a single 8mm bolt, and clattering around, which had caused a slight leak.
Close call.
I managed to get talking to a couple of good guys in the lodge’s vehicle garage and we discussed what was required. Although he couldn’t do the work on the radiator, James knew a good welder in Kazungula, about 10km away. He had to go there anyway and offered to take it – perfect. We then moved onto the 30mm hole ripped in the bulkhead, and he suggested sandwiching it in two thick pieces of metal. That would require access to the front, where the aircon reservoir and radiator was mounted.
We never liked the aircon anyway.
By the evening, we were running again, with a fully refurbished radiator in better condition than it’s been since we left, and our pockets only £55 lighter. As an additional bonus, the gubbins in front of the radiator is gone, allowing better engine cooling (we’re running 5C cooler now).
These trucks, now 18 years old, have taken an incredible beating, and their ability to keep on marching through with regular checks and simple, cheap maintenance has confirmed their choice as the right decision in our minds. When things on them begin to fail, they do so slowly, with enough warning to sort them out before any serious damage. There’s life in the old dogs yet!
Another country, another national park! Since Kenya, the sheer density of wildlife in the parks has been astonishing, with mostly well managed programmes of conservation and tourism providing easy and trips that rarely disappoint.
Two days driving in the park let us camp beside the mighty Chobe River. Nearly all the rainfall in southern Angola flows south into Botswana, where it forms the Okavango Delta, a 15,000 sq km flood plane in the Kalahari desert. For 3 or 4 months, the highest waters drain via the Chobe River into the Zambezi; the rest simply stagnates, evaporating away to nothing until the next rains come.
The ecosystems are entirely dependent on the flow of the seasons, and we were there at a good time. Elephants, our book says, live in family units of between 10 and 20. We saw 150 around the waterfront in about 2 hours. Watching them move towards us, then decide it was time we moved on and forming a spontaneous defensive circle around the young, was incredible. The tenderness with which a badly injured calf was being shepherded was as touching as if they had been people.
In Kasane, the town bordering the park, we had met with Connor and Louise, a couple we first met in Livingstonia in Malawi. For the next few days, they rode with us; in our car, the soothing Welsh lyrics of Connor’s band, Plant Duw, is now the music of choice!
