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Trip Start Sep 09, 2010 Previous
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  Swakopmund, Erongo, Namibia
Friday, October 15, 2010

Comfortable journeys, gaining weight, and an average of twelve hours sleep a day. Three things you perhaps wouldn't associate with traveling around some of the most sparsely populated and unpaved areas of Southern Africa. However, the twenty one days we spent on an overland truck from Livingstone to Cape Town were so easy that we feared we would lose the ability to think for ourselves. Still, it wasn’t quite enough to prevent certain road weary travellers from voicing their irritation. "We’re tired, we’re hungry… and we’re pissed off" was a common refrain. Perhaps they weren’t consuming Doritos or snoozing quite as regularly as us. This aside, we did meet some lovely people from all corners of the English speaking world, plus a couple from Another Country (Denmark).

In Namibia, we went to Spitzkoppe to scramble up one of the most dramatic and vertical rock formations that we’d ever set foot on. The phrases “don’t look down” and “avoid touching that poisonous cactus at all costs” were used rather too much for our liking. We finally completed the Big Five (lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo) by spotting several rhinos slurping and swimming in a conveniently placed floodlit waterhole by night. In Sossusvlei, we hopped up a huge red sand dune (100m high) for sunrise. We also visited Germany, in the colonial town of Swakopmund. Described as “more German than Germany” by the Lonely Planet, should you be that way inclined you can enjoy a schnitzel whilst sand boarding in your lederhosen in the town’s neighbouring dunes. We chose a more conventional sand boarding attire of grazed knees and sandy beards as we achieved speeds of over 70k per hour on a sheet of plywood, hurtling headfirst down a dune. Oh, and it turns out Namibia has the world’s second biggest canyon after America’s Grand. Who knew?

Our favourite stop was the spectacular Okavango Delta in the north of Botswana. Formed when the Okavango River spreads out and vanishes inland, the delta is a vast and unique marshy eco-system full of hippos, elephants, crocs and water birds. The local people move around on mokoros – basically light weight versions of punts. Despite their claims of 'poling’ being an impossible challenge for all tourists, thanks to Cambridge we showed them how it was done. One drawback of life in the delta is the lack of amenities, especially on one of the small islands on which we camped. Here, we were advised to forget the journey to the long drop at night and instead to pee outside our tents, as hippos had been known to do the rounds. We heard them grunting from a safe distance, but that didn’t prevent our guide from yelling “umvuvu-yo!” (look out, hippo!) every five minutes. He’d clearly never heard of the boy who cried wolf.

Our trip came to an end at South Africa’s Cape Point (the continent’s most South Westerly point), where Jim was immediately mugged. By a baboon. For his lunch. It took him right back to high school days of long hair and few friends. Fortunately, we had filled the pilfered sandwiches with oodles of Africa’s hottest chili sauce. We have high hopes that the baboon is now either reaching for the Renees or, preferably, is dead.

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Top of the Spitzkoppe	Sand dunes in Sossusvlei	This tree has been dead for 600 years!	Tony Hawk of the dunes
Speedy Gonzales	Jim gets his revenge.... sort of

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