Namibia

When planning an independent overland trip through Africa, never plan to depart over one of South Africa's biggest camping long weekends, take your original budget and double it and apply the same theory to your estimated preparation time. These three fundamental facts were what we chose to completely ignore despite being warned otherwise by those in the know due to a disease both Karks and Jacobs's suffer severely from: stubborness. The result was a hasty two-time attempt at leaving completely unprepared and still managing to leave stuff behind.
So when we eventually got on the road, we pushed our heavily laden Land Cruiser aptly named "Tank" to its limits as we cruised through Springbok and all the way into Namibia. After being briskly shoved through customs on both sides of the border by very bored looking officials, we decided that we would attempt most border crossings at the end of the day from here on out when officials have lost all vigour to cause trouble and are already dreaming of their bed. The crossing was therefore hasstle free but the sun had already made a hasty retreat behind the horizon by the time we sped away from the Namibian border in a cloud of dust. Thankfully we were given the name of a campsite on the Orange River just passed the border so we made our way there. Trying to erect our roof-top tent for the first time since testing it out in Kleinmond, in the sweltering and oppressive orange river heat after being on the road for 10 hours made for a tyrade of swearing, throwing around of stuff yet to be identified and general grumpiness. After 45 minutes, various cuts and bruises and the spade still trying to figure out what it did wrong to deserve being kicked repeatedly, we eventually got it up and made a beeline for the bar where we hastily consumed 2 very strong drinks each, ate an apple each for dinner and climbed straight into bed.

We spent a day just trying to figure out who we were, where we were and why we were there, as well as what the hell we had actually decided to bring with us and why. Well Shaun did. I lay on the groundsheet with my pillow pretending I was on holiday. Our time in Namibia however is short and very badly researched with no plan whatsoever, so we pushed on to what was aparently a great tourist attraction, The Fish River Canyon. To be honest, we have spent the last week just going through the motions of visiting each tourist attraction on a route we think we should do, while still trying to recover from a month of madness and planning in Cape Town. So through our stupour, we managed to tick off Fish River Canyon, Sossusvlei where we decided to beat the hords of tourists by hiking up a massive sand dune, only to find out that it was the wrong dune and we had forgotten to take our water with us, and we are now in Swakopmundt trying to tie up loose ends and get our attitudes adjusted for the remaining 5 months and however many weeks.

The good news is that we have mastered the erecting and collapsing of our tent and can do it now in under 10 minutes, but the spade still suffers some abuse, and our car has been packed and repacked so that it actually almost resembles some sort of order and I can get to most of the stuff I need to even without my step ladder!

And so we head off to Etosha, Okavango and then into Zambia for two weeks. We'll post some decent pics when we remember to bring the Nikon to internet cafe's! I said we were better organised . . . not organised!!