Victoria Falls to Stellenbosch

 Wednesday 8 – Wednesday 16 March

The Durban to Windhoek journey
Yellow - Durban to Joburg
White - Joburg to the Rhino Sanctuary
Brown - Rhino to Maun and the Delta
Orange - Maun to Nata
Red - Nata to Vic Falls
Blue - Vic Falls to Windhoek
From Windhoek we went directly west to Swakopmund, then returned to Windhoek to fly directly south to Cape Town.

Wednesday 8 – Victoria Falls to Windhoek

The bugs are huge up here and I rescue two upside down big ones from a puddle in my shower.

Though we are ‘roughing it’ at the rest camp, compared to Matetsi, the food at the Indabelly restaurant is good and you can see the mist rising off the Falls and hear their ceaseless thunder.  We catch up on breakfast and the news (what's happening with this world?!).

Our 21 hour bus ride leaves from the Zambian border at just before 11, but we give ourselves lots of time to do the border crossings and check out at around 9am.  To get there you need to take one taxi to the Zim border crossing, get your passport stamped and walk through the fence.  On the other side, you take another taxi across the bridge (stunning!  Windscreen wipers are a must!  There are heaps of people riding or pushing bicycles stacked high with goods to sell on the other side and one loan backpacker walking the 3km through the mist) and get dropped at the Zambia border.

Our taxi driver appoints a young guy selling copper bracelets to escort us to a spot where we can wait.  He’s a nice kid, but once we buy one of his bracelets it’s not long before he leaves our side for better fodder and we're left 'alone' to wait for the bus.

Sitting on the wall next to us are two guys playing a homemade board game with bottle tops and a hand-painted chessboard.  I trade a couple of photos for a couple of hugs with the guys.  The board’s got ‘Touch n Go’ written on it, but we suspect that it’s either full blood, or mongrel checkers.  One guy uses twelve bottle tops face side up and the other uses his face side down.  They only move along the dark squares in single diagonal moves and the point is to take as many of your opponent’s pieces as possible.  To take a piece you ‘jump’ over them and you can take multiple pieces by making multiple jumps.  If you make it to the other side your piece becomes king (denoted by putting a second bottle top on the piece).  The king can move as far as he wants along the diagonal and you can have multiple kings working for you at once.  That game, on the wall at the Zambian border, was the perfect entertainment.  Needless to say, we’ve been collecting bottle tops ever since!

Touch n Go at the Zambian border

When the bus arrived we were the only people to get on, so we commandeered two seats each (and we're lucky to maintain them for the duration of the journey).  Next stop was Livingstone, where we picked up a few more passengers.  During the half hour stop we have a great time watching the passing parade – a guy selling boiled eggs, someone else selling dvds (they did alright out of our bus drivers), someone selling passports, handbags, jeans, shoes.  Jono dared to step off the bus for a second to make sure our bags were ok and was absolutely swamped!!

Views from the bus in Livingstone - these signs are so common!

This guy was selling boiled eggs outside our bus

This guy was selling passports and handbags

We stop once more to pick up passengers and then later in the afternoon have a rest stop in a little dusty town where we passed on the pre-cooked meals wrapped in cling wrap sitting in the heat.  As the sun began to set we made our way through the Caprivi Strip and in the night down towards the heart of Namibia.  At our last stop in the dark we pulled up and as I got off I asked where was good to eat – I  and couldn’t understand the blank looks I received.  Until the truck blocking my view drove past and I was left with one little take away store, also selling pre-packed meals.  Lucky we had those soggy cheese and pickle sandwiches I'd made the night before to see us through the night! 

Views from the journey - a small but typical settlement of a few family homes with perfectly raked gardens.

Restaurant at the Zambian/Namibian border

Thursday 9 – Windhoek

Sun rising over the outskirts of Windhoek

As the sun is rising and Windhoek is coming alive our bus pulls in to the city. There are less minibus taxis in Windhoek, but there are sedans doing effectively the same job.  The taxis beep at pedestrians as they go by, hoping for another customer and aside from a few 4x4s and trucks most of the traffic on the road are taxis - so plenty of beeps!

We’d hoped to stay at a joint called the Chameleon Backpackers, not far from the town centre and had emailed them from Vic Falls just before we left, but when we pulled up in our taxi they were completely booked out (days later we realise that the email never went through!!).  Our taxi driver was good enough to take us around to a few more places and we ended up at a place called Backpackers Unite, a nice enough place – pool, BBQ and breakfast provided, with a couple of buildings making up the accommodations.  Our room was inside a little house and when we arrived we were the only ones there so could monopolise the couch and tv. 

Finally we mustered the energy to take a walk into town for a look around.  I was keen to get my hands on some German bakery goods and a good coffee.  We headed out of the hostel at the same time as two other backpakers did, who helped us with directions.  We got chatting, one guy was from Johannesburg (and he didn’t actually chat that much) and the other guy was a local tour guide who was heading over to Swakopmund the next day and offered us a ride if his car could be fixed in time.  Perfect, we thought!  Just where we’re heading!  So we agreed to chat more later that night and went our separate ways.

On Independence Avenue one of the first things you notice are the hot dog stand on nearly every corner and with queues at every one.  But really, that was the only German vibe I got in Windhoek.  Non-German vibes I got were the ladies' love of great hairstyles, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the many, busy salons.  I also noticed a distinct cohesion of the people in Windhoek - particularly compared to South Africa.

We head home with a bag full of groceries that are meant to feed Jono’s Mexican cravings – samp and beans, mince, avocado and some Cajun seasoning to wrap up in lettuce leaves.  After dinner the tour guide guy ‘Ziggy’, stops by and we work on a plan for the following moring.  His car hasn’t been fixed, but there’s room in the van he’s hired for N150 each and he’s booked us in at a hostel in Swakopmund and if we want to join his tour group for the next four days, with two meals a day included and sandboarding excursions it’ll only be N1500 each.  We mull it over.

Thursday 10 – Windhoek

Early in the morning Jono tells this tour group guy that we’ll think about the lift, but won’t do the tour and we’ll see him in a couple of hours and later decide to go and look at car hire instead.  This Ziggy guy recons we owe him R75 each because we’ve reneg’d on the deal.  What deal? 

We check out of the backpackers, head to town to look at cars or buses or however we’re going to get to Swakopmund in.  By the time we decide the cars are too expensive all the buses have left (planning FAIL), so I find myself a stale croissant and Jono gets a Russian hotdog from a lady speaking three languages managing a crowd wanting one of the many different kinds of hotdogs on her menu, wearing a very African outfit in a floral design.  It’s delicious.

We reserve a seat on the City Hopper bus going to Swakopmund the next day (for three times the price Ziggy was offering), book another room in the hostel, check out the National Gallery, grab some dinner groceries (Thai curry this time), head back to the hostel and in walks Ziggy – five hours after he’s meant to have left to meet his tour group in Swakopmund.  Sometimes some things sound too good to be true.

Different room and a different vibe at the hostel that night – between Ziggy, his stoned mates, some guy who has an ‘only gay in the hostel’ chip on his shoulder and a lady who likes my dress a little too much,  we have good cause to retreat to a bench by the pool and get stuck into our $6 bottle of gin from Zimbabwe.

 

Gin times at the backpackers

Friday 11 – Windhoek to Swakopmund

Our ride doesn’t leave until 2pm, so we take it easy and make use of the free wifi and catch up on skype, facebook and attempt to get the blog updated (clearly another FAIL as nearly three weeks later it's not posted).

  

I really proved to myself that I should have done a bit more research on Namibia before I got here.  The bus arrived right on time (is that part of the German connection?) and almost everyone on board is German.   We head off and I realise that I have no idea how long it’s going to take us to get to the coast.  On the way the countryside changes drastically, from bright green hills dotted with rocks like sprinkles on ice cream and shrouded by deep grey rain clouds (the fences we lost in Botswana are back), to low lying scrub and long dry grass, to rocky sand and dried up bushes, to sand and nothing else.  Really should have seen that coming, but absolutely did not.

On the road to Swakopmund - This thing was climbing through the car park at a toilet stop - they are HUGE.  The bus driver said that when he was a kid he and his friends would tie match boxes to them and have billy cart races.

Namibian ladies - certain women wear these outfits to signify that they are married.

   

When we pull up in Skwakopmund I don’t know if I’m back in Abu Dhabi or the Wild West or Munich.  The wide streets are made of packed sand and two out of every three buildings could have come straight out of Germany.  The ocean is to one side and the sand dunes to another.  Where is this place?

We get dropped right at the door of our backpackers – the Desert Sky Lodge (maybe I should have picked up on the name) and we’re shown to our room.  This one is also in a separate house and it’s a 60’s German design.  Hilarious and comforting all at the same time!  I feel like I’m back at my Dad’s Stepdad’s place and everything is in order, has it’s place and has a label.  

On the way to dinner I expect to see tumbleweed roll down the street.  I’m craving some fresh and healthy food and Swakopmund is known for it’s seafood.  We settle on Kückies Pub it’s a completely German pub in the middle of this Wild West town in Africa!  The waitress asks if we want to speak German or English and I chicken and we go with English.

It was mentioned on several occasions throughout the dinner how much my Dad would love this joint.  Probably the rest of the family too!  We’re feeling quite poor at the moment so we stick with the cheaper menu options – Jono goes the Portuguese style calamari with bratkartoffle (John will correct me if I make a mistake in my spelling, I’m sure) and I take the line fish with röstie (so much for freshness, but the potato goodness is delicious).  Each of our meals were under N90 (pegged to the Rand at 7 to the dollar), so even though it sounds expensive we were looking at meals for maybe $13 each.  And phew!  They were something to look at!  They were huge!  I had four grilled fillets of fish on my plate and Jono had a mountain of melt in your mouth calamari.  That and the litre of Windhoek Lager we each consumed made for a very good value meal!

Back at the backpackers we meet a New Yorker couple who are motorcycling their way through Africa. WOW!

Saturday 12 - Swakopmund

A three block walk gets us to the beach and a great jetty jutting out through the waves.  We wander along the promenade, past some markets (with some of the most excellent goodies - those elephant bookends were fantastic, I wish I had room to pack them in!), past the beach and then meander our way to the Checkers for groceries.

We have a very lazy day, but as the heat goes out of it we decide a run is in order.  I'm so unfit that it doesn't even cross my mind that I'm running on the west coast of Africa in Namibia!!  But I shuffle my way through 10kms of the locals enjoying their Saturday afternoon.

The street our backpackers is on in Swakopmund with the sun setting over the ocean.

German/ Portuguese / African dinner at the pub.

Sunday 13 - Swakopmund

Namibia is stunning but I feel like we've wasted the opportunity by not doing enough research.  There is so much to do and see!!  So, to remedy this I send Jono off to the sanddunes for a morning of sand boarding, while I check out the town and get some errands done.  We also check out of our huge room and choose to save some cash by moving to the dorm for a night.

In the afternoon we go for ice creams, then watch the cricket in a pub that when I ask for a Bloody Mary serves me up all the individual ingredients so I can make my own.  Yeeeow!  For dinner we head out to another popular seafood restaurant for a platter of prawns, fish and calamari.  

The dorm is really only one small room with a bunk bed and a single bed.  When we get back a girl has checked in to the dorm too, she's been travelling for 14 months!  I love hearing the stories of fellow travellers - some people do some amazing things and go to amazing places!  

Swakopmund Times

  

Monday 14 - Swakopmund to Windhoek

We bid farewell to Swakopmund early in the morning and catch the Town Hopper bus back to Windhoek and check into the Chameleon.  You could head to that backpackers without a plan and come out of it a week later having seen the whole country - they're very organised, with tours leaving nearly every day.  Our room is tiny, but it's cheap and right next to the pool.  We spend our last day in Windhoek by the pool, watching the cricket and feasting on 2 minute noodles (topped with cheese and boerwurst donated by a very kind South African).

Tuesday 15 - Windhoek to Stellenbosch

When we wake up at the crack of dawn it is positively pouring and the rain doesn't let up until after we get to the airport (which has a tin roof and the African storm hitting it is deafening!).  Again, I think we let Namibia down on the experience front, so I'm leaving with mixed feelings - even though I regret what we missed I cannot wait to get to Stellenbosch to see the family again!

Our plane arrives in Cape Town quite early in the day and as Hod is out we have been given instructions on how to get into her house.  The Backpacker Bus we take for R270 and does a door to door service is fantastic, punctual and cheap!

Back at Hod's Jono settles into the cricket and I settle back into Hod's book, which still has two more Parts in it for me.  When Hod arrives at lunch we catch up over quiches and she explains that she has another job to do in the afternoon.  Hod visits a childrens' welfare centre in Kayamandi each week to see if there's anything her Church's bursary can do to help anyone.  Today she asks if one of us would like to go and I gladly accept the offer.

For the duration of our visit in South Africa both Jono and I have been curious to see the inside of a township but have been slightly disgusted at the thought of taking a tour through one.  I'm interested to go to Kayamandi and meet someone that lives there to gain an insight into how nearly half of the South African country lives.

At the welfare centre a young girl is waiting for her meeting and she is the girl that Hod and the Assistant Social Member interview.  Our girl is 18 years old and was abandoned by her parents while living in the Transkei.  She moved to Stellenbosch to live with a cousin and to go to school, where she is in grade 10.  She explains that her cousin, who completed Matric (year 12) the year before, works on a farm to earn money to support the two of them.  Sometimes there isn't enough food in the house and they must start their days with empty stomachs, often relying on their neighbours to help feed them.  There isn't enough money for the school uniform and so it's hard to fit into the new school.

Hod is very concerned about the cousin, who with a pass grade in Matric should be doing better than working on a farm, but at this stage in the year it's too late to apply for university or technical college.  With the Assistant Welfare Officer in tow we all head over to our girl's flat to assess the situation.  Hod later explains that this flat is like a palace compared to the home-made, one room shacks that make up the majority of the townships.

This flat is on the second story, it looks like there is one bedroom, one bathroom (where I can see that the toilet has no seat) and an open plan kitchen and sitting area.  It's simple, but impeccably tidy.  When we arrive we learn that there are actually four people in the house - our girl, her cousin and another distant cousin who has a two year old daughter.  Both the older girls have finished Matric, but neither are working, the cousin lost her job at the farm because she had no identification.  She had no identification because she too had been abandoned by her parents and so had no one to identify her.  It made me sick to learn that a temporary identification would have cost her the equivalent of AUD11, but that she could not afford the cost.

Hod is quick to move and asks if the older girls would be interested in taking a computing course, she also tells our younger girl that we will go and get her her school uniform that day and we head off to the shops leaving the girls with two grocery parcels containing plenty of pap, soap, soup and supplies (in Hod's book she explains that while out on the mission it's the three S's that are in strong demand - soap, sugar and salt).  I notice that the girls are rather popular with the neighbours when the parcels arrive.  We hit the shops with our girl, decking her out in shoes and a jumper.  I'm so disappointed when we learn that there are no skirts in her size and she must wait a week until one can be adjusted - she was so brave to come in to the welfare centre and ask for help and for us lucky people it's help that can so easily be given.  I also worry that while we've been out sourcing the school uniform that our girl will have missed out on some of the food in the parcel.

In good news, a couple of days later I learn that the older cousins made their own ways to the computer course and introduced themselves.  The cost of the course is covered by the bursary, but the price is only one part of these girls getting a better opportunity for themselves.

I've found it hard to express the influence that afternoon in Kayamandi had on me, but what a place and what a life those girls lead.