A Journey South: Stop

I am a stupid German tourist... haha

Baby

09.03.2012

And finally Wombosi let me down properly. Not as bad that I’m stuck in no-man’s-land with guerilla and wild animals all around me, but still. I am stranded in northern Namibia in a town called Ongwediva because of a broken spring. It broke quite close to Rundu I think, but I couldn’t locate the strange sound the car made in bumps before 100 km later, so I continued here. There are plenty of garages here, but no Land-Rovers. The new spring has to be ordered from South-Africa, and apparently it takes five working-days to transport it here. It is supposed to arrive next Thursday. I hope it does. Before we decided to order from SA we searched all the scrap-yards in the area to find a similar piece, but without luck. It seems Wombosi’s suspension is bigger than anything you have here in northern Namibia.

Before the spring captured my attention my week was rather unspectacular, but nice. The whole Caprivi-area and northern Namibia (with the exemption of the very west) is uncommonly flat, so you see the straight strip of tarmac in front of you, and to the two sides you see five to ten meters of cleared land, and then the forest and the fences start, so then you see no more. The nice thing is that you can stop anywhere without being bothered. You can camp along the road. There are resting-places (see picture) every twenty kilometers along the road where you can take breaks or even sleep safely.

Namibia is very different from the rest of Africa. It is so ordered, like South Africa I presume, but the big difference to South-Africa is the lack of criminality. Not that there are too many people that can be criminal, but still. Namibia has a population of about two million, and a big country. As a matter of fact, Namibia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world. As soon as Wombosi is good to go again I’ll be heading into the Kakoaveld (North-West), one of the last remaining great wildernesses of Africa. There you can still camp around and stumble across desert-elephants and lions without paying for it.

The majority of the pictures are from Zambia. I spend two evenings in the village close to Livingstone with this incredibly friendly man named Louis, and the pictures are from there. It was nice to become part of the village-life the tourists usually only see from outside. And ugali can be VERY good!

When I wrote last time I still had planned to do Botswana, but it didn’t make sense in the end. It is rainy season, so I would have been bound to the main-roads, and those I’ll do with my father in less than two months, so I left it until then. Namibia has so much to offer anyway, so I won’t be bored. It’s a shame that the Fish-River-Canyon is closed until the first of May.

That’s it for today. Not too exiting I guess, but the week has simply not been too exiting. I hope I can do some good here while I wait and that Wombosi will be cured until next time you hear from me.