We both wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We shall be spending our Christmas day at the Kansanshi hotel in the northern Zambian mining town of Solwezi. Our hosts, David and Veroncia, have made us feel very welcome and have very kindly let us park Big Bertha in their car park for the duration. […]
At our camp on the bank of the Zambezi river, close to the Zambia border post, we are reflecting on our 88 days in a country we have come to very much like; Namibia. We are definitely more than a little sad to be leaving. Namibia is a very easy and safe country to explore and we’ve made it our […]
Our long-time dream of a world tour in an expedition vehicle came true in 2018. On the 5th November 2018 we set sail on a ferry to Spain and here we are, one year later in Africa. The year has passed in a flash! Where did the time go? Big Bertha Our truck has not let us down at all […]
We spent a wonderful month touring Angola. Big Bertha added 4,426km to its odometer in that time and coped admirably with the high sulphur fuel. Luckily the fuel price is low in Angola – about 34p/litre. The road condition is very varied and we experienced perfect tarmac recently laid by Chinese contractors, absolute nightmare ‘tarmac’ roads with more potholes than […]
After returning from the lush green countryside of Angola, where one can buy huge avocados and other delicious fruit and vegetables from the roadside vendors, we are now back in the arid north of Namibia. We plan to spend a few weeks here before crossing over to Zambia in December. Etosha, Namibia’s premier national park, is in the north and […]
It wasn’t so long ago that civil war was tearing Angola apart. The Portuguese withdrew in 1975 after 500 years of rule leaving a vacuum and power struggle between the rival Angolan political factions. A brutal civil war ensued for the next 27 years which ended in 2002. The country has been difficult to visit and it is only recently […]
When we first considered Africa, we toyed with the idea of driving from Morocco down the West Coast. I looked at the map and the highlights of each country, searching for something that really stood out. I hesitated at Gabon (possibility of seeing gorillas), but there was no way I could bypass Angola. My research showed a country with BIG […]
When driving off road, it can be very advantageous to deflate our tyres thereby greatly extending their footprint, or contact area. Deflating helps driving in sand for example. Letting air out of our tyres is fairly straightforward using my ARB deflator from my desert driving days – it’s a device that extracts the inner Schrader valve, but keeps it captive. […]
We couldn’t blog about Namibia without mentioning the wildlife! As we drove out of the airport at Windhoek, we saw giraffe (albeit behind a fence) and we knew we were in for some special animal encounters in the country. Whereas the centre and south of Namibia has many large fenced private farms, the north has more “conservancies”. In these conservancies, […]
We have completed our 3589 km loop of southern Namibia and have returned to Walvis Bay to cool off. In Namibia, you can drive from the dry desert heat of 40⁰c to coastal coolness of 20⁰c in two hours! All thanks to the Benguela current that keeps the coastal sea temperature at 12⁰c. Southern Namibia has spectacular landscapes, but not […]