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 so […]
Travelling down a gravel back-road towards Fish River Canyon, we were starting to wonder where we might camp as the clock hit four pm. It was then we came across a brightly painted plough with a sign for the De Klerk Boerdery (farm). We took a chance, opened the gate and trundled over a rise to be greeted by a […]
It’s dry, very dry! Our visa allows us to stay up to 90 days in Namibia and we fully intend to use this time to tour the length and breadth of the country. Distances between ‘things’ are greater than in Europe and we easily drive a couple of hundred kilometres in a day. Fortunately, diesel is reasonably priced at about […]
(A shorter recreation of our post from 2019 which was mysteriously deleted…) Francine has always wanted to skydive and the clear skies of Swakopmund in Namibia provided an excellent opportunity to fulfil her ambition (although David was very happy to watch proceedings from terraferma). Ruud, Francine’s South African ‘co-pilot’ took very good care of her, and she returned to planet […]
Having waved ‘au revoir’ to Big Bertha on the dockside at Sheerness Port on a blustery July day, we have just been very happily reunited 34 days later in a hot and sunny Walvis Bay, Namibia. BB was shipped here on the Glovis Summit, a so-called RoRo (roll on roll off) vessel. The ship called in at a number of […]
Francine found a novel way to get from the UK to Namibia, but it had good and bad features. The good – a business class flight that cost less than an economy ticket (on the same flight!). The bad – it involved a slight detour via Istanbul and catching the Frankfurt/Windhoek flight the following day. So far so good – […]
Distance: 7,453 miles / 11,994 kmTime: 223 daysFuel Consumption: 13.2 mpg / 21.4 l/100kmCountries: UK / Spain / Morocco / Portugal It was always our intention to have a shakedown trip before setting off on our African adventure. And we have learned a lot: about ourselves, about Big Bertha, and about overlanding. On reflection, BB is too big from an […]
It’s not Marrakech! When we arrived in Morocco, we had a rough idea that we would travel a conventional route – down the coast, passing through Casablanca, Essaouira, Agadir, Marrakech, etc, and back up on the other side of the Atlas mountain ranges, which split Morocco in half. But, as we wanted to test Bertha in the desert and we […]
Mark White, an old Moroccan hand, whom we met whilst camping in Tinghir, advised us that, should we ever get the chance, we should attend a Moroccan Tbourida (or Fantasia). We did our research and saw that an inter-regional competition was scheduled for April 27 & 28 in Meknes. We were camping nearby in Azrou and so we arranged for […]