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 […]
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 […]
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 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 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 […]